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Showing posts from November, 2025

Kiwix vs Aard2: in the pursuit of offline knowledge

I love projects that support the idea of archiving for offline accessibility. A year back, I think at the end of 2023, I Googled "How to make Wikipedia offline" and eventually came across the Aard2 Project that specializes in it. It's crazy to think about how the entierity of Wikipedia could be stored in just around 22GB file. Later in July 2024, it became more evident why we need more archiver projects like these. I tried to promote this project and learned that there were other projects beside it. One of them was the Kiwix Project. Between the two, I believe that they have their pros and cons, and that's what I will try to document here. #What I know so far: alternatives to offline wikipedia: Wikipedia Article, AlternativeTo Website. Kiwix uses .zim format and Aard2 uses .slob format for their respective archive files. Apparently .zim is larger than .slob because they store full webpages compressed. I could not verify .zim's quality ( no way I am downloading 100...