You can fit text-only wikipedia on a normal Blu Ray as it’s only about 24GB. You can also easily fit Llama 3.1 or any of the other open, offline capable ai models as they’re only about 4GB.
I suggest the happy medium called Kiwix, directly from the programme you can download all of Wikipedia with medium-sized pictures for a hundred gigabytes or so.
500TB is still surprisingly reasonable for what is essentially a library of human (surface level) knowledge.
It would be interesting to know how large the file would be including all text form references (i’d imagine anything else such as videos would completely blow the proportions)
yes you really can; it’s like 20-25 gb depending on how recent of a copy you have. I’ve been seeding wikipedia for almost a year and it barely takes any space on my computer
The full 2025-04 English-only ZIM dump is about 120 GB. That includes reduced-size images as well as all articles. I think the text-only version is in the 40-60 GB range.
There are smaller ZIM versions in the ~4 GB range that would fit on a DVD, but they’re only a subset for specific topics or for a list of the most popular topics.
Isn’t it possible to download all of wikipedia, and it being surprisenly a small file size? Can it fit on a CD?
It could fit on a BDXL disc.
You can fit text-only wikipedia on a normal Blu Ray as it’s only about 24GB. You can also easily fit Llama 3.1 or any of the other open, offline capable ai models as they’re only about 4GB.
could also store it on a flashdrive or micro sd card
No
(English) 24,05GB without media. Adding media adds 428,36TB.
Can you give me the text only version link? I found only a version that is like 43gb
The sizes I mentioned are from around 2023-2024, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download)
I suggest the happy medium called Kiwix, directly from the programme you can download all of Wikipedia with medium-sized pictures for a hundred gigabytes or so.
KiwiX on mobile gives 111.1GB Wikipedia download, It also has a bunch of diff categories if you don’t want the super large one.
500TB is still surprisingly reasonable for what is essentially a library of human (surface level) knowledge.
It would be interesting to know how large the file would be including all text form references (i’d imagine anything else such as videos would completely blow the proportions)
No, you really can’t; It’s like 43 gb the text only version
yes you really can; it’s like 20-25 gb depending on how recent of a copy you have. I’ve been seeding wikipedia for almost a year and it barely takes any space on my computer
So gonna need like 2 CDs then
The full 2025-04 English-only ZIM dump is about 120 GB. That includes reduced-size images as well as all articles. I think the text-only version is in the 40-60 GB range.
There are smaller ZIM versions in the ~4 GB range that would fit on a DVD, but they’re only a subset for specific topics or for a list of the most popular topics.
kiwix? that’s compressed (afaik), and when i tried, it took up half of my disk space and needed ethernet