I'm not sure this is true. Lossless compression algorithms exist, and HTML compresses almost absurdly well. A 20x compression rate would be quite impressive, b

I'm not sure this is true. Lossless compression algorithms exist, and HTML compresses almost absurdly well. A 20x compression rate would be quite impressive, but I don't think it's impossible, since 10x compression is fairly common in this domain, and there are reasons to expect wikipedia to compress even better given the significant amount of markup on each page. I've worked with cleaning up rendered wikipedia texts, and if you strip the mediawiki class names and cruft, the uncompressed HTML shrinks a lot, often from hundreds of kilobytes to tens of kilobytes. You can then probably compress that quite a lot as well since plain text compresses very well on its own. Basically, mediawiki uses this much markup to say <li><a href="#Assessment">Assessment</a></li>: <li id="toc-Assessment" class="vector-toc-list-item vector-toc-level-1 vector-toc-list-item-expanded"> <a class="vector-toc-link" href="#Assessment"> <div class="vector-toc-text"> <span class="vector-toc-numb">6</span>Assessment</div> </a> <ul id="toc-Assessment-sublist" class="vector-toc-list"> </ul> </li> So yeah. 20x isn't too far fetched.