XOWA Editor's Review

Bring down Wikipedia to your hard drive for offline viewing with this awesome app.

When I was growing up (I graduated from high school in 1984), my parents had a set of Britannica Encyclopedias THEY used when they were in school circa 1950-blah, blah, blah. Its what I had at home to help me with homework – a 25-30 year old, out dated set of reference books...and it was far better than most anyone else had at home.  Google didn't exist yet. In 1984 when I graduated from high school, Sergey Brin was in the 4th grade.  That, my friends... is TOTALLY depressing.

Today, with the advent of Google and other search engines, the world is your oyster. Students today have access to information that I could only dream about back in the day...that is, as long as they're online. Well, until now.  XOWA is a cool Windows app that downloads any Wikimedia wiki to your hard drive for offline use; and unlike my stale set of smelly encyclopedias, can be updated at will.

XOWA is a free application that lets you download Wikipedia and Wikimedia compatible wiki's to your computer. With it, you can access all of Wikipedia offline, meaning without an internet connection.  You effectively rip it to your hard drive and then access Wikipedia via the app.

It works with any Wikimedia wiki, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikiquote, and Wikivoyage. It also works with other specialized wikis such as Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, or any other MediaWiki generated dump. Also works with any non-English language wiki (French, German, Dutch, etc.) compatible wiki.

When you search or find what you're looking for, you can search for any page by title using a Wikipedia-like search box, browse pages by alphabetical order using special:allpages, or find a word on a page.  You can also access a history of viewed pages and bookmark your favorite pages.

App Pro’s: FREE, Works on any Wikimedia wiki, full HTML formatting, downloads images and other files on demand

App Con’s: Eats up storage space, difficult to figure out for first time users, you have to do a lot of reading to figure it out, interface needs a bit of work to be more user friendly. This looks TOO much like Wikipedia. It needs to either be a full blown desktop app, or an offline browser. Currently, it seems as though its stuck somewhere in between.

Conclusion: This application is really cool. Its something that every high school and especially college student should have, especially if you have a laptop, have to do some kind of a research paper and know you're going to be some place that doesn't have Wi-Fi (and you don't have mobile broadband to burn – which is a very common state, especially among students here in the States). 

With XOWA, you surf, download, storage and go. The app will even store data on a storage card or thumb drive, so you don't have to eat up precious hard drive space. The app is also VERY difficult for first time users to get set up. You have to do a LOT of reading of instructions in order to actually get the app to rip something to your hard drive. Don't expect to be able to flip a switch and start using it out of the box. Its going to take a bit of work to get going.