Download Wiki
"Download Wiki" means two different things:
- Downloading the engine which runs this wiki. (See WikiDownload.) The scripts that runs this site aren't public, but many wiki engines are. (See the extensive list at WikiEngines.)
- Downloading the entire page database. The response to this request is "Please don't", and here's why:
- Assuming each Wiki page is .5K, as of this writing (2003-06-05) the complete page database would be on the order of 12 MB (assuming it's uncompressed). That's a hefty download. If you're on 56k.
- If you get a copy of the raw page database, you'll have to run your own copy of the Wiki software in order to read the pages.
- If you spider the Wiki, you'll miss OrphanPages and WalledGardens.
- Spidering too fast (which we know you'd never do, of course) degrades response time for everyone else, and will cause Wiki's SurgeProtector to throttle your connection.
- Offline pages will go out of synch with their counterparts on WardsWiki.
These rather discourage the idea of taking a snapshot of the Wiki for offline use.
Nevertheless, a few subsets of the Wiki can be downloaded from mirror sites for offline reading. See WikiMirrors and http:/ppr/wiki/.
If you really want to download Wiki pages:
- You can always choose File > Save As in your browser to save individual pages.
- You could use
- wget -r -np http://www.c2.com/
- ... but, aside from the problems already noted above, using "wget" this way will also grab all the edit pages, which doubles the load you lay on the WikiWikiWeb's server. There are better ways of getting the entire database, but one has to ask why. It's already backed up regularly to several sites.
- You could politely ask the WikiWikiWeb's creator, WardCunningham, for help.
Have a favorite WikiWiki page (or two)? Want to download it and want the links to work?
If you're running a Windows OS (we have 98se, WinME, XP-home, and XP-pro hanging around here) maybe you can do what I just did. Navigate to your favorite WikiWiki page with MicrosoftInternetExplorer, then click File / Send / Page By Email. This will load the page into a MicrosoftOutlookExpress email window. Now in the email window choose File / Save As / then go to File Type (change from .eml to .htm) choose the location on your machine that you prefer, now Save. This sets the HTML link BASE to c2.com so that all links will work when the page is re-loaded new from your machine into your browser. As far as copyright infringements, well... since the page was already downloaded to your browser's temp folder, what's the difference? Now, at the moment I am on the 98se machine with I.E. 5.5, but it should be similar for the other Windows OSes and newer I.E. versions. I have a page that I use for navigating WikiWiki that I did this way, and it works nice for me (just update it by re-downloading as necessary to keep current).