WikiTaxi: use a local copy of WikiPedia
Accessing WikiPedia is easy when you're online, but have you ever wanted to take it along with you for off-line situations? I have, and there is a lovely program to do so for Windows: WikiTaxi. You don't have to install the program; just extract it from its 7zip archive and put it in a convenient location somewhere on your Windows drive.
After downloading one of the page dumps from Wikimedia, you convert (to SQLite) the compressed page dump file (e.g. enwiki-.....-pages-articles.xml.bz2) to WikiTaxi's format with the included importer program, which takes a while: on my system the converter ran for just over an hour to translate the full WikiPedia compressed XML source (3.3GB) to WikiTaxi's format, resulting in a 5.89 GB file.
WikiTaxi is well documented, and it is fun to use. The only thing missing are WikiPedia's images, but those are difficult to acquire.
WikiTaxi wrote on 26-May-08 at 3:32 pm
http://www.wikitaxi.org is now connected and points to the latest version of WikiTaxi.
Tom Hall wrote on 05-Aug-08 at 1:06 pm
I am having difficulty importing the xml english dump into wikitaxi importer. The importer doesn't seem to recognize the file and I have made sure to download the correct one exactly as described. I have Windows Vista and wonder if that is the problem or is there something else? Help me please if you can. Thanks!
orhan wrote on 07-Aug-08 at 12:36 pm
@Tom Hall
it may be because of fat32 filesystem restrictions. fat32 cannot handle files over 4gb. you need to put the file on an ntfs formatted disk.
JAmes C wrote on 17-Aug-08 at 5:24 am
In vista you need to run it in compatibility mode. right click on the icon and go to the properties then the tab for compatibility, click the run in compatibility mode for windows XP.
Norman Samish wrote on 28-Aug-08 at 8:09 am
I am having difficulty importing the xml english dump enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2 into wikitaxi importer 1.0.3. When I click on "Import Now!" I get "Error: SQLite Error 14 – unable to open database file" I have Windows XP Pro fully updated. Help me please if you can. Thanks!