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Download all of Wikipedia on your phone
- dobladov 3y ago> This app isn't available for your device because it was made for an older version of Android. I hope they update it.
- seba_dos1 3y agoMade me think of the old https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader from 2009.
- interloxia 3y agoI like the wikipedia dumps with Aard 2. Excluding images, it's only about 21gb which was small enough to use years ago when I had spotty connectivity and small enough to leave lying around today. https://aarddict.org/ https://aarddict.org/ (available on F-Driod)
- uzurpator 3y agoI don't remember the name of the educational project that made knowledge accessible. It fit on a usb driver.
- xanderlewis 3y agoI remember doing this about ten years ago, taking up almost the entirety of my phone’s storage in the process, and feeling unreasonably delighted by it. I’m not sure why, but this idea really appeals to me. It’s all very good having access to information on some server somewhere, but literally having (a very useful amount of) information on almost every topic humans have so far contemplated available literally in your pocket is somehow incredibly thrilling. For the same reason I’m fascinated by the idea of locally-hosted LLMs. It’s hard to explain. Maybe it’s like some sort of digital version of hoarding behaviour.
- flashback2199 3y ago> Maybe it’s like some sort of digital version of hoarding behaviour Digital hoarding is a real thing reddit.com/r/DataHoarder
- cm2187 3y agoI would bet those who grew up with 56k modems are more affected!
- mikestew 3y ago56K, such luxury. I know what digital scarcity is, and a 1Gbps fiber line to my house isn’t it. Sure, I have my secret stash over in the corner of that NAS in the garage, just in case. But I otherwise can now download what I want in seconds, minutes at worst. Ergo, I don’t hoard nearly like I used to (never was a true hoarder in the first place, so I can probably be ignored). Not to say that your point isn’t well taken. One does tend to keep stuff after a long overnight download, and old habits die hard. And I do have a local copy of Wikipedia…just in case.
- Damogran6 3y agoI had the same feeling I imagine...when I paid $2.00 to download the entirety of the Laserdisk game Dragon's Lair onto my iPhone (3gs? 4s?) The thought that I used to spend $.50 a game and now I can hold it in my hand for 4 times that.
- johnsillings 3y agoHitchhiker's Guide vibes
- babypuncher 3y agoAn early (pre-App Store) homebrew iOS app I used that did this on my iPod Touch was called "Don't Panic".
- btbuildem 3y ago
- canpan 3y agoWhile not necessarily related to Wikipedia, I focus a lot on the offline usage of my phone: I fly a few times per year and I like to travel. Even in 2023, internet is not always working so great. Two important things for me are: * Offline Map - The times I need a map and I am offline are strongly correlated. * Stardew Valley - Great game, pay only once, play offline, no ads. Wikipedia does sound cool though. Maybe I'll trial one of the reduced size versions.
- 123pie123 3y agoI strongly recommend Organic Maps for a free offline map application
- FredPret 3y agoOrganic Maps: 10/10 Completely offline, shows more info about the landscape than Google/Apple Maps, especially for hiking, has almost all businesses, has driving directions.
- 123pie123 3y agoyou can also add and change that map - openstreetmap.org it's very rewarding when you see your changes being used by other people and apps
- solardev 3y agoIt heavily depends on your area though. It's often way behind Google Maps, in every populated place I've tried it in the USA. (Businesses are years out of date, roads are missing or incorrect, etc.) I do contribute to OSM, but day to day I find Google Maps + Alltrails + Trailforks to be more practical (all paid, closed source, but high quality data). Google Maps also has free offline tiles. Those other two have paid offline maps, but it's worth it to not have to always wonder if your map is accurate.
- thinkling 3y agoA tip about offline Google Maps: When your phone can “hear” a cell tower (and thus thinks it’s online) but doesn’t have enough signal to get any data, apps like Google Maps and Gaia will often hang instead of showing you the downloaded map data that’s on your phone. Put your phone in airplane mode to fix that behavior.
- tmikaeld 3y agoMakes me curious on how useful a tiny AI model based just on wikipedia would be on mobile phones. Especially if it could also cite sources.
- llmnonsense 3y agoA (tiny) AI model can not cite sources, it can only hallucinate citations. A (tiny) AI model can not create a representation of knowledge or truths based on sources it knows. It can not provide any truths except by random chance. You would have an hallucinating make-up-some-fake-facts machine on your phone.
