That's already a thing. :-) https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/10/11/kiwix-ten-years/

Most smartphones in Iraq probably have 4–16gb of storage, and 64gb flash storage would be prohibitively expensive for most Iraqis. The English Wikipedia is 60gb, but that's without _any_ multimedia. The total size of all media in Wikimedia Commons is 23 terabytes.

We could create a minified version of the Iraq Wikipedia that could be around 40gb, but many will not want it, so we'd have to sell Wikipedia phones and non-Wikipedia phones.

You could sell copies of the minified Wikipedia on microSD cards, but a 64gb microSD card still costs about $20, but that price is out of reach for most in the war torn country.

Then there's the issue of updated content. One of the main uses for Wikipedia is learning about current events, current status of crises, recent elections, recent deaths, etc. You wouldn't really be able to do that with this system.

The Arabic ZIM file of February 2017 is 5.4G. http://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages

Text only compressed is even less, in the 10-15GB range. I used to have it on an SD card and used https://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/4755 to put in on a cheap media player.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader was one such attempt. Though reading the limitations, it seemed to do some heavy processing that threw away data to save space.

Well, I don't know anything at all about wikimedia infrastructure, but I would think it caches rather well.

Then all the ISP would have to do is coordinate with wikimedia to put such a device in their datacenter and save a lot on that precious upstream bandwith, keeping traffic on their local network where it's not costing them as much.

That's a plus, in addition to the free karma.

Problem is there are updates every day. The dump is only good if you don't need the latest page.

That's why I wrote cache.

I would imagine that on average a page is retrieved more than it's edited. So even even in the case of poplar pages, there is potential for saving bandwidth.

But I don't know the actual statistics for wikipedia.

For Wikipedia, if you aren't logged in (with an editor's account etc.) you are hitting a cache most of the time.

And it isn't so much for the bandwidth saving, more the saving in CPU time in rendering the page up from the Wikitext source, which can be substantial. Some very big pages used to take 2-3 minutes to render because Wikitext is a rather slow ugly programming language pretending to be a document format. (A lot has been sped up after a lot of the rendering guts got moved to Lua.)

Keeping that up to date would cost huge amounts of bandwidth though, of which 99.99% would be wasted.