If you want a free and massive performance optimization, remove the cat:

fastWikiLookup() { grep "$@" ~/wikipedia.txt }

Reading and piping 156 GB of data to another process every time you want to look something up is a somewhat nontrivial action. Grep can directly read the file, which should result in a pretty damn good speed up.

rip Greg would shine here

How fast is it, really? How do you differentiate between topics?

what the hell I want that

Holy...

WikiTok Swipe through random articles.

There's a wiki app?!

Fun fact, if you search for a term but start with !w you will get the wiki page.

My concern would be losing market share to other sources resulting in Wikipedia slowly being forgotten by future generations. Then the downstream of effects of fewer new contributions, and increasingly consolidated moderators.

Then not being at the forefront of the Internet hurts prestige that reduces donations. I agree with your point on ad revenue vs server costs, but I imagine a 20% reduction in traffic hurts their long strategy more than a 20% reduction on hosting costs.

People are doing less reading

I don't think that is a net positive

Technically, yeah. But with less people going to Wikipedia directly there would probably stand to be less chance of getting any new contributors. I'm not sure how the foundation gets all its money, but the more traffic they serve the more they can prove their relevance which might matter for funding

Wikipedia relies on people reading it and realising "Wait, that's wrong..." to fix inaccuracies.

Recently some PR company was caught taking money to whitewash the Wikipedia pages of their clients. The more people that are looking at the pages, the more likely it is that someone will realise they are being manipulated maliciously.

Lol, "PatrickGPT" would be the easiest novelty chatbot to write, too.

10 INPUT "ASK ME ANYTHING>"
20 PRINT "[THINKING...]"
30 SLEEP 3
40 PRINT "THAT'S A STUPID QUESTION"
50 GOTO 10

how to seed wiki? Like on a torrent?

47 GB for text only, 111 GB with images (both only English articles)