Take Wikipedia Anywhere With WikiTaxi

Did you ever want to take Wikipedia with you while you are offline? Call on WikiTaxi: It is a portable application that delivers the Wikipedia of your choice to wherever you go.

WikiTaxi enables you to read, search, and browse Wikipedia offline. No Internet connection is needed, all pages are stored in a WikiTaxi database. Because Wikipedia is constantly growing, WikiTaxi uses compression to make sure that the database stays as small as possible.

WikiTaxi is multilingual, so you can use it for different language Wikipedias (see screenshots). It also works well with the Wiktionary and WikiQuote. You can save multiple Wikis to disk and use all of them with WikiTaxi.

WikiTaxi Benefits

Simple: WikiTaxi requires no installation. Just extract the WikiTaxi archive into any folder, that's all. This folder can be on a fixed hard drive, a portable device like memory stick, or flash card. WikiTaxi never modify the operating system, except for a small *.ini file right next to its own executable to save its options.

Portable: WikiTaxi is a single-file application which starts by a simple double-click. It does not require a database engine or HTML browser, nor does it require PHP. All functionality is completely self-contained in a single executable.

Easy to Maintain: To uninstall WikiTaxi, simply delete the WikiTaxi folder. To remove an outdated database file, just erase it.


How to Start? To run WikiTaxi, double-click on WikiTaxi.exe. The welcome screen guides you through a few simple steps to download and import your first Wiki. It will be up and running with just a few clicks!

Downloading WikiTaxi

You can download WikiTaxi from here.

Importing a Database Dump

Before you can actually use WikiTaxi, you must download your Wikipedia from the Internet and import it into a WikiTaxi database. This is necessary for offline browsing, and it is not difficult at all.

Download the Wiki Backup

You can download the Wikipedia Database Dumps from here.

To start downloading, follow the link above, pick your Wiki, and look out for the file named:

pages-articles.xml.bz2

Download this file to your local hard disk. It contains all articles, templates, image descriptions, and primary meta-pages of a Wiki. Do not bother with any other files, WikiTaxi does not know how to handle them.

Import the XML dump into a WikiTaxi database

After the download has finished, run WikiTaxi_Importer.exe to extract the Wiki articles from the XML dump file to a WikiTaxi database. Depending on the size of your Wikipedia, this may take a bit of time, but you have to do it once only.
Within the WikiTaxi importer, enter or browse for the XML dump file you just downloaded and the database file you want it to create. Then click the "Import Now!" button and wait until the import is finished.

WikiTaxi usage

Once you have a WikiTaxi database, you can run WikiTaxi to browse your Wikipedia off-line. Start WikiTaxi.exe, and open a database. WikiTaxi will display a random page and you can start browsing from here.