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← Off-grid & offline · Mission 1 of 3

Carry Wikipedia on your laptop, offline

Build a grab-and-go survival library: the best 50,000 Wikipedia articles and an emergency medicine guide on your laptop or a USB stick, searchable with no signal at all. The whole of English Wikipedia, every article in full, fits in 49GB. Free, no account, nothing to install.

25 minBeginnerTools: FreeStep 1 free
Tested 8 Oct 2026 · Kiwix Desktop 2.5.1, kiwix-tools 3.8.1, Windows 11, 16GB laptop
An offline copy of the best 50,000 Wikipedia articles in a 283MB file
A searchable emergency medicine reference that works with no signal
Your own private search page that every phone in the house can use
  • A shopping list of what else you can carry offline, with real sizes, up to all of Wikipedia
Before you start
  • About 1GB of free disk space for this mission (the app plus two libraries)
  • A Windows 10 or 11 PC, a Mac or a Linux PC. On Windows nothing gets installed, so you don't need admin rights
  • An internet connection for the downloads only. After that, none
01/05Choose your library before you download0 done
STEP 01 of 05~3 min

Choose your library before you download

Kiwix reads .zim files. Some are 25MB, some are 200GB. Start small, then build the full drive.

  1. Kiwix is a free, open-source reader for offline websites. Each website comes packed into one .zim file. You download the file once, then read it forever with no internet.

  2. Most come in three flavours: mini (just the opening section of each article), nopic (full text, no pictures) and maxi (everything). Sizes from the official download folder ↗:

    • Best of Wikipedia, mini (50,000 articles): 283MB. You'll start with this one.
    • Best of Wikipedia, no pictures: 2.6GB. With pictures: 6.5GB
    • All of English Wikipedia: 13GB mini, 49GB no pictures (every article in full, fits on a 64GB stick), 119GB with pictures
    • WikEM (emergency medicine): 331MB. You'll get this one too.
    • Wikipedia medicine, no pictures: 822MB
    • Wikivoyage (travel guides, no pictures): 260MB
    • Simple English Wiktionary: 25MB. The full English Wiktionary is 8.5GB
    • Cooking Stack Exchange: 226MB. All of Stack Overflow is 107GB
    • Project Gutenberg (English books): 206GB. TED talks: 85GB
    CarefulA USB stick formatted FAT32 can't hold a file bigger than 4GB, so the 13GB and 49GB full-Wikipedia files won't copy to it. Format the stick exFAT or NTFS (right-click the drive in File Explorer, then Format) before you build the big drive. The two small files in this mission fit FAT32 fine.
    TipA .zim is a snapshot from the date in its file name. For reference material it stays useful for years, but for anything that changes, like medical guidance or current events, re-download every few months to stay current.
    TipThe full catalogue, in every language, is at library.kiwix.org ↗. Start with the two small files in this mission, check you like it, then build the big drive.
✓
CheckpointYou've picked one or two files that fit your disk. If in doubt, use the two from this mission.
Stuck? Ask the community
Next mission · Off-grid & offlineYour whole city's map in 20MB, working with zero signal
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