- simonw 3y ago"A (tiny) AI model can not cite sources, it can only hallucinate citations." I don't think that's definitely true, if you build the system around it well. It would look something like this: 1. User asks a question. LLM extracts key concepts from that question to use as search terms. 2. LLM triggers a search of Wikipedia, getting back snippets of pages, each with their page identifier. 3. LLM is fed those snippets along with the user's question and instructions to cite pages that it uses content from. 4. LLM generates a response which includes formatted citations. This response may be complete garbage, but... 5. Your code can at least confirm that the citations correspond to the pages that you fed into the LLM. I've seen this approach work well with larger models. The open question is if it could work with smaller ones. The 7B models (Mistral and its variants in particular) are getting VERY effective. I'm confident they could mostly-work for the above sequence... and you can just about run a 7B model on a phone. The bigger question for me is if you could get this to work with a 3B model, since those are much more mobile-device friendly than 7B.
- johnsillings 3y agoagree. sounds doable and awesome.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- someotherperson 3y agoFunny enough, I was doing this just yesterday, on the same app mentioned. I remember seeing offline Wikipedia hardware devices about a decade ago and decided it would be handy to have while on a flight. It was actually quite surprising to see how big Wikipedia has since gotten. The subdivisions the app provides isn't enough, or at least I was using it wrong. For example, trying to download the lighter versions of the Geography section only seems to offer combinations that ultimately leave you without much usable information (i.e Paris only providing the introduction text and not the content from the later sections) unless I go for the much larger size.
- Mouthfeel 3y agoIce hockey articles are ~.5% of wikipedia?
- gwbas1c 3y agoYeah, I find that odd too. I wonder if there's some kind of algorithm that downloads what the hockey articles link to, and thus a lot of what's called "Hockey" could be things like the articles about the cities that the teams are in, articles about the physics of water freezing, ect.
- DitheringIdiot 3y agoMy guess is that set has higher resolution images, just because it can.
- iandanforth 3y agoCan this be done for a Kindle?
- 1970-01-01 3y agoThis would be great if it was an optional part of the wipe process. Turn old Android phones into offline encyclopedias.
- marcod 3y agoEspecially since the mentioned app apparently doesn't run on the newest Android version...
- bionhoward 3y agoThis is great, I have difficulty with the navigation though, it seems you can get stuck in some part of the library and there’s no button to go back to the beginning.
- fmajid 3y agoHmmm. The full English Wikipedia Zim went from 87GB 1.5 years ago to 103GB now. While 512GB microSD cards are fairly reasonable nowadays, iPhone users will struggle.
- isametry 3y agoCurrent iPhones are available with up to 1 TB of storage. I’d argue that whoever would even think about downloading all of Wikipedia on their phone is a particular type of user and their choice storage will be on the northern side.
- fmajid 3y agoI do have the Maxi Wikipedia ZIM on my iPad Pro, which has 1TB. I upgraded my wife's iPhone X to a 15 non-Pro, maxed to 512GB, but she has so many videos I doubt the ZIM will fit. I myself will keep my iPhone 12 until it either breaks or they no longer provide security updates for it. Not everyone changes to the latest iPhone.
- flyinghamster 3y agoOr any other phone lacking a microSD slot. I'd assume it works that way on an iPhone, but I can at least plug a flash drive (or card reader) into my Pixel 7a's USB-C port. Not quite as nice as having always-ready extra storage, but handier for quick swaps.
- speedylight 3y agoWith the iPhone 15 you could easily plug in a USB C SSD and download it onto that—would probably require a custom client to read the data from the external drive though.
- thinkling 3y agoAre there cases yet that will take an SD card and provide a pass-through USB-C plug? (Much like the battery hump cases?) Didn’t find it on a superficial search.
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- linkpuff 3y agoThis reminds me of Aard2, it does the same job as the one mentioned in the article, but the dumps are really small (for example, the wikipedia english one uses around 20 something GBs) No images on it, but the app loads them from the source when needed
- davidgerard 3y agothe other cool thing about Kiwix is that you can download other MediaWiki sites for it, there's a whole selection: https://library.kiwix.org/ https://library.kiwix.org/
- hombre_fatal 3y agoThat language dropdown list is insane. I can't find spanish/español. And since it's not sorted, I can't rule out that it doesn't exist without scanning the whole thing.
