Published by Steve Litchfield at 12:21 UTC, January 2nd 2018

You can't always be online, especially when travelling in foreign climes, when data might be prohibitively expensive. Which is why it's good to have as much content as possible available offline. And if you have a penchant for facts about locations around the world, including the best ways to travel, what to see, where to eat and where to sleep, then WikiVoyage (as it sounds, a crowd-sourced travel encyclopaedia) is a good bet. Here, Wikivoyage by Kiwix UWP packages up the latest WikiVoyage archive for all Windows 10 devices, including phones, tablets and laptops.

From the Store description:

(LARGE DOWNLOAD - check you have enough free space on your device.) With almost 30,000 destinations around the world, Wikivoyage Offline Travel Guide by Kiwix is a complete resource for travellers and tourists, or anyone interested in the locality they are visiting. This app functions completely offline, so you are not limited in your ability to consult travel information by lack of access to the Internet, or by slow and unreliable access speeds. The app is packaged with an archive containing the full text and images from the English-language edition of Wikivoyage (http://www.wikivoyage.org) from December 2017. The archive will update automatically from the Store when we release the update via this app. WARNING: the archive is 700Mb, and you will need at least 2Gb free space to download and install -- if using a phone, we recommend you install this app on your microSD card (you can change the location for download and installation of apps from Settings -> System -> Storage). The app is a packaged version of Kiwix JS Offline Wikipedia reader(http://www.kiwix.org). As well as Wikivoyage, you can download (in advance of your trip) one or more archives (called ZIM archives) from the Configuration page of the app, enabling you to consult material from Wikipedia, Wiki Medicine, Wiktionary and many other sources. You can even download Wikivoyage, Wikipedia or Wiktionary in different languages. While on the plane or train, you can consult in-depth historical information from an offline Wikipedia archive to supplement the practical information in Wikivoyage.



Here's Wikivoyage by Kiwix in action on my Lumia 950:

Introductory text is good and makes the important point that you shouldn't go DIY except as a last resort, since the 700MB archive is bundled inside the Store UWP application and updated as such.

It's what you'd expect, a typical hypertext Wikipedia format, text, links, images, tables, maps, all compressed but accessible here on the fly and totally offline. When internal content runs out you'll find external links, but most of what you encounter is internal and doesn't need a connection.

In terms of UI, the top bar has 'home', search, shuffle, settings (above, right), and help. While the bottom bar has home (again), back and forwards (for browsing, if you use the Windows 10 'back' control, you're taken back to Windows, i.e. out of WikiVoyage), the Table of Contents for the current page (i.e. with all the sub-headings, just tap the one you want), zoom out/in, and 'top of page'; (right) several dark theme options for AMOLED-screened phones or use at night.

Typical Wikivoyage pages, it's all useful content, text-heavy but then that's fine as it keeps the archive (though still 2GB uncompressed) space down.

I was impressed, checking out my own home town, there was a LOT of useful information about getting there by various means and what to do when you arrived. Comments welcome on coverage wherever you are.

You can grab Wikivoyage by Kiwix UWP here in the Store - it's all free - and open source to boot!