Wikipedia is a website that represents the web encyclopedia par excellence. It is written and revised by volunteers who, without profit, contribute to creating complete and descriptive pages about everything: science, sport, entertainment, films, technology, history, geography etc. Being viewable only by browsing the internet and therefore with a computer connected to the network, some English volunteers thought it well to save the entire encyclopedia and to share it so that it can be downloaded onto the PC and copied to a DVD so as to always have it at hand. READ ALSO: How to write on Wikipedia, create and edit pages
" The Wikipedia Selection for Schools " is a reduced version of the real Wikipedia (all of which would require too much space) and contains over 4500 topics and 25000 images which could correspond to an encyclopedia of 15 volumes. Obviously there is the best of Wikipedia and the most important and most searched for items have been collected with a particular eye on children. The main purpose is to make the encyclopedia accessible to people and children from disadvantaged areas who do not have an internet connection (and unfortunately there are still many in Italy). By saving the encyclopedia on the PC and on a DVD it becomes like those encyclopedias that often sell on newsstands in files with the difference that Wikipedia is more complete and is free. There are several programs to download Wikipedia to your computer and be able to read the encyclopedia from your desktop, without opening the internet.
1) Evopedia is a program for reading Wikipedia articles in Italian, even without the internet.
To download it, choose the installer for Windows and then it takes several hours since more than 2 GB of data will be downloaded.
2) The Wikipedia database and every single article updated to date is available on the main Wikipedia website (dumps.wikimedia.org) as an .Xml file.
The updated English encyclopedia can be downloaded from this page by downloading the 3 GB file present where Latest is written.
Wikipedia in Italian instead can be downloaded from here (download the latest, the "latest").
The xml files of Wikipedia can be easily opened with the Wikitaxi program which is a reader of the articles downloaded from the Windows PC without the need for an internet connection.
3) Even with the IndyWiki program you can download the encyclopedia Wikipedia in Italian on your computer.
4) A good alternative is Kiwix, another free and available program for Mac, Windows and Linux systems that works like Wikitaxi.
5) Pocket Wikipedia is a great new program to download 24, 000 images and 14 million words contained in Wikipedia. Pocket Wikipedia is a curated and condensed form of the Wikipedia encyclopedia which has been specially compiled in a 180 MB download. It is based on Wikipedia for schools and is a freeware available for Windows and Linux.
