Kiwix: Wikipedia in your pocket

A hackmeeting, many years ago. A conference on various open-source projects. They were talking about Kiwix. The audience seemed interested, nodding, asking questions. I sat in the back of the room with a doubt that seemed legitimate but that I didn't dare express out loud: “what's the point of offline Wikipedia?” I mean: the internet is everywhere. If you need to look something up on Wikipedia, you open your browser, search, read. Done. Why would anyone download gigabytes of data to consult an encyclopedia offline? It seemed like a solution in search of a problem. Something for nerds nostalgic for CD-ROM encyclopedias.

It took me years to understand how naive I'd been.

Years in which I continued to follow the project from afar. Years in which I read stories of deployments in Africa, Asia, prisons, refugee camps. Years in which I understood that the internet isn't everywhere, it's a privilege, not a given. And even where it exists, it's not necessarily accessible, affordable, or free from censorship.

Years later, when I set up my Proxmox server, one of the first containers I decided to install was Kiwix. Not because I needed it—my connection works fine, thanks for asking—but because I wanted to be part of that project, so to speak. Because I had understood that Kiwix wasn't just software. It's a philosophy. It's practical proof that another web is possible: decentralized, offline, in users' hands.

Simply a matter of fundamental rights

There's a moment in 2004 when Emmanuel Engelhart—a French computer engineer working between Germany and Switzerland—becomes a Wikipedia editor and asks himself an apparently simple question: “What about those without internet access?” It wasn't a rhetorical question. At the time, as today, billions of people lived (and live) in areas where connectivity is a luxury, where broadband is science fiction, where even a single megabyte of data costs more than a meal.

Engelhart's answer was radical: if people can't reach Wikipedia, then Wikipedia must reach people. Even without the internet.

You know that thing about “if the mountain won't come to Muhammad...”? Exactly that.

And so, in 2007, together with Renaud Gaudin—a Malian information management expert—Engelhart launched Kiwix. Open source software that allowed downloading the entire Wikipedia (and much more) to consult it completely offline.

In a 2014 interview, Engelhart stated:

The contents of Wikipedia should be available for everyone! Even without Internet access. This is why I have launched the Kiwix project. Our users are all over the world: sailors on the oceans, poor students thirsty for knowledge, globetrotters almost living in planes, world's citizens suffering from censorship or free minded prisoners. For all these people, Kiwix provides a simple and practical solution to ponder about the world.

And:

Water is a common good. You understand why you have to care about water. Wikipedia is the same; it's a common good. We have to care about Wikipedia.

Digital Sovereignty

Why talk about Kiwix today? Because it's not just a technical solution to a connectivity problem. Kiwix represents something deeper: digital sovereignty in its purest form.

While projects like Mastodon, Matrix, Lemmy, and Pixelfed create distributed networks—many nodes communicating with each other in federation—Kiwix goes beyond, or perhaps beneath, depending on your perspective. It's so radically independent that it doesn't even need a network. It's local. Completely. A single Kiwix installation is an autonomous island that communicates with nothing and no one.

No federation, no peer-to-peer, no cloud.

You have Wikipedia on your Raspberry Pi? It's yours—or rather, it's yours thanks to the contribution of all Wikipedians. It works without internet, without external dependencies. You can copy it to a USB stick and give it to someone else. You can take it to the middle of the ocean, the desert, Antarctica. You can share it on a local computer network. And it will work. Always. The data is on your hardware, under your physical control.

The birth of the project

Kiwix's 2007 launch didn't happen with grand announcements or marketing campaigns. It was open source software, released under GPL license, developed by two enthusiasts. That's it.

The technological heart of the project was (and is) the ZIM format—”Zeno IMproved”—an open source archive format optimized for wiki-style content. Highly compressed, easily indexable, designed to be searchable even without connection. All of Wikipedia's content is converted to static HTML, compressed into ZIM, and made available for download.

To give you an idea of scale: the entire English Wikipedia—6.4 million articles, images included—takes up about 97 GB in ZIM format. Seems like a lot? The sum of all human knowledge now fits on a microSD card that costs 15 euros. On a 1TB portable hard drive you can put Wikipedia in ten different languages, the entire Project Gutenberg library, all TED talks, complete Stack Exchange, and you'll still have space left over.

Between 2007 and 2011, the team also released three CD/DVD versions with article selections. Today they seem like archaeological artifacts, but at the time they were the solution for bringing Wikipedia to African schools where the internet simply didn't exist.

The XULRunner problem and the rebirth

Like every serious open source project, Kiwix had its “winter.” Between 2014 and 2020, the software disappeared from many Linux distribution repositories. The reason? XULRunner, the Mozilla framework Kiwix was based on, was deprecated and removed from package databases.

For six years, Kiwix was technically “dead” for many Linux users. But the community didn't give up. The team worked to completely rethink the software's architecture, rewrite it from scratch, and modernize it. When it reemerged in 2020, it was stronger than before: progressive WebApp, browser extensions, native mobile support, Raspberry Pi integration.

It's the usual open source story: an obstacle that would seem fatal becomes an opportunity to improve and grow. How many proprietary companies would have simply shut down? But in open source, software doesn't die as long as the code is available and someone believes in it.

Where Kiwix saves lives (not hyperbole)

Numbers are important, but it's the stories that make us truly understand a project's impact.

