Did you ever want to take Wikipedia with you while you are offline? Call on WikiTaxi: It is a portable application that delivers the Wikipedia of your choice to wherever you go.

WikiTaxi enables you to read, search, and browse Wikipedia offline. No Internet connection is needed, all pages are stored in a WikiTaxi database. Because Wikipedia is constantly growing, WikiTaxi uses compression to make sure that the database stays reasonably small. The huge English Wikipedia easily fits on a 8 GB memory stick.

WikiTaxi is multilingual, which means that you can use it for Wikipedias from different languages (see screenshots). It also works well with the dictionary and quotation Wikis, if you like. You can also save multiple Wikis to disk and use all of them with WikiTaxi.

WikiTaxi is up to date. It works with the original Wikipedia database dumps, which are updated regularly every few weeks or so. If you feel that your offline Wikipedia is getting too old, you can go online to download a more recent version or just copy it from a friend.

WikiTaxi is simple: It requires no installation. Just extract the WikiTaxi archive to any folder, that's all. This folder can be on a fixed hard drive, or a portable device like memory stick or flash card. WikiTaxi does not modify the operating system, except for a small options *.ini file which it places right next to its own executable.

WikiTaxi is also portable: It is a single-file application which you just need to double-click to run. It does not require a database engine or HTML browser, nor does it require PHP. All functionality is completely self-contained in a single executable.

WikiTaxi is easy to maintain: To uninstall, simply delete the executable file. To remove an outdated database, just erase the file.

To run WikiTaxi, double-click on WikiTaxi.exe. The welcome screen guides you through a few simple steps to download and import your first Wiki. It will be up and running with just a few clicks!

Here are some links to WikiTaxi reviews. If you have seen others, please get in touch!

• download.com (English)
• lifehacker (English)
• gHacks (English)
• Jan-Piet Mens (English)
• Dr. Web (German)
• OvalNets (German)
• soft-ware.net (German)
• 01net (French)
• SVM (French)
• DiggLife (Chinese)
• ZDNet (Dutch)
• Walhez (Spanish)
• Neoteo (Spanish)
• Gelhele (Turkish)

Before you can actually use WikiTaxi, you must download your Wikipedia from the Internet and import it into a WikiTaxi database. This is necessary for offline browsing, and it is not difficult at all.

From the many Wikipedia backups available, you need to download just one file, the so-called XML dump. Here are some direct links to the more popular:

• Simple English (simplewiki), small download, less than 25 MB, excellent for your first WikiTaxi import and testing.
• English (enwiki), huge download, more than 3.5 GB.
• German (dewiki), large download, more than 1.1 GB.
• Frensh (frwiki), medium download, less than 1 GB.
• Polish (plwiki), smaller download, less than 400 MB.
• Dumps for all Wikis, in different languages and sizes.

To start downloading, follow one of the links above, pick your Wiki and backup date (latest is usually best), and look out for the file named:

pages-articles.xml.bz2

Download this file to your local hard disk. It contains all articles, templates, image descriptions, and primary meta-pages of a Wiki. Do not bother with any other files, WikiTaxi does not know how to handle them.

WikiTaxi allows you to share your Wikipedia, so you do not have to download it yourself. You can copy from a friend, a teacher, or your boss. If you can copy to save the download, you can also save the database import if you copy the WikiTaxi database instead!

After the download has finished, run WikiTaxi_Importer.exe to extract the Wiki articles from the XML dump file to a WikiTaxi database. Depending on the size of your Wikipedia, this may take a bit of time, but you have to do it once only.

Within the WikiTaxi importer, enter or browse for the XML dump file you just downloaded and the database file you want it to create. Then click the "Import Now!" button and wait until the import is finished.

For the very large Wikipedias, more memory can help the importer to run faster. Move the "RAM for database" slider to the right before you start the import. Be moderate, however, or you risk your system running out of memory. The default setting usually works fine.

When the import is finished, you can use the database right away (read below). The XML dump file, on the other hand, is no longer needed. You can delete it to free up some disk space, but test the database file first in case something went wrong and you must import again.

Once you have a WikiTaxi database, you can run WikiTaxi to browse your Wikipedia off-line. Start WikiTaxi.exe, and open a database. WikiTaxi will display a random page and you can start browsing from here.

To search for a page name, enter a search query into the top edit control (CTRL+L). This syntax is supported:

• Capitalization WikiTaxi searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower case.
• Automatic "and" queries WikiTaxi only returns pages that include all of your search terms. To restrict a search, include more terms. This will also return results faster.
• Phrase searches To search for an exact phrase, simply put quotation marks (") around search terms.
• Negative terms Putting a minus sign (-) in front of a word will only search for pages which do not have this word in their names.
• "OR" search To find pages that include either of two search terms, add an uppercase OR between the terms. You can group alternatives by wrapping them with parenthesis "(" and ")".
• Prefix search Put an asterisk (*) after a word to search for variants. Example: class* finds class, classmate, classes, and so on.

Press CTRL+F to display the find in text panel, then type some text. F3 jumps to the next match, SHIFT+F3 to the previous one.

WikiTaxi shows Unicode characters, but it needs a Unicode font to do so. If you experience display problems (little boxes instead of characters), specify a Unicode font: Right click on the viewer and choose the font type from the popup-menu.