cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/3349583
So, I was thinking about this, and I realized that Kiwix might actually be one of the best apps for looking at information privately, for the following reasons:
- Completely off the grid, so no tracking, no cookies, no spying by your ISP or people who might be monitoring your internet activity.
- No browsing history.
- You can bring your content anywhere.
- No censorship.
Yeah, most of the official zim contents for Kiwix are inoffensive and is mostly general information, but imagine if you live in a country with heavy censorship and you want to inform yourself about topics that the people in power don’t want you to look out, or imagine if you live in a community run by a cult and they control what you look at on the internet. Well, Kiwix is not on the internet, and at any moment you can hide or delete the kiwix content and there is no trace that you were looking at forbidden knowledge that the cult don’t want you to know about.
I don’t see people talking about these advantages, and I think it would be nice to point them out. What do you think?
Kiwix is a pretty good tool. The only real disadvantage (as far as I know) is that edits to the pages often take a long time to come through after they’re made on Wikipedia (or whichever wiki you’re looking at); sometimes weeks or months.
I agree that data staleness is a limiting factor. Depending on your needs and technical proficiency you could use use their zimit service (limited in the number of links it follows). The zimit tool is oss and on github, so you can run the it yourself to keep the sites you are interested in up to date in your local kiwix
Compared to physical encyclopedias that’s still quick.