I had something else in mind, I think the parent thought that too. Imagine, for instance, how many articles there are about how A has relation R with C, and B

I had something else in mind, I think the parent thought that too. Imagine, for instance, how many articles there are about how A has relation R with C, and B also (e.g., George Washington was a president of the USA, Abraham Lincoln also). For some definition of "understanding", you wouldn't need to encode data about the text of both articles A and B, you could use NLP to somehow store just the ontology. The problem would change from encoding text to encoding a graph. So it would be a lossy process (because you wouldn't be able to decompress into the original Wikipedia), but in my opinion seems more relevant to AI than bothering with the original corpus.