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.

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.

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