[EmanueleAina]

> just the text of the articles is 8.8GB compressed

Which seems to mean that storing only the version in the user's language should not pose a huge challenge, storage-wise. No?

[DanBC]

I think that 8.8 GB is just EN wiki.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Wikipedia

> There are 5,049,507 articles on the site (live count).[4] In October 2015, the combined text of the English Wikipedia's articles totalled 11.5 gigabytes when compressed.[5]