I had the same thought yesterday. I'm using kiwix-tools to serve pages from a local wikipedia dump to the browser. It works really well using zim compressed files, you can also get stackexchange, project Gutenberg books and archwiki dumps in zim format.
I followed up the quickstart commands from the readme of this repo
https://github.com/pirate/wikipedia-mirror/
You can find recent dumps to download here
http://download.kiwix.org/zim/
EDIT: if you really don't want to use the browser to view pages, you can use the kiwix reader program to read the zim files (the program comes with an interface to download them too). Its written in qt but the build process is a bit unusual for my tastes, they provide an appimage though which works in slackware-current