How big is Wikipedia offline? The real file sizes in 2026

The complete text of English Wikipedia is 49.1 GB as one offline file. With images it is 119 GB. Spanish Wikipedia is 12.4 GB as text and 34 GB with images.

Those are not estimates from a forum. We read them from the Kiwix download directory on November 14, 2026, and we are downloading the text editions this week to build our library.

Every edition and its size

These are the newest files in the directory on that day. Sizes are in the units your computer shows when it lists a file. The two medicine files are downloaded and checked. The two full-text files are on their way: the sizes are the ones the Kiwix server reports for them.

English and Spanish text together are 61.5 GB. That is the number to plan around if you want both languages.

What you are downloading

Offline Wikipedia comes as a ZIM file: one large, compressed file that holds every article and a search index. The Kiwix project builds them from Wikipedia and publishes new ones on a rolling schedule. You read a ZIM file with the free Kiwix app on a phone or computer, or you serve it to other devices with a small program called kiwix-serve.

Each file comes in a few versions:

• Text only ("nopic"). Every article in full, no photos. This is the one most people want.
• With images ("maxi"). The same articles with their pictures, at about two and a half times the size.
• Introductions only ("mini"). The opening section of every article and nothing else. It is small, and it is not the whole encyclopedia.
• Topic selections, such as the medicine edition. A small file with the articles from one subject area.

Text or images?

For a household library we chose text, for three reasons.

Size. Text in two languages is 61.5 GB. With images, the two languages come to 153 GB.

Licensing. Wikipedia's text is under one license, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0, which allows copying with credit. The images are not: each picture has its own license, and English Wikipedia includes some pictures that are not freely licensed at all. If you only read the file yourself, that does not matter. If you plan to give copies to other people, it does.

What you look up. How to treat a burn, what a medicine is for, how a septic system works: the answer is in the words.

The cost is real, though. Anatomy, plant identification and anything with a diagram are worse without the pictures. If those matter to you and you have the space, take the image edition for your own use.

How long the download takes

At a steady speed, the two text editions together (61.5 GB) take about:

Real downloads are slower than the arithmetic. Ours is held to about 40 Mbps on purpose, to leave the line free for other work, and the plan was three and a half hours. At 87% the English file stopped: the connection to the mirror timed out. Our downloader waits two minutes, then carries on from the same byte.

That is normal for files this size, so two rules:

1. Use a downloader that resumes. A browser download that fails at 43 GB starts again from zero. wget -c or curl -C - picks up where it left off.
2. Check that the file is the same file after a resume. If a newer edition was published while you were paused, the two halves do not belong together. A careful downloader compares the file's size and date before it continues.

Check the file before you trust it

Kiwix publishes a SHA-256 checksum beside every file. It is a short code calculated from the file's contents. Calculate it for your copy and compare:

sha256sum wikipedia_en_all_nopic_2026-06.zim

If one byte is wrong, the code is different. A 49 GB file with a damaged section can still open and seem fine, and then fail on the one article you need. Checking takes a few minutes and you only do it once.

What it fits on

A memory card works. We use a solid-state drive instead: it is faster to search and it stands up better to being read all day.

The short version

Plan on 61.5 GB for the complete text of Wikipedia in English and Spanish, a download of a few hours, and five minutes to check the files. If you want it served to every phone in the house over Wi-Fi, the build guide covers the rest, and the parts list has today's prices.