We are pleased to present a new interview in APC's Building a Free Internet of the Future series, our monthly feature focusing on NGI Zero (NGI0) grant recipients and consortium members. Funded by the European Commission, NGI0 supports free software, open data, open hardware and open standards projects. It provides financial and practical support in a myriad of forms, including mentoring, testing, security testing, accessibility, dissemination and more.
Kiwix started as a free and open source offline web browser created by Emmanuel Engelhart and Renaud Gaudin 18 years ago. Now it’s a non-profit organisation and a free and open source software project dedicated to providing offline access to free educational content. Its software is available in 100 languages and deployed in more than 200 countries and territories, in facilities including schools and universities, prisons, community centres, libraries and much more.
In 2025, Kiwix received an NGI Zero Core grant. This month we talk to its CEO Stephane Coillet-Matillon.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Kiwix was released in 2007, 18 years ago. The original intent was that the content of Wikipedia should be accessible to anyone, even without internet access. Why was this accessibility so important?
The short and idealistic answer is that access to knowledge should not be limited by physical or monetary constraints. The more prosaic answer is that back then, Wikipedia was still fairly new and we thought it was awesome to be able to check out the Sum of Human Knowledge anywhere, anytime.
In the realm of communications technology and software, 18 years is a long time. What have been the biggest challenges for Kiwix between the early days and now?
In tech, 18 years feels pretty much like two lifetimes – we started with DVDs! Weirdly enough, though, our challenges have remained almost the same: we’re still fighting for a better compression. Storage has never been really expensive and in fact, now a medium-range Android phone can store the entirety of Wikipedia – for example, almost seven million entries, along with images, will “only” take 100 GB. But, how do we get these to the end user’s device, if they’re in a refugee camp, in Antarctica or in prison? What if they live next to a 5G tower but can’t pay for data? We always need to find new ways to share content, for the smallest possible cost.
There are also issues such as the risk of censorship, manipulation of information, blocking access to networks, legal consequences for accessing or contributing to information resources, and retaliation for helping others gain access. These actions involve a variety of different actors. How do you go about it?
Well, censorship never really was on our roadmap; Kiwix’s statutes (we’re a registered non-profit) are about freedom of access to education. But, it turns out that knowledge really is power and that a lot of folks have taken to Kiwix to get access to things they were prevented from reading: whenever Wikipedia is blocked, people will turn to us – be it in China, Russia, Turkey, and as far as North Korea, as it happens.
Our software is free and people will find ways to get their hands on it without needing to ask. There are many ways to make this happen (torrents, VPNs, smuggling flash drives… even beaming via satellite into Iran), and in a way, it’s as much their problem to figure out what works best as ours. As far as we are concerned, the best way to keep our users safe is to know as little as possible about them. We do not collect nor store any personal data, feel no need to do it, and plan to keep it that way.
You focus on creating a local offline instance (in HTML format) of any online knowledge, for example, about water access and treatment, or an emergency medicine library, educational resources, and so on. You were recently a grantee of the NGI0 consortium. Why did you apply for this cascade-funded programme?
Everyone takes software maintenance for granted, but the fact is that technical debt is an issue that needs to be tended to from day one. We can’t just write a great piece of code, say it’s awesome and have everyone agree on that, and then call it a day and move on to the next big shiny thing. Software is a living product and the only reason for it not to need maintenance and fixes would be if no one used it. (Un)fortunately, with a growing base of millions of users around the world, there’s always something to do or to fix, both in the Kiwix reader itself and our content scrapers. This is exactly where the NGI0 programme is coming to help.
With millions of users around the world, you also seem to be taking action on digital accessibility and the digital divide. Do you have any examples or stories from the field to illustrate this?
If there's one thing we've learnt over the years, it is that the digital divide can take many forms: in no particular order, this can mean rural schools in Africa, or refugee camps in the Middle East or South Asia; but also prisoners in the US or Europe, North Korean dissidents, or simply Chinese, Turkish or Iranian citizens trying to circumvent censorship. Or nuclear research facilities that are air-gapped or Antarctic bases that only get polar satellites to fly overhead five hours a day.
There are various forefronts of digital accessibility as a human right. What about webs of alliances in this field?
Accessibility is an issue that has been nagging at us for a while now. We’re a very small team and in constant firefighting mode, so it’s easy for this to take a back seat. Kiwix has been a lot of hacking for most of its life, and we had to build a user base first in order for people to get interested in it and be there to let us know how we could do better. We had to have blind users to tell us that screen readers perform pretty poorly on Kiwix for Windows/Linux overall. The good news is that these issues are now documented (kudos here to the folks at Emmabuntüs). Now that our tech stack is under control, our firefighting times are (probably? maybe? hopefully?) over. The next step is a redesign/rethink of our UI/UX [user interface and user experience], and accessibility will be part of this equation.
Once you've completed your NGI0 grant project, what are your next big steps?
As far as we're concerned, torrents (or any decentralised distribution) are the future. Bandwidth isn’t cheap, and downloading a very large file from a mirror is a drag. How people can access content needs to disappear from our users’ list of problems, and that’s where we see a lot of room for progress.
The floor is yours. Anything you want to bounce out of the box?
I think UI/UX is a fight that very few people have been taking seriously in the free software world, and this has been annoying me to no end. I wish people would be more vocal about having less powerful features if they can be easier to use instead.
Xavier Coadic is a consultant for the NGI0 consortium, and a free/libre open source software activist with 15 years of experience in free open source cultures and communities (software, data hardware, wetware, policy makers and political groups, research and development).