Bring The Entire Wikipedia Database To Your iPod Touch (and iPhone) For Use Offline!
Posted by Jody Mitoma on January 31, 2008
Something amazing has hit the iPod Touch front. One team calls it the iPhonePedia.app. The other, simply Wikipedia.app.
That’s right. There are actually two application versions of Wikipedia.com’s database that are available for the iPod Touch (and iPhone, of course).
One huge difference between the two is the size of the download. Wikipedia.app will require ~2GB’s of space, while the iPhonePedia.app will only consume an astonishing ~150MB’s!
Update (from Patrick [starter of Wikipedia.app] on Jan 4th, 2008)
…the iPhonePedia app needs you to download a dump from the main Wikipedia servers in addition to their 150MB file — so you end up
with 3.1GB of stuff (not 150MB). Wikipedia.app (the one I wrote 🙂 needs a little under 2GB (keeping this size down was one of the big
goals when developing it).
Here’s the basics on Wikipedia.app
What: An offline Wikipedia reader for the iPhone or iPod Touch. I wanted to write an iPhone app over Christmas, and so hacked this together during the break.
Why: It’s the warm fuzzy feeling of having the sum of all human knowledge in your pocket. It’s the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy realised. EDGE is slow; search is slow; you’re abroad, in a plane, a tunnel, or on top of a mountain. You have an iPod Touch.
Size: It’ll consume about a quarter of your iPhone’s storage—the app, indexes and dumps are almost exactly 2GB together.
Completenes: This still has a lot of rough edges. Some articles can’t be opened, and it’s not too hard to crash the app.
Other: There’s also a mongrel-based ruby server for offline browsing on a PC (was used for debug during development). See sh/server in the source distribution. No screenshots yet.
Download
Application: Wikipedia.zip
Dump: enwiki-20071018-iphone.tar
Source: wikipedia-iphone-0.1.tar.bz2 (GPL)
Installation
Put the app in /Applications. Use something like Customize.app to get it onto your springboard. Untar the dump, and put the contents at /var/root/wp. If using Windows, check out the in-depth Windows installation instructions contributed by rebelxtnut.
Here’s the basics on iPhonePedia.app
iPhonePedia is a quite terrible name but summarizes it well: this project allows to run a local wikipedia database on the iPhone and iPod Touch.
You may be wondering what the hell is the point of wasting precious iPhone space for something you can just access onlie. Well, I personally don’t really see any, but I have an iPod Touch, hence the need for something offline and the smaller worries about disk space!
Check the following pages to know:
Sources:
– (iPhonePedia.app) http://trac2.assembla.com/iPhonePedia/wiki/FeaturesList
– (Wikipedia.app) http://collison.ie/wikipedia-iphone/
This entry was posted on January 31, 2008 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Application Related. Tagged: database, dictionary, offline webapp, wiki, wikipedia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
suicidefury said
lol actually theres a 3rd one by http://haukap.net
Jody Mitoma said
Thanks for that!
andree said
I cant see the 150 MB one, 2GB is way too much for a 16GB iPod!
Jody Mitoma said
Yea, it’s a little much for my 8GB iPod as well. 😉
Ben said
iPhonePedia requires 150MB for the *search index*. In addition to that, it requires a 3GB dump from Wikipedia — so Wikipedia.app is over 50% smaller.
Jody Mitoma said
Thanks very much for that. 🙂
Sorry about the misunderstanding.
deltax said
the database seem a bit old, is there an update somewhere? is it using some form of compression to fit the entire database in 2GB ?
Axel Boldt said
An up-to-date and free offline Wikipedia (with images) can be found at http://www.haukap.com/wiki2touch/
Taleb said
hello everyone i read the post above about how to install the zip files on the windows written by rebelxtnut but it’s a bit vague for me. can you please anwer my questions?
1.how can we Place the Wiki app into /Applications and set permitions to 0755? do we need a special program?
2.how can we Place the Folder ” wp ” in the Directory /var/root?
i’ll be very grateful if you reply.
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