r/Kiwix

Heads-up: this is a preview video of our next release, Offlined v2.0.0, coming October 18, 2026. It isn't available to download yet. I'm sharing it to hear your honest feedback before launch.

Hi r/Kiwix! I'm one of the developers of Offlined, a free Windows app that runs completely offline. Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikivoyage, Wikiquote and WikiMed are served from standard Kiwix ZIM files via kiwix-serve, so your existing ZIMs just work.

On top of that we added things we always wanted next to an offline encyclopedia:
• Wikitrees: explore topics as a tree and open any node's article
• Michael Encartha: a local AI tutor that explains an article, quizzes you on it or gives you an oral exam
• Offline maps, a sky map, geography and astronomy games

Thanks to the Kiwix project for making offline knowledge possible. Free for personal use (not open source), Windows 10/11.

What do you think? What would you add or change?

Hi again r/Kiwix! Some of you saw our preview of Offlined a few days ago. Thanks again for all the feedback, it's been incredibly helpful.

I'd like to open a discussion on something I keep going back and forth on. I recently shared the project in r/wikipedia and got a strong reaction against the AI part. I understand why, so I deleted the post. I'd rather listen first, and this community felt like the right place to talk about it honestly.

Why we care about this: around a third of the world still has no internet access, and in many places good education isn't available to everyone. That's what Kiwix has been fighting for years, and it's what drives us too. We also think of families who simply want to get their kids away from the open internet: ads, tracking, and apps designed to keep them hooked. For all of them, a PC that brings knowledge and someone to learn with, completely offline, could make a real difference.

Where I stand on the AI: you can't trust an AI's answers blindly. LLMs hallucinate, make things up and tend to agree with whatever you say. I don't think an LLM can educate anyone on its own; you always need your own judgement. And the real value is in the articles, written by people.

What we tried: Michael Encartha, a tutor built around the ZIM article you're reading:
• It runs a small model (Qwen 3.5 4B) locally on an ordinary home PC. No cloud, no internet.
• It's confined to the article's text. It doesn't replace or rewrite anything.
• It asks you questions, builds quizzes, and can give you an oral exam, then reminds you which parts you got wrong so you can go back and review them.
• The oral exam is where it can drift furthest from the article, and that's where I'm least sure.

We also built Wikitrees, which lets you explore Wikipedia's categories as interactive Sankey-style diagrams. That's a different way to discover articles, and no AI is involved.

I know a Windows PC that can run a local model isn't a given everywhere, and that's a real limitation. But where there is one, a school, a library or a family computer, Kiwix plus a small local model feels like an amazing combination: the article stays the source of truth, and the AI just helps you engage with it more deeply.

So I'd really like to hear what you think:
• Can AI be genuinely useful for learning when it's confined like this?
• Where would you draw the line?
• What would worry you most?

Honest criticism very welcome. I'd rather hear it now than build the wrong thing. 🙏

Hi all. Kiwix has been the backbone of a project I have been building for a few months, and it is now open source, so I wanted to show it here first.

The Ark of Noahledge node is off-grid AI for places where the grid is unreliable and the internet is not a given. It puts an open-weight language model beside a local library and answers questions from it. The part that depends on you: every claim in an answer carries a citation, and the citation opens the exact article in kiwix-serve on the same machine. What the model adds from its own memory is shown separately and labelled as unchecked.

What it does today:

1. One command on a Windows PC with an NVIDIA card (6 GB or more) downloads a starter library (four ZIMs: zimgit medicine, post-disaster and water, and Wikipedia medicine in Spanish), checks every file by sha256, builds the index and answers a first question. 38 to 70 minutes in my tests.
2. On my reference machine it serves 67 ZIMs from one library.xml, and searches 39 million passages drawn from 44 of them plus a few PDF collections.

Things I learned about kiwix-serve along the way (book keys, absolute paths in library.xml, the search form) are written up in the code comments; happy to compare notes or be told I did something the hard way.

Code (Apache 2.0): https://github.com/ArkOfNoahledge/ark-node More about the project: https://arkofnoahledge.org

Thank you for Kiwix. None of this would exist without it.

I'm using ghcr.io/openzim/zimit with Zimit 3.1.3 and Browsertrix Crawler 1.14.1.

I want to create a ZIM starting from this page:

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/python/python-programming-language-tutorial/

My intended crawl is:

• Depth 0: the seed page
• Depth 1: every geeksforgeeks.org page linked from the seed
• Depth 2: every geeksforgeeks.org page linked from those depth-1 pages
• Do not crawl external domains
• I do NOT want the scope restricted to the seed URL's path

--depth 2 appears to work correctly. Browsertrix shows:

"maxDepth":2

The problem is the scope. With my normal seed, Browsertrix shows:

"scopeType":"prefix"

and generates an include regex for:

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/python/python-programming-language-tutorial/

As a result, links such as:

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/python/python-data-types/
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/python/python-functions/
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/python/python-interview-questions/

are skipped as:

Skipping Link; not in scope

I tried these:

--include-domains geeksforgeeks.org
-i geeksforgeeks.org
--include "^https://(www\.)?geeksforgeeks\.org/.*"

but in my Zimit 3.1.3 setup they appear to be passed to warc2zim, rather than configuring Browsertrix's crawl scope.

I also tried:

--scopeType custom

which successfully reached Browsertrix, but then Browsertrix had an empty include list and excluded even the seed.

So my question is:

What is the correct Zimit 3.1.3 command/option to make Browsertrix crawl the entire geeksforgeeks.org domain while still using --depth 2 from the seed?

Is it simply:

--scopeType domain

or is there another Browsertrix scope option that needs to be passed through Zimit?

Example of the kind of command I'm trying to achieve:

docker run --rm \
  -v "$PWD/output:/output" \
  ghcr.io/openzim/zimit \
  zimit \
  --seeds "https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/python/python-programming-language-tutorial/" \
  --name gfg_python \
  --title "GFG Python Tutorial" \
  --description "Offline archive of GeeksforGeeks Python tutorials." \
  --publisher "Akshit Kamboj (si4k)" \
  --creator "Akshit Kamboj (si4k)" \
  --lang en \
  --output /output \
  --workers 3 \
  --depth 2

I specifically want domain-wide scope + depth 2, not prefix scope.

Thanks!

the Mermaid.js Docs site is a VitePress site, take a while to make the zim file of it.

The https://zimit.kiwix.org/#/ is not make it completely, so i tried it my self.

I want to share the zim file if anyone interested, for the sake of saving people time and "server work"

from a quick test, all "internal function" works fine: the menu, the diagram render, the dark/light theme

see the screenshot.

cheers