[gnosygnu]

I personally use it for traveling. There are a few other applications as well:

- low-bandwidth availability, particularly in less-developed regions of the world

- censorship evasion

- security concerns. some users want to access Wikipedia without exposing their machine to the internet

There are probably a few others I'm missing....

[greenyoda]

"censorship evasion..."

Unfortunately, having your own copy of Wikipedia could also be used to enable censorship. For example, a fundamentalist school could have their own version of Wikipedia from which they've purged all articles about evolution, etc. Then they could configure their firewall to block the real Wikipedia.

[gnosygnu]

Agreed. However, I think it would be less work for them to block access through firewall policy, than to remove them from XOWA.

By and large, for most private individuals, an offline app would allow them to evade censorship. I'd hope that this benefit outweighs the risk of the other's abuse.

[Someone]

A firewall would not hide the fact that censoring takes place. You would have to rewrite content to do that. That might be easier in batch, especially if you are going to do NLP to make cut up sentences grammatical.

[gnosygnu]

Ahh.... That's pretty devious. I was thinking of blocking the entire article, not rewriting content. Still not worth the work IMHO, but who knows what censorship servants would do.