Based on the tinyweb server, sqlite, PHP, MediaWiki and a self-written XML-to-sqlite converter, I have created a package [1] for Windows that can run a wikipedia without any installation required.

This package doesn't include any wikipedia data set, so you'll have to generate your own from an XML dump. Instructions are dead easy, see the included README file. Some drawbacks of this alpha-version:

* Conversion takes long Took 6 hours to convert a recent XML dump on my 2.8GHz P4. So, start this in the evening ;-)

* sqlite database gets huge For the above mentioned dump, it is just below 3GB. However, as this is mostly text, it should compress well, if someone wants to make a CD image with a simple installer from it. I might play with the whole setup, maybe keeping the actual text in the zipped XML dump and just store titles etc. in the database. This will speed up the conversion process and decrease database size considerably, but will pose other problems and slow down the whole thing.

* Browsing is slow Most pages render in under 10 sec, but some (like the Main Page, for some unknown reason) get stuck somewhere and won't stop rendering. I'll look into this. Meanwhile, the default start page is "Biology" ;-)

* Categories and interwiki links are broken For categories to work, I'd have to regenerate all the links in the database, which means rendering all articles, which would take too long. I'm not sure why the interwiki links are broken. Looks like it forgot the language codes, somehow.

* Links and articles with a single quote (') in them show as broken This has something to do with sqlite quote escaping. I'm not sure how to fix that, but basically shouldn't be a problem.

Other than that, you can read all (OK, most) of the pages, links work. I did't dare try searching yet ;-) It might be noteworthy that no MediaWiki code had to be patched for this. The package actually includes the CVS info, so you can "cvs update" MediaWiki. I only had to design a special LocalSettings.php and write a DatabaseSqlite.php structure, containing some ugly hacks. Strangely enough, I have to route all GET requests through a DOS batch file, which is where I lose POST data. Otherwise, one could even edit the wiki.

Please have a look at it and tell me what you think.

Magnus

[1] http://www.magnusmanske.de/wikipedia/standalonewiki.zip (about 6MB)