Offline Wikipedia: which file to download and how big it is

Kiwix publishes English Wikipedia as one large file in three sizes, and the right one depends on how much room you have. On 25 October 2026 the full version with pictures was listed at 119G, the version without pictures at 49G, and the introductions-only version at 13G. The "G" in that listing means a bit more than you would expect, which we explain below. The order holds either way: pick maxi for pictures, nopic for all the text in less than half the space, or mini for a phone.

Which file should you pick?

If you have a laptop with a 256 GB drive or more, start with nopic. It has every article, and the pictures are what take most of the space. Take maxi only if you want the pictures and can spare around 128 GB.

On a small laptop, a tablet or a phone, use mini, or one of the smaller sets in the table below. On a Raspberry Pi, use whatever fits your drive with room to spare. For the full set that means an SSD or a very large card, not the old one you found in a drawer.

If you only want background on health or general topics, the medicine and "Best of Wikipedia" files are small enough for any device made in the last several years.

The current files and their sizes

Here is what the Kiwix download listing showed on 25 October 2026. The file names start with wikipedia_en_ followed by the name in the first column. Each set comes in up to three versions.

Kiwix's own catalog describes the "top" set as a selection of the best 50,000 Wikipedia articles, the medicine set as the largest medical encyclopedia drawn from Wikipedia, and the "100" set as the top one hundred articles.

Sizes move between releases, and not always upward. The full maxi file was 115G in February and is 119G now. The medicine maxi file was 2.1G in April and is 1.7G now. Look at the listing before you buy a drive.

Why the 119G in the listing is bigger than it looks

The listing's G is the binary kind: 1,073,741,824 bytes. Drive makers and Apple label a gigabyte as 1 billion bytes instead, and Apple adds that the formatted capacity is less than the label. So the same file shows up as a different number depending on who is counting.

We asked the download server for the exact length of the three big files. The maxi file is 127,418,087,648 bytes, which is 127.4 GB counted the way drive makers count, or 118.7 the way the listing does. The nopic file is 52.7 GB (49.1 the listing's way) and the mini file is 14.4 GB (13.4).

This matters when you buy storage. A drive sold as 128 GB holds 128,000,000,000 bytes before formatting, so a 127.4 GB file leaves 0.6 GB and the formatting takes more than that. A 256 GB drive leaves 128.6 GB. Buy the bigger one.

What each version gives you, and what it leaves out

Maxi is the default full version. The catalog marks it as having pictures and no videos, and it has a full-text index, so search works offline. Nopic has full articles with no images. Mini keeps only the introduction of each article plus the infobox.

Kiwix's FAQ says nopic is about 75% smaller than the full version and mini saves about 95%. For the English files today, our arithmetic gives about 59% and about 89%. The FAQ figures look out of date, though the files were built a few weeks apart, so treat our numbers as approximate too.

A file is a snapshot. The maxi file is the August 2026 build, and Kiwix says incremental updates for ZIM files such as Wikipedia are not currently available. To refresh your copy you download the whole file again. Links to other websites lead nowhere offline.

How long the download takes

The formula is bytes times 8, divided by your speed in bits per second. We worked it out for three line speeds. These are best cases, because Wi-Fi, a busy server and a laptop that falls asleep all make real downloads slower.

For Raspberry Pi images, Kiwix recommends a torrent download because it checks for corruption. The download server also offers a torrent file for the ZIM files: we confirmed it for the mini file on 25 October. We did not download the full files ourselves, so the times above are arithmetic, not stopwatch readings.

Set it up on a laptop

1. Install Kiwix Reader. It is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. On Windows you can use the Microsoft Store, Winget or a standalone installer, and on a Mac the Mac App Store.
2. Get the file. The app has a built-in catalog where you download straight from the app. You can also pick a file from the listing in your browser.
3. If you downloaded in a browser, open Kiwix, choose "Open file" and select the ZIM file.
4. Turn Wi-Fi off, open an article and search for a word. Do this once while you are still able to fix problems.

Keep the file on a drive formatted as exFAT or NTFS. Kiwix warns that storage is often formatted as FAT32, which can't store files larger than 4GB, and recommends exFAT or even NTFS. Even the 6.5G "Best of Wikipedia" file is too big for FAT32.

Set it up on a phone

Kiwix lists the app for Android on Google Play and as a direct APK file, and for iPhone and iPad in the App Store. Open the app's catalog on Wi-Fi, choose a mini file or one of the smaller sets, and check your free storage first. The 13G mini file is a realistic fit for a phone with room to spare. The full set is not.

If your Android phone keeps files on an SD card, format the card as exFAT on a computer before copying a big file to it, for the FAT32 reason above, and check that your phone can read exFAT. Reformatting erases the card.

Set it up on a Raspberry Pi

A Pi can serve Wikipedia to every phone and laptop nearby, with no internet. There are three ways to do it.

The ready-made route is Kiwix's own Hotspot. It features a Raspberry Pi 5 with 4GB of RAM and a 256GB NVMe SSD that can expand up to 1TB. It lets up to 24 devices connect at once and draws between 4W and 9W, so a power bank or a small solar panel can run it. Kiwix also sells a Wikipedia content bundle, described as the complete English Wikipedia (6.7 million articles, including images), with an image size of 200GB.

The do-it-yourself route is Kiwix's OS-only image on your own Pi. Kiwix supports the Raspberry Pi 3B, 3B+, 4B, 400, 5 and 500, and does not support the Zero 2W because of its limited memory. Its quick guide says to flash the image onto a microSD card with Raspberry Pi Imager and not to edit the imager's parameters, because that locks the boot system. Then power the Pi up and wait: Kiwix says the first run takes 1 to 8 minutes. After that a network called "Kiwix Hotspot" appears. It is an open network with no internet access, so your phone may warn you. Join it and type http://goto.kiwix.hotspot into your browser, with the full http:// at the start and not https. Use a power supply that matches the model (27W for the Pi 5).

Adding files later over the Pi's own network is slow, and Kiwix says transferring large files over the Hotspot's network can be frustrating. Plan the contents before you build the image.

The third route is plain kiwix-serve, which comes in the kiwix-tools package on many Linux systems. One command starts it: kiwix-serve -p 80 /data/*.zim. Anyone on the same network can then browse the files in a web browser, with search. Our guide to building an offline survival computer compares this with the other options, and Project N.O.M.A.D. and its alternatives covers a ready-made system that offers offline Wikipedia through Kiwix.

What Wikipedia is not

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a manual. Even the medical set is a collection of Wikipedia articles, and we do not treat it as first-aid instruction. We use Wikipedia for background and take every dose, distance and time from an official source instead. Our offline survival library guide lists which official documents you may keep and how big they are, including Wikipedia's licence terms.

What we could not check

We did not install Kiwix on any device for this guide. The setup steps follow Kiwix's own pages as we read them on 25 October 2026, and the file sizes come from its download server on the same day. Kiwix publishes new builds several times a year, so the table will age.

We're building Waystone, an offline preparedness assistant that is still in development and not on sale. It answers from a small library of official pages, which is a different job from an encyclopedia.