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Old 23rd July 2012
ocicat ocicat is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by daemonfowl View Post
What I need is : an offline English wikipedia serving a small intranet via a web server (static content)
You have not disclosed why you want the ability to access Wikipedia offline, but I can only assume that this is due to:
  • sporadic Internet access through an ISP which has problems consistently being up. If this is true, you may want to look for a better ISP.
  • limited bandwidth. If access is too slow, you still may want to look for a better ISP.
The core problem with going forward with an offline solution is that as soon as the Wikipedia content is downloaded, it will be out-of-date. Wikipedia is constantly being updated.
  • Maybe you are fine with content which has already been changed on the live site. Again, you have not disclosed any requirements.
  • You will need to decide how stale your local copy can become before live content needs to be downloaded again. This means you will be repeating the process manually until you figure out how to automate the necessary steps.
It appears you have a lot of work to do in order to make this work irregardless of what kind of download frequency is required. It also seems like you are taking on a lot of work simply due to problems with a flaky ISP. It seems to me that all of your problems would be solved by getting a different ISP, however, the cost may be prohibitive. If this is the case, you need to factor in the costs of manually updating a local copy & what costs will be incurred to automate the entire process.

Again, you have disclosed any details. Why are you going down this path?
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