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BzReader is designed to enable users to browse Wikipedia without going online. The uncompressed Wikipedia dumps can take hundreds of gigs of disk space.

BzReader can search and show the articles from the compressed dump files. The main window of BzReader allows users to open a dump file and navigate its content with ease.

The typical usage would be:

Download one or several .xml.bz2 dumps of Wikipedia topics from homepage
You will need the files named pages-articles.xml.bz2 for your language. Alternatively, you may use any database dumps which follow Wikipedia XML format - Wikibooks, Wikitravel etc.
Install BzReader
Open the Wikipedia dump in BzReader (you can have multiple dumps opened at the same time, all of them will be searched together)
Let BzReader create the index for fast retrieval of topics. This might be quite lengthy for big dumps. It takes about 4 hours on Core 2 Duo to index the current dump of all English topics (enwiki-20080312-pages-articles.xml.bz2, 3.5 Gb file). The BzReader index for this dump takes about 550 Mb.
Browse!
Enter your search terms into the search window on the left, wait for the result(s) and click on the topic. Try also something like "music*" to find anything that starts with "music".