# App/Import/English Wikipedia

From XOWA: the free, open-source, offline wiki application

## Background

English Wikipedia has a lot of data. There are over 16 million pages with 25 GB of text, as well as 5 million images.

Setting all this up on your computer will not be a quick process. As a general estimate, you will need at least 30 GB and 5 hours processing time. If you want images as well, the numbers increase to 100 GB of disk space and 30+ hours of processing time. However, when you are done, you will have a complete, recent copy of English Wikipedia with images that can fit on a 128 GB SD card.

Although the process itself is not hard, I strongly recommend that you try Simple Wikipedia first. Simple Wikipedia has 180,000 pages and 90,000 images. The text version uses 200 MB and sets up in 5 minutes. With images, this expands to 2 GB and 30 minutes of downloading time. Simple Wikipedia is a reasonably accurate simulation of English Wikipedia -- just much smaller. It'll also give you a pretty good idea of what XOWA can do.

## Quick start

### Articles

There are two approaches:

- Download pre-built wikis from archive.org
- Build wikis using the database dumps at wikimedia.org

#### Download pre-built wikis from archive.org

- Go to `Special:XowaDownloadCentral` from the URL bar within XOWA. You can also do Main Menu -> Tools -> Download Central
- In the Available table, add the task names that start off with `English Wikipedia - Articles`
- In the Queue table, click the Play button
- Wait for the Queue to process. When it is done, enter the wiki URL in the bar. For example, `en.wikipedia.org`

#### Build wikis using the database dumps at wikimedia.org

- Go to Dashboard/Import/Online
- Find `en.wikipedia.org` in the list
- Click the `download` link.
- Wait for the wiki to build. When it is done, it will automatically load the Main Page

### Images

- Go to `Special:XowaDownloadCentral` from the URL bar within XOWA. You can also do Main Menu -> Tools -> Download Central
- In the Available table, add the task names that start off with `English Wikipedia - Images` and `English Wikipedia - Image Update`
- In the Queue table, click the Play button
- Wait for the Queue to process. When it is done, enter any page in the bar. For example, `en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth`

## Detailed start

See Wiki_setup/English_wikis

### XOWA

- Main page
- Screenshots
- Video
- Download XOWA
- Download wikis

### Getting started

- Requirements
- Installation
- Simple Wikipedia
- English Wikipedia
- Other Wikipedias

### Android

- Setup
- Video

### Help

- About
- Contents
- Media
- Feedback

### Blog

- Current

### Links

- Wikimedia dumps
- XOWA @ archive.org
- English Wikipedia

### Donate

- archive.org
- Wikipedia