Emmanuel Engelhart

I believe Wikipedia should be freely available to anyone, any time — whether they are online or offline. That's why I started Kiwix, an offline Wikipedia reader.

1. Download the reader to your computer.

2. Download the .zim file in the language you want from the Kiwix website or a torrent. A .zim file is Wikipedia without the images — for English Wikipedia it's about 10 gigabytes.

3. Load the .zim file in the Kiwix reader.

That's it. Now you have Wikipedia on your computer, any time you want it!

People are curious. They love to be able to learn things, even when there's no internet connection nearby. Kiwix is a simple, practical solution — and its supporters are a surprisingly diverse group. Sailors on the oceans. Residents of remote, rural areas. Globetrotters who live on airplanes. Poor students seeking to expand their horizons. Teachers in developing nations. People who live under censorship... They all want to access the world's knowledge.

Kiwix is available in more than 80 languages, with full text search, tabbed navigation and export capabilities. It is free, open-source software, which means you are free to copy it, to modify it, and to share it. And I hope you will.

Currently, only two in seven people has access to the internet. One day, maybe we can change that. But in the meantime, let's share Wikipedia with as many people as we can.

— Emmanuel Engelhart

Emmanuel Engelhart is a programmer from Vendôme, France. He loves to code.

Image Attribution: Emmanuel Engelhart by Victor Grigas, under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported, from Wikimedia Commons.

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