The title is right: you can install Wikipedia on your iPhone. Most articles on Wikipedia are there, in only 2GB of disk space. Sure, there are no pictures(nor other multimedia items), and the navigation is crappy, but after all… it’s Wikipedia on your iPhone, to read and to love whenever you’re offline.
In the author’s words:

What
An offline Wikipedia reader for the iPhone or iPod Touch. I wanted to write an iPhone app over Christmas, and so hacked this together during the break.
Why
It’s the warm fuzzy feeling of having the sum of all human knowledge in your pocket. It’s the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy realised. EDGE is slow; search is slow; you’re abroad, in a plane, a tunnel, or on top of a mountain. You have an iPod Touch.

Here’s the noob’s step-by-step guide on how to install it on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Prerequisites

1. First of all, make sure u have BSD Subsystem and SSH working on it.

Download to computer

2. Second: download the Wikipedia data files(2 GB worth of them). There’s a torrent file available for the data files, but I got better download speed for classic download (English version, 2GB). You should consider using a download manager for this, in case u get interrupted u don’t want to start the download all over again. If you’re downloading from ftp, you’ll need another 2GB extra space on your computer to unzip the archive.

3. Third, download Wikipedia.app – this is the executable file that you’re going to use. The latest version can be found on code.google.com, and so can the sources for it. Unzip the archive to obtain Wikipedia.app

Copy to iPhone

4. We need to copy all our files onto the iPhone/iPod Touch. The files u need to copy are:
Wikipedia.app and its contents
The data files – wp folder and the files within(the one unpacked by the torrent or unzipped from ftp):

locate.prefixdb
processed
blocks.db
locate.db


If on Windows, get WinSCP, connect to the iPhone and just copy them. You’ll want:
Wikipedia.app copied inside /Applications/ folder on the iPhone
the wp folder and the 4 files mentioned above, copied on /var/root/.

Open up Terminal.app (I’m assuming u use MacOSX or Linux) you’ll achieve this using the marvelous scp command:

First of all:
scp -r Wikipedia.app/ root@10.168.1.102:/Applications/

scp -r wp root@10.168.1.102:/var/root/

Obviously, you’ll need to change the IP address there with the one of your iPhone or iPod. If u don’t know what it is, read this article again.

Scp will ask you for the password – as I mentioned before, for BSD Subsystem 2.1 for 1.1.4, the password is “alpine” (no quotes).

Done? If we’re lucky, it might actually work. You’ll need to kill Springboard to see Wikipedia appear on the screen. Rebooting the iPhone is one way to do it, but even simpler we can just restart the Springboard process.

Restarting Springboard

5. Ssh into the iPhone from Putty or Terminal.app, still as root.
run ps -A | grep Springboard
The first number this shows you is what we’re interested in, namely the PID of the process.
run kill 575 (where instead of 575 you have the PID we got previously). Looking at the iPhone you’ll see the spinning circle and Springboard restarting.

If you see the Wikipedia icon on the screen, give it a try. Hopefully it will work.

Chmod, Chown and other tuneup

If not, we have some tuning to do:
Still in the ssh session, logged in as root on the iPhone/iPod, you’ll have to make sure the correct access rights and ownership is assigned to the files we’re interested in:
What works for me is:


# ls -la /Applications/ | grep Wikipedia
drwxr-xr-x 2 root admin 204 Apr 10 11:33 Wikipedia.app



# ls -la /Applications/Wikipedia.app
total 360
drwxr-xr-x 2 root admin 204 Apr 10 11:33 .
drwxrwxr-x 51 root admin 1734 Apr 10 11:33 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root admin 71168 Apr 10 11:33 Default.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 root admin 613 Apr 10 11:33 Info.plist
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root admin 96624 Apr 10 11:33 Wikipedia
-rw-r--r-- 1 root admin 7563 Apr 10 11:33 icon.png


If you don’t have something similar, you could also try something like
chmod -R 777 /Applications/Wikipedia.app
and
chown root -R /Applications/Wikipedia.app
which will grant all rights to all files inside the Wikipedia.app folder, and will change the user name to root.

