This extension provides an offline viewing mode for Wikipedia dumps, or any other wiki.
Be aware that you will need a Wikipedia dump and the corresponding index, see the project page if you need help:
For a recent English, compressed backup of all article text (6.3Gb
once you build an index):
http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/20101011/enwiki-20101011-pages-articles.xml.bz2
For a small testing database (or if you speak Tagalog), try this
http://wikipedia-offline-patch.googlecode.com/files/wiki-splits-tl.zip
or browse many other languages and wiki projects:
http://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html
The project page has binary distributions for macos, windows, and linux, which include a webserver and supporting libraries. http://code.google.com/p/wikipedia-offline-patch
There is an unusual dependency: the Xapian indexing library and its PHP bindings. Also, you will have to configure some type of revision_text caching by setting $wgRevisionCacheExpiry and $wgCacheType.
= Acknowledgements = The current author is Adam Wight, who can be reached through the wikipedia-offline-patch project page or at adamw on ludd.net.
Thanassis Tsiodras has a great page explaining how to build a working offline wikipedia: http://users.softlab.ece.ntua.gr/~ttsiod/buildWikipediaOffline.html
Wikipedia Offline Client was the starting point for this project. https://projects.fslab.de/projects/wpofflineclient/
MediaWiki developers contributed valuable insight.
This software and its source code are licensed as GPL.