On 2/1/2011 5:50 AM, Ashwin Baindur wrote: 
To conclude, I do not take it as a given that every thing is hunky
dorey. Without meaning disrespect for the absolutely wonderful work
and colossal efforts put in by the SOS Children's village Wikipedia
team, I personally would like to tweak it so as to suit the Indian
palate. I too am part of the world movement but I consider it a glocal
one, not a global one. At this point of the time, I'm looking at how
to make the world relevant to our locality.

The other albeit obvious thing to note is that beyond perhaps the "local relevance" of articles, there are vast differences in article QUALITY cross-languages. That is, certain articles may have been excluded from the SOS version due to poor quality rather than importance/relevance, and this of course could and would work both ways across language projects.  So, we need to make sure there are structures in place to rate article quality within a given language project which we want to place into the offline versions.

On another note - I STRONGLY agree that creating offline versions in the native languages is of utmost importance.  If we can do this, the distribution will not only be better received, but could actually be much more impactful at large.  UNESCO wrote a report in 2005 which stated:

"Denial to access to information in one's mother tongue is equivalent to a denial of a human right...In terms of pedagogy, how do children learn best?  In their mother tongue."[1]

The creation of quality-filtered offline materials in many languages is an incredibly important project and one that Wikimedia is uniquely positioned to tackle.  Glad we are working so actively on figuring this out.

Jessie

[1] http://en.childrenslibrary.org/about/mission.shtml [admission: I've never been able to find this actual report, although I haven't spent a significant amount of time looking. I'll track it down soon enough...]
-- 
Jessie Wild
Special Projects Manager
Global Development
Wikimedia Foundation