Wikipedia is without doubt the biggest free encyclopedia online. It has more than 7 million articles in over 200 languages. And it never ceases to grow as more people collaborate to write and edit multilingual entries everyday.

You can download Wikipedia as a database XML or SQL dump. You can also grab a copy of the wikis in HTML format. Or you can burn a Wikidpedia DVD . None of these options, however, is as easy as downloading and installing “The Pocket Wikipedia”.

A full download of the Pocket Wikipedia is only 180 megabytes. All you have to do after downloading the file is to unzip it and run “WikipediaW.exe”. The software is free and works on PocketPC, Windows and Linux.

As you can tell from the screenshot above, I am running the Pocket Wikipedia on my Ubuntu 8.04 machine using Wine. I tested it on a Windows desktop this afternoon and it worked just fine. You can download the Pocket Wikipedia here.