Offline Wikipedia with Kiwix: what it is, how big it is, and how to set it up

Wikipedia feels like it lives on the internet, and mostly it does. But the whole of English Wikipedia can sit on your laptop as a single file and open with the wifi switched off. The free tool that makes that possible is called Kiwix. Here's what it is, how big the files really are, and the choices you'll make setting it up.

What Kiwix is

Kiwix is a non-profit project that describes its work as making free knowledge accessible where the internet is not. It started in 2007 to give people offline access to Wikipedia, and its software is open source under the GPL licence.

Kiwix's own FAQ answers the obvious questions plainly. It's free to use, it doesn't show ads, and it doesn't collect user data. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS, and as a web app.

It's not a niche experiment either. According to Wikipedia's article on Kiwix, it has been used in prison education programmes in Europe and the US, on ships in Antarctic waters, and in schools where internet access is hard to get or too expensive.

How it works: one file, opened by a reader

Kiwix has two parts:

ZIM files. These are the content. Kiwix describes them as highly compressed archives of web content. One ZIM file can hold a whole website, such as all of English Wikipedia, with its search index built in.
The reader. The Kiwix app opens a ZIM file and lets you browse and search it like a website, except nothing leaves your device.

Download the file once, while you have internet. After that you don't need a connection at all.

How big is English Wikipedia offline?

English Wikipedia had 7,257,645 articles when we checked its statistics page on 1 November 2026. Kiwix packs that into three versions, which it calls flavours:

maxi: the full version, with pictures. Kiwix calls it the default.
nopic: full articles without images, roughly 75% smaller.
mini: only the introduction of each article plus the info box, about 95% smaller.

Here are the current English files on Kiwix's download server, as listed on 1 November 2026. The server shows sizes in binary units (a "G" there is a gibibyte, slightly bigger than the gigabyte your Mac shows), so the decimal size is a little higher than the label:

Every article, with pictures (maxi, August 2026 build): listed as 119G, about 127 GB.
Every article, no pictures (nopic, June 2026 build): listed as 49G.
Every article, introductions only (mini, September 2026 build): listed as 13G.
The top 1 million articles, no pictures (April 2026 build): listed as 16G.
WikiMed, the medical subset, with pictures (October 2026 build): listed as 1.7G.

So the honest answer is "between about 13 GB and about 127 GB, depending on what you choose". Most laptops can take one of the smaller versions. The full version with pictures needs a large drive and a long download.

Which version should you pick?

It depends on what you want it for.

For looking things up when the internet is down: full text matters more than pictures. The no-pictures version of every article, or the top 1 million articles without pictures, gives you complete articles at a fraction of the size.
For browsing and learning: pictures help a lot, especially for maps, diagrams, plants and anatomy. That's the full version, if you have the space.
For a phone: the mini version, or WikiMed on its own, is far easier to carry.
For health reference: WikiMed is small and focused. Treat it as reference reading, the same way you'd treat a book on the shelf, and call a health service for anything urgent.

Setting it up yourself

Kiwix is free, so you can do this today:

Install the Kiwix reader for your device from kiwix.org.
Pick a ZIM file and download it from Kiwix's download server.
Let it download. On a big file, leave it running overnight.
Open the file in Kiwix, then switch the wifi off and try a search to prove it works.

Three things trip people up. The file names are terse, so it's easy to grab the wrong language or flavour. The big files take hours and need the space free before you start. And updating isn't automatic: Kiwix's FAQ says incremental updates for files like Wikipedia aren't available yet, so getting a newer copy means downloading the whole file again.

None of that is hard. It's just a set of choices, and a download you have to remember to start.

Wikipedia plus an offline AI

On its own, an offline Wikipedia answers "what is" questions very well. It's less good at "what should I do with what I've got", where you want someone to pull the pieces together. That's where a small AI on the same laptop helps: it can read the article and answer in plain words, while the article stays beside it for checking. Our post on running an AI on your own laptop explains how that works and where it falls short.

The short version

Kiwix is free, open source and runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS.
All of English Wikipedia is about 127 GB with pictures, and much less without them.
Pick text-only if space is tight. Re-download to update.

If you'd rather have it chosen, tested and set up in one go, the Offline Brain download installs Wikipedia and WikiMed through Kiwix alongside your own offline AI and a map pack. You choose Essentials (the top 1 million articles, text only, about 22.4 GB in total) or Full (every article with pictures, about 132.7 GB in total) in the installer. Both are in the one US$29 (NZ$49) price.