Saturday 21 January 2012

MAKE YOUR OWN COPY OF WIKIPEDIA

Beyond your anger about conflicted representatives voting on disgusting & broken laws, though, you are probably experiencing a very different emotion entirely: loss. Loss for your beloved Wikipedia. The Wikipedia Foundation knows how important its encyclopedia is, it knows that blacking out the site for 24 hours will generate an uproar but most importantly, it knows that a blackout will make people query the future safety of of the most important services in the world. I mean, if SOPA was enacted & Wikipedia was made to close down, what would they do?

With today's blackout of Wikipedia, its editors & governing Foundation are sending a very clear message to Congress & other governments around the globe: In case you mess with the net the fabric on which Wikipedia is built there will be more trouble & strife than you can ever imagine.

Wikipedia, being the awesome site that it is, provides complete dumps of each of its encyclopedias to make the mirroring technique simple. With a tiny little bit of developer know-how, you can set up your very own Wikipedia mirror, available & editable by the public, like Wikipedia itself. Even if you are a standard web surfer without geek credentials, you can set up a local version of Wikipedia right on your computer, available at any time, irrespective of blackouts or shutdowns. Let's start!
Download a replica of Wikipedia

I have been thinking about this for the last couple of days, poring over potential solutions. Speaking to your local Representative or Senator (or member of parliament, if you are outside the US) is definitely a nice preventative step. But if Wikipedia actually goes dark not in a soft sense like today the only actual solution is to have a network of mirrors.

To start with, you will need to grab a compressed copy of the Wikipedia language that you need to reflect English, French, French, & so on from dumps.wikipedia.org. I strongly recommend you use a mirror, as the official servers appear to be slow. I used a fast Brazilian mirror, but its latest dump is over a month elderly.

You are looking for a file name that looks something like: enwiki-20120104-pages-articles.xml.bz2. The important thing is that the file name ends with pages-articles.xml.bz2.

If you are mirroring the English Wikipedia, this file will be around 7.5GB; other wikis will be considerably smaller.

 
Decompress Wikipedia

Now you have options:

You can cease reading now in the event you only require to generate a local mirror; otherwise, read on

In the event you require to make a web-accessible version of Wikipedia (i.e. an actual mirror of Wikipedia), you require to uncompressed pages-articles.xml.bz2. On Windows, this can be completed with 7-Zip. On Linux and Mac OS X it can be completed with bunzip2. The uncompressed English Wikipedia, without pics, is around 25GB.
 
In the event you require to make a local mirror of Wikipedia in the event you require a duplicate of Wikipedia on your computer, in case the world wide web-site suddenly disappears download WikiTaxi.It can take your compressed Wikipedia dump and turn it in to a browsable, searchable Wikipedia with a few clicks. The import technique will around an hour for English Wikipedia, or considerably more in the event you have an older computer.

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