Most people know that Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, is a great place to learn about new things. Few people know that all the content on Wikipedia can downloaded the their own computer and accessed offline. It does take up quite a bit of hard drive space but external hard drives these days are fairly inexpensive. Visit download.wikimedia.org and select the format you prefer.

If you are a web designer, software developer, or generally geeky person, you may want to select the XML or SQL version and install a fully functional version on your computer. You may also want to download a copy of MediaWiki the open source software that powers Wikipedia.

If you are not very technical consider downloading the static html files and use a web browser to view them. If you install Google Desktop on your computer it will make searching the Wikipedia files, and everything else, much easier. If you want a more secure method of storing the data you can buy Wikipedia on DVDs.

No matter which option you choose having access to Wikipedia in an emergency might be very useful, especially during a long lasting disaster. For more information about downloading Wikipedia visit en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_database.