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Wikipedia is designed to be easily downloaded and distributed in other ways

Easily, only when you have fast connections. The smallest archives are in the 20 GB kind of range for the English language, and that's without pictures. And good luck finding updated mirrors for the content, or even recent dumps.

I can ship a BluRay disc or three pretty quickly...

I've used a re-compressed version in the past, with reduced xml markup, and with the most rarely visited articles removed. It was around 1GB when I downloaded it, and it used the proprietary MDX/MDict format. You can find downloads here (from 2010):

http://sh0dan.blogspot.com/

Or you could just download the Wikipedia CD. It contains 5500 articles from 2007:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_CD_Selecti...

Neither of those two are very up to date of course, but it shows that it can be done.

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