Wikipedia publishes database dumps every couple of days[1]. So it shouldn't be that expensive for smaller governments to create and host their own censored mirror. You'd maintain a list of banned and censored articles, then pull from wikipedia once a month. You'd have to check new articles by hand (maybe even all edits), but a lot of that should be easily automated, and if you only care about wikipedia in your native tongue (and it's not english) that's much less work.
The academics will bypass censorship anyway, since it's so easy[2], so an autocrat won't worry about intellectually crippling their country by banning wikipedia. Maybe they don't do this because the list of banned articles would be trivial to get.
Better machine translation might solve this by helping information flow freely[3]. We have until 2018 I guess.
[0] https://news.vice.com/story/china-is-recruiting-20000-people...
[1] https://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html
[2] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-great-firewall-censors...
[3] https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/12/17/anti-wikipedi...