Offline Wikipedia

This is a look at how one could make an Offline Wikipedia. Offline means without access to the internet. This is not a doomsday prep project, but just catering to a desire to preserve information and a fun exercise.

Basic Considerations

We must consider if we do not have internet, what else do we not have access to. So we will have two approaches:

1. Electricity and consumer electronics are available
2. Very long term endurance of the data

Approach #1: Tablet

This one is pretty easy.

1. Buy an Android tablet with at least 256GB of storage (or a Micro SD card slot). You can buy an e-ink tablet to make it easier to read
2. Install Kiwix on the tablet and download the offline version of Wikipedia
3. You're done

You can also get a solar powered charger for the tablet and then you wouldn't need electricity. Eventually the tablet will breakdown as all electronics do.

Approach #2: Microform

In this case we are assuming no electricity and that we want extremely long term endurance of the data. Printing on paper is impossible due to the amount of paper needed. Computers and electronics can last a while, but not the really long time we are looking for. The solution seems to be Microform. This is like microfilm, but is bigger. Many libraries store newspapers and periodicals in this format. Here is some math showing this is possible:

The Math

• Wikipedia has about 7,000,000 articles
• Wikipedia is about 4,900,000,000 words
  • Each article has about 700 words
• This fills about 3,062 volumes (books)
  • with 1,600,000 words per volume (at 6 characters per word)
  • with a volume being 25cm tall and 5cm thick (at 500 sheets, 1000 pages)

This is too many books, but microform reduces books to ~4% their original size. 3,062 volumes becomes 123 volumes, each in the form of a roll of microform. This makes the Wikipedia collection able to fit in a cabinet.

The Cost

The hypothetical cost is as follows. I found a company that will "microform"-ify your documents for $0.025 (USD) per A4 page (210x297mm)

• 3,062,000 pages
  • 3,062 volumes at 1,000 pages each
• Roughly $77,000.

This is far from affordable but is very much in the realm of possible.

Caveats

• Format: Wikipedia is not in bounds of volumes, it is in articles. Some utility would have to be programmed to download all of Wikipedia and parse out each article and put them into PDF books to be sent to be "microform"-ified. Wikipedia gives access to anyone to download all of it's text (I don't know about images) in some file format. I do not know how to parse or read this format or if it contains images.
• Table of Contents: You will need a decently sized index or table of contents to make the microform library useful. This is not impossible, but it will have to probably take the form of a book that is 100's of pages long AND the indexing/order of articles must be considered while parsing Wikipedia during the previous caveat.
• Images: I don't think there is an easy way to download images with Wikipedia's text, like it is with Kiwix in the tablet method.
• Reading: This is important. It is not always easy to read microform.
  • If your eyes are really good, you can just barely read microform, but most microform storage places have something like a light table for reading. A light table is definitely a piece of equipment that can require electricity or new manufactured parts, but it's purpose can be met with a magnifying glass. If one is worried about endurance, but several magnifying glasses.
  • Microform also requires a source of light. A light table takes care of that. Without electricity, maybe a mirror could use daylight to backlight the microform. Without the light table, one could hold the microform up to the sky for backlighting. The other hand can hold the magnifying glass.
  • If you forgo a light table, you would need some device that could hold the microform at a specific page as holding two ends of the microform, keeping the middle part in the light, and holding a magnifying glass is near impossible for one person. A device like this doesn't really exist, but you could model and 3D print something that would meet these needs.
• Endurance: Microform will not last 1000 years like a stone tablet or printed page might, but it is claimed that it can last ~100s of years.

Other Notes

• Microfiche might be better. It is like microform but not in a roll. A page can hold dozens of pages. It would be easier to read than a roll, but it might also take up a little more space. Microfiche can (some forms of microfiche cannot) hold at a better ratio (~1% vs the ~4% of microform), but a microfiche page is thicker than a piece of paper if stored in a binder, for example. However, microfiche may be easier to index or "flip through" to find what you need, as opposed to spooling through a roll.