Theres been some article like few years ago about wikipedia for offline browsing, it claimed you can download english wikipedia with all articles and use it locally on your pc, like it releases every year officially, someone know anything about it?

You mean this? Wikipedia:Wikipedia_CD_Selection

There are programs which can download entire websites to be used off-internet.

Do yourself a favior, buy Encarta for off-line consulting. I hate Microsoft, but the price of Encarta is excellent.

Go here: http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/

You need to have MediaWiki, php, and MySQL to browse it, along with the tools to uncompress (which obviously works much better together on some flavor of Unix).

But then, it's 3.2 GB compressed just for the "current" (January) article text, does not contain pictures, is of dubious merit, and requires setting up several pieces of difficult software.

So...yeah, the Encarta suggestion isn't terrible.

I didn't know they still supported the direct download. 3.2 Gb shish..., how much of it is garbage.

You might be thinking of the semi-regularly updated database dumps. The latest is dated 1/3/2008, and you can find the main download page here.

If all you want is article content (no user pages or discussion pages, nor edit histories) then you're probably looking for the file called pages-articles.xml.bz2. It's 3.2 Gb compressed, and likely expands to 10-15 Gb.

Making these dumps offline browseable is a real pain, by the way. The best way to do it locally (assuming you're on a PC) is by installing MediaWiki in a "Wamp" environment. The first time I did it, I relied heavily on this, from LifeHacker. As far as the actual importation of the dump into MediaWiki, you'll find some terrible -- but the best that I've found -- instructions here.

Another option is a static html dump, the most recent in English being 4/2007. You can find the various compressed files for download here. You won't need anything byt a browser for this option. Well, a browser and a bunch of patience.

The problem is this: once you have loaded it or purchased a USB key, you find out that a bunch of kids changed the articles you wanted to store. Now you bought news that is wrong and you bought articles that defaulted to a mean that is mediocre at best.

Encarta is a better bet or Encyc. Brit.

When WP is being run as a corporation and the articles can be protected and processed by professionals and experts, your idea of a USB key might work.

This sounds like something from the Chandler interview and defender of Jimbo?

Excuse me to revive this, but check this, hardly any better deal: http://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-Britann...m/dp/B000GCBOJ8

Judging from the comments (on the US and on the UK sites), that version, and even the more expensive ultimate edition contain only cut down versions of the articles in the printed edition (and the online edition?), but the ultimate edition does comes with a free 1 year subscription to the online edition.