- lxgr 3y agoIt's obviously right between Southern Sotho and Shqip!
- baggy_trough 3y agoKeep Wikipedia around on your iPad in case the world comes to an end (and have some solar panels for charging).
- ohlookabird 3y agoBack in the year 2001/2002 (I think) I remember doing this with a Wikipedia plugin for Rockbox (https://www.rockbox.org/ https://www.rockbox.org/), which I had running on my Archos FM Recorder. It was truly awesome to have all this knowledge in the palm of your hands without omnipresent Internet.
- nlh 3y agoI sometimes daydream about what would happen if I were suddenly transported back in time -- but with everything on my person intact (iPhone included). Step one in this daydream is always "Crap, no internet for 100 years -- if only I had all of Wikipedia cached". Check! :) Step 2 of course is figure out how to fashion some sort of charging system so my magical godlike pocket super abacus continues to function after ~days, but I'm making the bold assumption that somewhere in the annals of Wikipedia I can figure that out.
- agrimonyhal 3y agoYou might enjoy this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39026990-how-to-invent-everything https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39026990-how-to-invent-e...
- guntars 3y ago7 cell copper-zinc wet electrolyte battery - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_battery
- hgomersall 3y agoThere's some sweet spot where technology is relatively easy to improve upon with Wikipedia, but one can also find wires and generators. Some time in the first half of the 19th century is probably good. It gets easier if you're allowed a solar charger to take with you, then you can improve tech in loads of ways (though probably best to restrict yourself to post enlightenment if you want to keep intact).
- Terr_ 3y ago> If I were suddenly transported back in time It'd be nice if there was a curated downloadable subset of Wikipedia pages for that kind of purpose. (Time-traveler in past, stranded/post-apocalyptic survival, history pages but only the text parts.) Even if only mundane events occur, it also represents a certain cross-section of user-interest. That said, one more daydream item to add to the pile: "What if I was somehow lost in space, what useful information could I provide for maybe locating my home-planet again?" ____ Without Wikipedia, the best I can think of are notable conditions that could help them filter existing records, often using ratios to avoid having to define measurement units, ex: 1. It's the 3rd planet from the Sun, the majority of it is covered with water, etc. 2. It has an unusually large single moon of 1/6 its mass. 3. The 5th and largest planet in the system has a little over 70% of all the (known) planetary mass. 4. The 5th planet is 5.2x further from the Sun than my 3rd planet. 5. The 6th planet still has notable rings which haven't decayed yet. With Wikipedia, perhaps I could tell them about pulsar maps or whatever. [0] [0] https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/golden-record-cover/ https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/golden-record-cov...
- matthewfelgate 3y agoHmm, could you leave out the least visited articles to reduced the size massively?
- hombre_fatal 3y agoKiwix lets you download a pack of the top 100,000 articles on your phone which is more than enough for offline browsing.
- hateful 3y agoFrom the article: > Kiwix also allows you to download subdivisions of wikipedia — like the top 1 million articles at 43.53GB
- ellisv 3y agoThe frequency of article visits probably resembles a Pareto distribution. So there would be many many articles with very few views, including new articles. I’d think the good ol’ Page rank would be a better metric for deciding which ones to prune.
- OJFord 3y agoOur usage may differ, but I would think I'm probably most interested in some relatively little visited articles, because I'm there looking something up not knowing about - versus say 'United Kingdom (country)' is probably quite highly visited in total, but not that likely to be visited.. if that makes some sort of sense. Might be better to ignore certain topics you know you're not interested in. (That way if there's no result, you know there's either truly no result, or that you don't care anyway because you're not interested.) Or perhaps most effective for the size goal would be just to cut images. Perhaps selectively include them depending on category - e.g. maybe you want them for science & technology categorised articles (diagrams) and geography, but can do without otherwise.
- isuckatcoding 3y agoTotal noob question: Would an LLM approach reduce the total required storage?
- infinityio 3y agoI'm not quite sure what you mean here - English Wikipedia is ~60GB, and there are definitely models trained on Wikipedia that are less than 60GB (eg: Llama 7B), but that's a lossy store of information - you won't get perfect recital of a Wikipedia page from an LLM
- Obscurity4340 3y agoKiwix