TL;DR: the WikiHow zim files have been deleted and there are no plans to bring them back.
The longer story is that the WikiHow folks reached out around the end of 2024 asking for their removal. Their content is apparently being harvested left and right by LLMs for their training, and they are trying to limit the number of mirrors so as to be in a better negotiating position.
WikiHow content has always been in a gray copyright zone: their user-generated content is under a Creative Commons license, but anything produced by their staff is not and there is no metadata to distinguish one from the other. They had been very helpful when we first started scraping their content a few years back and our goal is not to get in the way or harm content creators who offer to share educational content. And sad as it may be for people that are offline and no access to these our new world-eating AI overlords, the zim files are gone.
On the flip side, the code for the scraper that we had created back in the days is still around: it is under a GPL-3 license and is free for anyone to use, study & modify, and share should anyone want to generate their own private offline WikiHow zim (the repo is here).
