However broad and non-deltionist might be best for online Wikepedia, a more curated i.e. deletionist version would certainly be very useful for offline usage and quite a few other purposes.
There are several offline snapshots of different sizes of Wikipedia that do exactly this. Some of them are more thoroughly curated, others are a snapshot of the most popular articles, etc.
What I could not find easily was a full English Wikipedia with images and all available in an easily accessible format (like the Kiwix snapshots). I'd put a whole hard disk for this purpose, because the size is in the gigabyte-terabyte range.
100,000 curated pages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles/Level...
In terms of space, the text is over 1000x smaller than the multimedia: ~20GB (uncompressed) for the text vs ~45TB (compressed) for multimedia (est accounting for growth vs 23TB@2014).
http://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/wikipedia_en_all_max...
Do you have any experience with this?
¹E.g. the 100k top article page linked by sibling does not look super promising, ~700 math articles vs ~10k fluff (sports, entertainment etc.).
I also have a 10GB snapshot on my phone, but it's a bit lacking. I don't have enough storage on my phone to fit the bigger one. But a battery powered offline Wikipedia is high on my list of necessary things in case things go south.
I haven't found a great way to keep these synced up, glad to hear if someone has a good solution for up-to-date offline wikipedia.