We were recently given a copy of Wikipedia for use offline and its stunningly useful! I never knew it existed as a “product" (though I was aware that mirroring it using the standard tools was incredibly unfriendly and they do ask you not to do it).

Its actually produced officially using a format for the Kiwix offline browser. Thats not so interesting for us as we like to serve all of our media from an onboard machine so everyone can see our planning documents for the Pacific crossing, all the boat manuals, all our videos etc. However, the kiwix software package comes with kiwix-serve which can turn the indexed and searchable files into a very nice offline-though-http Wikipedia.

It has instantly become our ‘go to’ reference. Want to know the agnostic display of a grey shark? It has it! Was the fish we caught a wahoo or something else? Wikipedia has photos! Does our current location rate a class 1 on the Bortle scale? Of course it does!

The downside is that its a huge download - 70GB or so and there is no incremental update ability. We will have to get friends with decent connectivity to bring us newer versions. I also noticed that all of the TED stuff is available in the same compressed and index format, which may also go on the ‘to be muled’ list.

Its amazing how such little things can be so useful onboard :) We really are rapidly approaching Hitchhikers Guide territory.