Pocket encyclopedia

Wikipedia on a USB drive, this is a major challenge, particularly for developing countries that do not always possess reliable Internet infrastructure — imagine how education could benefit from this system available offline. The principle is simple: install software on a USB drive then upload all Wikipedia articles. Once the computer is offline, the software enables navigation in the articles downloaded — for information, the total of the French articles, without images, weighs 1.4 GB, so it fits on a standard 4 GB USB drive. For more recent articles, the downloadable database is updated every month. Two suitable softwares are currently available, both freeware: Kiwix and Wikitaxi. The advantage of Kiwix is that it runs under Windows, Mac and Linux, unlike Wikitaxi, which only runs under Windows. In addition, Kiwix has a multilingual interface (not to be confused with the language in which the articles are written, independent of the system): English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi and Mandarin.