Calling a WikiTaxi
Krish Raghav -
Thursday, August 07, 2008 5:13 PM
Remember Microsoft’s Encarta? 
6-7 years ago, any new PC was incomplete without the venerable ‘multimedia encyclopedia’ smugly occupying 50 mb of hard disk space – almost everyone I knew had a copy bundled or pre-installed (Often the only piece of legal software in possession). The sheer flashiness of its user interface (complete with orchestral intro) made it the ideal choice for showcasing the capabilities of your new computer to visiting friends (and relatives).
Its actual usefulness, however, was a bit dodgy. ‘It helps in school work’ was a pretty common excuse to get just about anything at the time (Never worked with video games, though), but I’ve never once actually relied solely on Encarta for a school project or homework.
Sure, MindMaze, the bundled trivia game, was great fun (evil Jester pictured on right) – at least until you reached later levels, where the questions became…well, a bit esoteric, and the World Atlas was good for mucking around when bored – but once we were through watching all the videos and listening to the music samples, there was little else to do.
Today we have Wikipedia, the gleefully anarchic but strangely coherent source of all knowledge. Boredom is a little more difficult with Wikipedia.
Now, carrying Wikipedia around like an offline encyclopedia has always been possible – the Wikimedia Foundation puts up database dumps of Wikipedia – which can then be downloaded and browsed with the appropriate program. 
That process, however, has gotten much easier now, thanks to WikiTaxi. (Whew. That was atleast 5 paragraphs of irrelevant rambling before getting to the point)
Wikitaxi is a nifty little tool (completely freeware, but unfortunately windows-only) that allows you to browse Wikipedia offline – and being a portable app, also carry it around without needing to install it anywhere.
The program itself is a tiny 1.6 Mb download – but to get browsing, you’ll have to download a Wikipedia database file also. (The process is covered in detail on the Wikitaxi homepage here)
The 'Simple English' text-only Database is your best bet (Just click on the latest date, and grab the 'complete text' variant) , which contains all article text, metadata and image descriptions a condensed version of the encyclopedia, and clocks in at 28 MB. The complete package, with all media and text content is a brave 3.5 gb download.
But the best part about WikiTaxi is it's multilingual support, so for added fun, also grab the Indian language variants (Tamil and Hindi, direct links) – and hit the ‘Random Page’ button for a quick fix of inevitably bizarre facts.
On my first try, I learnt the relevance of September the 16th in Tamil, the history of C++ (including a lovely Hindi spelling of developer Bjarne Stroustrup), a 1961 movie called Aas Ka Panchhi and an intriguingly detailed article on ‘Tamils in Australia’.
Edit: The 'Simplewiki' dump is NOT the complete wikipedia database - its a 'simple' variant with condensed subject matter. [Thanks, Seb]