G'day mboverload,
[I'm not even going to bother fixing the top-posting on this one, so 'bye-'bye context. Please, Dan Tobias posted a link explaining this.]
Just to expand: They don't need to mirror the Wikipedia: content. All they have to do is link back to the actual site. TaDa - problem fixed.
Once again, I think you've missed the point. We want Wikipedia to be as accessible as possible. This means:
a) We *want* to be mirrored We're producing a free-content encyclopaedia. For that purpose, everything we write is licensed under the GFDL. All our work is *explicitly* available to anyone who wants to take it, provided they abide by the rules set out in the GFDL. In addition, much of the revenue that pays for servers and so on comes from mirrors like answers.com who kick back some of their income (even though they don't have to) as a "thank you" to us for providing free-as-in-speech content. What, you thought our donations were enough to pay for *everything*? Our mirrors owe us. And we owe *them*. We can't just dismiss them.
b) We cannot assume our readers are using Wikipedia itself We're producing a free-content encyclopaedia. That means we encourage people to re-use our work. We don't want to limit that by deliberately making life difficult for re-users.
c) We cannot assume our readers are connected to the Internet We're producing a free-content encyclopaedia. The result, Wikipedia, is *not* a website: it's an encyclopaedia that happens to be written in hypertext and hosted on the Web. The content would not stop being our content if it were not used in the context of our website. We're taking advantage of the semantic and formatting opportunities available through HTML and CSS, but we don't need to be a website for that. Wikipedia content needs to be able to stand alone as well as any other encyclopaedia's content could.
d) We cannot assume our readers are *capable* of connecting to the Internet Yes, even today, there are people living outside America, and unable to access the technological marvels y'all are privileged with. It's even possible their circumstances differ wildly from what you expect. A version of Wikipedia on CD/DVD, for example, could make it a lot easier for certain users to access our content ...
e) We cannot even assume our readers are using a computer Wikipedia articles are printed all the time. We're probably too big for our articles to be used in a traditional paper encyclopaedia, but there's no reason certain articles couldn't be placed in a book --- a hardcover "Best of Wikipedia" showcasing our featured articles, for example, would be rather nifty. HTML is quite useful, but we should not write our content such that it can only be enjoyed on a computer.