this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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For anyone who doesn't know, you can download Wikipedia and host it yourself! I got the top 50k version (~7G) on my RPI3 and now no matter what fuckery they pull or the government pulls, I've got a pretty decent source of general information.
Could you share what you did to achieve this? I've been planning on doing just that, and have it auto-update every week or so (keeping the previous versions archived, of course) by using kiwix-serve for a static '.zim' file and maybe a cron job for the auto-update. But if you have a better solution, I'd love to know. The deployment I am planning is kind of convoluted to be honest.
No, that's exactly what I did, I'm running kiwix-serve, but I'm not going to bother updating it because I'm really worried about information degrading now that fascists are basically calling the shots on everything (and WP's jackboot co-founder has a hard on for it). If I feel enough time has gone by to warrant an update I'll just do it manually.
What year was your cutoff?
About 6 months ago.
I ended up using mediawiki instead of kiwix-serve. Left my proxmox grabbing the data and its at around 170,000 pages right now. I'm still going to be versioning to make sure I keep the most up to date data, but still have access to the previous versions, as well as getting new articles, and keeping any removed ones if it happens.
How do you do that?
You run a server on a machine inside your house, it can be any computer on your local LAN/wifi, but it's obviously best if it's a machine that's always on. I use a Raspberry Pi 3B+ (these can be had for about $50) that I have plugged into my wifi router and it's running a little program called Kiwix-Server (free and open source). You download the WP file (it's a huge single file with a .zim extension) and point the server to it and boom.
Wow, neat! Thanks for the explanation
I am currently pretty tapped out on all storage and backup drives but if I had space this post would have motivated me. Just sayin
Yeah, I did that about 20 months ago (wonder why?) and the problem is, there it sits but I forget where on my LAN I stored it, how to access it - I suppose, were I absolutely desperate, I could launch a several hours research project and find it, maybe even figure out how to access (I believe I stored README with it about how to do all that), but... why? And, even worse, one why? might be to see how articles have drifted over time, which I guarantee they have and continue to do, Wikipedia is actually quite fluid, but does knowing how current articles compare to the ones you archived in 2024 do anything of greater value for you than the negative value of being pissed off at how the world is lying to itself (same as it ever has...)?
I have my Pi-Hole doing DNS for me so I just set up an easy to remember redirect, wikipedia.local. I did it more for independence. I got Home Assistant and Voice PE so I could have a local smart speaker to get big tech out of my house. I don't do anything on the cloud, so it stands to reason that if I want to make sure I always have access to rudimentary information, having my own version of WP is nice. I also just think it's kind of cool and it never begs me for money.