Also, now for the data files:

# ls -la /var/root
total 0
drwxrwxrwx 6 root wheel 204 Apr 10 11:32 .
drwxr-xr-x 16 root wheel 612 Mar 30 14:23 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 mobile wheel 68 Mar 30 23:38 Downloads
drwxrwxrwx 6 mobile wheel 204 Mar 30 15:15 Library
drwx------ 5 mobile wheel 170 Apr 10 09:10 Media
drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 204 Apr 10 11:32 wp

you should see wp over there, with at least r and x as access rights everywhere.
Same as before, just to make sure we could run
chmod -R 777 /var/root/wp
and
chown root -R /var/root/wp

Well.. that was about it. If the last part about access rights was confusing for you, you’ll just need to remember to copy-paste and run the 4 commands I mentioned:

chmod -R 777 /Applications/Wikipedia.app
chown root -R /Applications/Wikipedia.app
chmod -R 777 /var/root/wp
chown root -R /var/root/wp


Congrats!

More reading material on installing Wikipedia, over at the author’s page over here.

The bug:

On 1.1.4 firmware(and possibly 1.1.3), for some iPhone setups, after you log into a website from Safari, when you get back after having closed Safari, it’ll keep ask you to login.

This gets quickly extremely frustrating, and, as you suspect, it’s a bug.

The solution:

Step 1. Use Terminal.app or putty to SSH onto your iPhone. Read more about how to do this over here (remember, the iPhone root password is usually “alpine” ).

Step 2. On your iPhone, run the following commands:


chmod 777 /var/mobile/Library/Cookies/
chmod 666 /var/mobile/Library/Cookies/*


Voila, it should work now.

As an alternative to Step 2 some people have reported that the following is cleaner and more effective(I didn’t test it, the first method works out for me):

chown -R mobile /var/mobile/

PS – here’s a video of doing this. I must mention that the chown -R version that u see right above is superior to changing manually the 2 files in the video.

You might have already heard some rumors about this, anyways here it is: the iPhone is a real computer, running a tiny stripped down version of Mac OSX, similar in many ways to what you have on your MacBook. In order to unleash its full potential, we’ll have to “unstrip” it a little bit by installing some of the tools found on Unix .

BSD Subsystem can be found in the “System” menu of Installer.app, and will install some essential utilities that you’ll further need. Plus, many iPhone apps need it in order to work. Installing it is as easy as installing any of the Installer.app packages(that is, 4 clicks away). If you like screenshots, take a look at iClarified over here. I’m pretty sure that you’ll need to restart the iPhone after you have installed this.

To reboot the iPhone, after you exit Installer.app, keep the button on top pressed for about 5 seconds, until it shows you a “Slide to Power Off” question. Slide, to power it off, then press the same button again to restart the iPhone.

Second on our list is the OpenSSH server. It needs BSD Subsystem, and it gives you console Terminal access to the iPhone from your computer. Yes, you heard me well – once you got OpenSSH installed(also found in Installer’s “System” menu), you’ll be able to access the iPhone in a Unix console, as if it were an ordinary computer.

But first, I think you’ll need to restart the iPhone again(just like 2 paragraphs above).

So.. you rebooted the iPhone once again. We can give it a try now. First, make sure the iPhone and the computer are in the same wireless network. Next, on the iPhone, go into Settings app, the Wi-Fi menu, click on the arrow right to the active wireless connection, and you should be presented to a details page. What we’re interested in is the IP Address.

If you’re on a Mac, you open up Terminal; type ssh followed by the iPhone’s IP address and -l root, such as:

ssh 192.168.1.100 -l root (it’s just a sample address).
If the connection can be made, and if the iPhone has BSD Subsystem and OpenSSH installed and ready, then you’ll be asked for a password – the one that should work is alpine – if it doesn’t, you’re on your own, keep on googling for “iPhone ssh root password”.

If on Windows, you can access ssh using the great free utility putty. Similar with above, you enter the iPhone’s IP address, “root” as the username and “alpine” as the password.

Well.. that’s about it. If it works, congrats! The world of iPhone hacking is wide open for you.

Using SSH and BDS Subsystem, we’ll soon teach you how to install Wikipedia on the iPhone, how to hack Tap Tap Revolution to make it work, or how to fix your iPhone Mail after it stopped working following an iPhone restore.