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This is, I'm sorry to say, baloney.
In 2002 Windows XP was already out and natively supported NTFS volumes. So did Windows 2000. XP even supported ExFAT volumes with a patch which was released in April 2001. If you're a Linux nerd, ext2 or ext3 could easily handle the partition and file sizes required. ext2 had already been available for decades at that point and ext3 was released in 2001 and readily available by 2002.
Without media, the current Wikipedia (according to itself) is a hair over 24 gigabytes not including images and media, which'd fit on a 32 gig flash drive that, while it would be absolutely amazing to 2002 users just based on its sheer usable volume, would handily accept a bog standard NTFS partition readable on any XP or Win2k machine.
There were no flash storage based drives bigger than one or two gigs in 2002, but there were plenty of external USB hard drives in that era that readily exceeded the 4 gig FAT32 file size limit. I know this well because I was there at the time, and I owned several of them. You had to manually format them as NTFS to be able to use the entire capacity effectively and with large files, but they absolutely did work over USB... Just not if you bunged them into a Windows 98 or ME machine. A modern flash drive would be no different. In all practicable terms you could mount a volume up to 2.2 terabytes (i.e. round thousands) or 2.0 tebibytes (powers of two, if you can countenance sounding ridiculous for using the word "tebibyte") in XP/2K if it were formatted NTFS without having to engage in any chicanery or third party tools. Even a ten year old could do it. You plug it in, and it'd Just Work.
Including media the entirety of the Wikimedia Commons is something like 420 TB, which would be a challenge even today to load onto a single USB flash drive. If you were going to include the media (images and videos) these would probably have to be downscaled significantly in order to fit on any single portable drive, even current ones.
The text content of Wikipedia would be no problem whatsoever. USB 3.0 didn't exist yet, though, so at best you'd be chugging along loading everything at 2.0 speed if you had a compliant board and all the correct drivers for it (and were running at least Win2k service pack 4). You'd want an HTML dump, not one of their database dumps, because running the current Wikimedia software and database versions would be a challenge for sure. But a browser from 2002 shouldn't trip up on any Wikipedia content except perhaps any .webp images (2010), or h264/h265 video content.
You'd have a much bigger problem if OP warped you and your USB drive back to 1998 or worse, 1995.
There are ways you could allow it to work, but straight out of the pack it probably would not. Also consider GPT partitions as a likelihood which weren't around. You'd also have to flip the bit ahead of time in diskpart to treat it as a hard drive without quick removal for xp to handle it correctly I believe.
Straight out of the pack it would probably be factory formatted as ExFAT. If you had the correct patch on a Windows XP machine (KB955704) it would literally be plug and play.
MBR's volume size limit is 2 T(i)B. You don't need GPT for these types of storage sizes.
Ah I just tried out a new 64gb stick and you're correct. I thought it would be EXFAT, but thought they were gpt by default. That appears to be untrue for the majority of drives according to a Google search too.
Quick removal isn't a big concern since the drive is read only. You might crash anything with an open file handle, but you don't have to worry about data corruption.