The article "United States" and "Antarctica" (and lots of others) do not render on MediaWiki 1.9.3 release with the 20071018 dumps. I also have a test setup with MediaWiki 1.11 and the performance is very poor vs. 1.9.3.
I just tried on my install here, running latest trunk of phase3, and although it took about 10 seconds at the first query, it did come up. There's so much on that page that it took my browser a lot longer to render it than a fetch with wget did, but the content is there, and did display.
This is enwiki fetched on September 10th. You want me to try with a newer dump?