zlacker

Totally agreed that the cost isn't really storage, but I wanted to point out that you're underestimating a fair bit on the size. Conveniently, there's a wikipedia article about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia

"As of 21 September 2022, the size of the current version of all articles compressed is about 21.23 GB without media."

(Note that's gzipped, so the actual size is much higher in-use.)

Media is, of course, vastly larger. Sadly, the last number given was from 2014, so I'd expect it to have increased massively since then:

"The size of the media files in Wikimedia Commons, which includes the images, videos and other media used across all the language-specific Wikipedias was described as well over 23 TB near the end of 2014"

>>kemayo+(OP)
> (Note that's gzipped, so the actual size is much higher in-use.)

OK; I did a quick dig to see how big Wikipedia is, but you've dug deeper.

You can still stick the whole English Wikipedia on a single disk, probably with all linked media (I suspect that a lot of what's on Wikimedia isn't linked from Wikipedia articles). So the main cost issue is serving content to the network; and there are lots of server farms that would cheerfully do that for the love.