Weird side point, but I'd be really interested to hear how people weight the importance of Wikipedia text vs media vs history. For me the first is 99% of the point, but clearly others feel differently.

History and talk pages can be very important.

When I saw that the film Defiance was based on a interesting-sounding real set of events, I looked at them on Wikipedia. The history and talk pages had an ongoing edit war with a sizable number of commentators who appeared to feel that the Bielskis should be treated as criminals and murderers rather than fêted as heroes, due to their killing of local Nazi sympathisers.

If you just stuck to the hashed-out Wikipedia page that was current, you'd be completely oblivious to the whole controversy.

Yeah, you're probably right. But the history can be really important on certain pages. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1671756 And images can make some of the math articles useful since they are too-often dense pages of formulas.

Isn't most the math just latex? So it could be rendered client side?

I mean the formulas are not very good at explaining the concepts. Sometimes it's helpful to have a picture.

I find that Wikipedia's text heavy presentation disappointing especially considering that the articles are almost exclusively what I would consider extremely terse. It's like the worst of both worlds.

I've never considered this, but the history of Wikipedia over the next 100 years might be an insanely valuable source of insight about culture.

I remember reading about Xowa and there was stated that English wikipedia requires 25GB and images additional ~80GB which you can all download and access offline with Xowa. Considering there are 128GB SD and micro SDXC cards readily available for ~$100... that's actually amazing.

I suspect if you selected 5% of the most "useful" articles you'd miss out almost nothing and be able to pack in a very small size actually.

I'm sure you could batch process the pictures to a reasonable size and store all those on a big flash drive today already.