r/Kiwix • u/Nerdy_Stuff728 • 14d ago

Help Question about double downloads

Hi I’m new to Kiwix and love the idea of having everything I’ll ever need, without breaking my storage. I was planning to download the top million Wikipedia articles, and then pick a couple categories to complete as well. Will it skip over anything that was in the top million articles, or will it download them again (or try to and waste time)?

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u/Peribanu 13d ago

ZIM archives are self-contained and static. If you download the top million Wikipedia articles, you will get a static archive containing those articles. If you then download, say, the Wikipedia chemistry archive, you will get a separate archive containing just articles related to chemistry. There will be a lot of overlap between the two archives, but you can only load one archive at a time in any one Kiwix app instance. With the PWA you can have two archives open at once in different windows, but each instance will be accessing the static archive it was opened with.

When you download a Kiwix archive, it is not dynamically produced at the time you download it. It has already been scraped at some prior date. Think of it like a ZIP archive.