Wiki Offline

A fully offline general-knowledge fallback for OVOS - "who was Charlie Chaplin", "what is the Eiffel Tower", "tell me about tomato". An offline alternative to ovos-skill-wikipedia/ovos-skill-ddg/ ovos-skill-wolfie for the ~10,000 topics covered by Wikipedia's own Level 4 Vital Articles list - the subjects the Wikipedia community itself has curated as the most essential encyclopedia entries. No internet connection needed at runtime.

• Usage
• What this is (and isn't)
• A Common Query + Fallback skill, not a fixed intent
• Data sourcing and licensing
• Known limitations
• Install
• Development

Usage

"who was Charlie Chaplin"
"what is the Eiffel Tower"
"tell me about tomato"
"what do you know about photosynthesis"
"where is Mount Everest"

What this is (and isn't)

An encyclopedia lookup, not a reasoning engine. It resolves a single named entity from the question and speaks that entity's own short summary. It can answer "what is a tomato" but not "are tomatoes and potatoes related" - the second is a comparison across two entities, and there's no structured data being compared here, only free-text extracts (some relational questions get answered by luck, when one entity's own summary happens to mention the other - not by design). See DEVELOPMENT.md for the reasoning.

A Common Query + Fallback skill, not a fixed intent

Every sibling skill in this project family (geography, geometry, convert, calculator) uses fixed Padatious intents as the primary path. This one doesn't - ~10,000 arbitrary proper nouns don't fit a bounded intent-slot vocabulary the way 194 countries or 24 geometry terms do. Instead this skill competes via Common Query (alongside Wikipedia/DDG/Wolfram, when the platform routes a question there) and catches whatever's left via a Fallback handler - the same dual pattern ovos-skill-wolfie already uses. See DEVELOPMENT.md for the full reasoning, including why this needed extending FallbackSkill specifically (not just adding the @fallback_handler decorator to a plain skill).

Data sourcing and licensing

Article titles and summaries both come directly from Wikipedia's own official APIs - the Level 4 Vital Articles category structure for the title list, and the REST summary API for the short spoken extracts. Wikipedia content is CC BY-SA 4.0; this skill bundles it offline the same way ovos-skill-wikipedia reads it aloud live. Full attribution and licensing details, plus why Level 4 was chosen over Kiwix/ZIM, DBpedia, or Wikipedia's own larger vital-article levels: CREDITS.md and DEVELOPMENT.md.

Known limitations

• English only in v1 - see DEVELOPMENT.md.
• Single-entity lookup, not relational reasoning - see above and DEVELOPMENT.md.
• A snapshot, not a live mirror - data/summaries.json reflects Wikipedia as of whenever data/build_data.py was last run, not the current live article.
• Scope is ~10,000 topics (Wikipedia's Level 4 Vital Articles) - Level 5 (50,000 articles) exists as a natural future extension (Level 4 is a strict subset), not built in v1.

Install

pip install ovos-skill-wiki-offline

Development

See DEVELOPMENT.md.

Category

Information

Tags

#wikipedia #offline #encyclopedia #reference #commonquery #fallback