Kenya: the Thika Alumni Trust

In 2015, seven friends who had studied together in the '60s at a high school in Thika return for a visit. The principal asks for help: they need 50 computers to create a lab. The problem? The internet connection is 100 kbps. Useless.

The solution was to create completely offline digital learning environments using Kiwix. Today, that project has transformed education in 61 schools throughout Kenya, reaching over 70,000 children. They've installed 164 microservers running Kiwix—probably one of the largest networks in the world.

The results? In primary schools where the Trust operates, national exam results improved from 8 to 12%. In special needs units, where absenteeism reached 50%, attendance now exceeds 90%.

Mary Mungai, principal of a school with special needs units, says: “All our children have benefited tremendously from the digital libraries. We have children who refused to attend classes but now do so faithfully, some who couldn't read or write but now do very well on computers.”

Ghana: the Kiwix4Schools Project

In 2019, four Ghanaian students from Ashesi University launched Kiwix4Schools with a simple goal: bring digital education to rural schools. They installed Kiwix on 15 Raspberry Pi devices, reaching 2,000 students in 15 schools.

The impact was immediate. Teachers reported students staying after school to explore content. Children who had never touched a computer were navigating Wikipedia articles. Science class changed completely when students could look up experiments, see diagrams, understand concepts beyond what the single available textbook offered.

India: Internet blackouts and censorship

In 2019-2020, the Indian government imposed internet blackouts in Kashmir—the longest in a democracy's history. For months, millions of people were cut off from the digital world. Hospitals, schools, businesses paralyzed.

But those who had Kiwix continued accessing medical information, educational content, technical documentation. It wasn't a complete solution, but it was a lifeline. It demonstrated that offline access isn't just for poor countries—it's a resilience tool even in developed nations with unstable political situations.

The ZIM format: open everything

The genius of Kiwix lies in the ZIM format. It's not just a compression format—it's an open standard specifically designed for offline content distribution. Any developer can create ZIM files, any software can read them. There's no vendor lock-in, no proprietary license.

But ZIM isn't just for Wikipedia. Today ZIM archives exist for:

The format is completely open, documented, and anyone can create ZIM archives of their content. It's the open source spirit in its purest form.

Everything works

In 2018, Kiwix formalized collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation, receiving $275,000 to improve offline access. In 2023, came a $250,000 grant from the Wikimedia Endowment.

Stephane Coillet-Matillon, Kiwix CEO, in December 2018 declared:

Our hope is that one day everyone will have access to the internet, and eliminate the need for other offline methods of access to information. But we know that there are still serious gaps in internet access globally that require solutions today. Kiwix is a tool to start fixing things right now.

Today, in 2025:

You can explore the entire catalog at library.kiwix.org.

The philosophy behind the code

Here we arrive at the heart of the matter. Why is Kiwix important? Not just because it works, not just because it's helped millions of people. But because it represents a way of thinking about technology.

Kiwix is:

It's the antithesis of the Big Tech model. There's no company controlling access, no centralized database of who reads what, no algorithms deciding which information to show you. It's technology as it should be: serving the user, before corporations transformed it into a machine for extracting data and selling advertising.

A “dangerous” precedent

There's an interesting paradox. Kiwix exists because the internet isn't accessible to everyone. But its success demonstrates that maybe we don't even need it to be—at least not the way we conceive it now.

Think about it: if I can have Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, Project Gutenberg, Khan Academy on a 128GB SD card, why should I depend on an always-on internet connection? If I can sync updates once a month when I pass by the library with WiFi, why should I pay 50 euros a month for a home connection?

Kiwix demonstrates that the “always connected, always online, always tracked” model isn't the only possible one. That an alternative exists where knowledge is local, accessible, controllable. The monopoly isn't inevitable.

And this, for Big Tech, is dangerous. Because if people realize they can access information without going through Google, without being tracked, without seeing ads... well, the entire business model collapses. It's also no secret that the entire streaming model—everything, no one excluded: Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, etc.—is ecologically unsustainable. Downloading once and playing a thousand times (locally) is less wasteful than downloading zero times and playing a thousand times (remotely). If it can be done for Wikipedia, TED Talks, and Project Gutenberg, it can be done for everything else.

But the biggest challenge remains the same: making Kiwix known. Because the software exists, works, is free. But how many people know they can have Wikipedia in their pocket without the internet? How many African schools know they can have a complete digital library for the cost of a Raspberry Pi?

Conclusions: what I learned

Innovation often doesn't come from Silicon Valley. It comes from a young French engineer working in Germany asking a simple question. It comes from developers scattered around the world contributing in their free time. It comes from the community, not corporations.

Open source works. Kiwix is almost twenty years old, has overcome technical crises that would have killed a proprietary project, has continued to grow with ridiculous budgets. Why? Because the community believes in it. Because the code is open. Because the mission is clear.

Technology is political. Deciding that knowledge must be accessible offline is a political choice. Deciding to use open source licenses is a political choice. Deciding not to track users is a political choice.

Kiwix shows us an alternative. That we don't have to choose between functionality and ethics. That another web is possible.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to add a Python ZIM library to my Kiwix container, because I'm studying it—or rather, “I have to study it”—for a bunch of small projects I have in mind. AI server included.

#Kiwix #SmallWeb #DigitalSovereignty #OpenSource #Wikipedia #Offline #Privacy #Education #Africa

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