I’ve been thinking about adding this to my “Fuck it, I’ll do it myself” / SHTF pile. I have a spare 10-15GB for a good selection of basic articles (across sciences, history, pop culture trivia etc).
https://get.kiwix.org/en/solutions/hotspots/content-bundles/
https://get.kiwix.org/en/solutions/hotspots/imager-service/
There’s something inherently cool about having wikipedia in a box (yes, you’d likely need to refresh it once a year) but I’ve never heard of anyone actually self hosting a Kiwix instance.


Yes, and I actually use it to train a local llm so I’m not hammering the internet. I have a ton of storage, and like to keep my kids in the sandbox, so we have wikipedia, project gutenberg, kahn academy, and a bunch of others all hosted behind an apache reverse proxy which is using mellon so there’s LDAP auth.
Do you actually train the LLM or use RAG? I have been looking for a local LLM + Wikipedia RAG solution for a while now.
For now I just have kiwix-serve + searxng doing a simple search but the Kiwix search is…questionable.
So this is actively in progress, and right now I’m having trouble getting my tesla P4’s working in my proxmox environment. The P4 is supported for vgpu out of the box, allegedly, but the installer I used is forcing a kernel version pin which isn’t making me happy:
https://github.com/anomixer/proxmox-vgpu-installer/issues/16
So at this time, I’m just connecting API’s.
Somewhere in my documents, I have a scoped ticket for how to use kiwix as the source for the LLM to pull information directly from, populate its answer organically, and naturally respond to question at hand, without word-vomiting a wiki entry complete. The last I looked, you can poll the kiwix DB directly without using the search engine.
I can dig that up for you if it still exists; it’s actually why I’m looking at kiwix (back burner project for now but the spirit moved me).
PS: You’re aware of LLM-wiki? That might suit your purposes better, if your corpus is bespoke and updating. Works nicely.
https://tinyurl.com/llmwiki
That was actually my immediate thought. I already have Wikipedia as a trusted source for llm, but I would prefer to self host and not hammer them.
130GB to fit the entirely of Wikipedia is basically nothing and I’m mildly embarrassed not to have done it already.
I also try to participate in some of the farms, running zimit and mwoffliner to help make more archives. Feels like I’m helping.