Hey Everyone!
I am so excited about the content of this email chain! There have been huge advances in the offline work for India of late.
Quick background: I know many of you know, and Hisham mentioned it earlier, but I am involved with the offline WIkipedia projects around the world for WMF, so I have an ok idea about what options are available and who uses our information (like OLPC or SOS Children's Village or Camara).
For this work, I think it's _imperative_ to get a high-quality, Indic version available for mass-distribution. But while the full, all-encompassing offline version might take 6-7 months to develop, there are bite-sized pieces we can concretely work on so we can start at least pushing some information out. For example, if we focus on "Geography" first, we could perhaps get a really good "Geography" package set-up and ready to go by the next pilot, in order to at least get a package out there - something to have a presence within the distributions. The storage space on the Aakash tablet and other low-cost devices is minimal, so a limited content package is actually fine, in many ways.
In the meantime, we can be working on more and more additions, which could be distributed in-mass as time unfolds. Then people could basically have a "library" of content available for their perusal.
Thoughts on this? It helps prevent a complete gap in time for our execution: we have an AWESOME encyclopedia already available (that's why we have almost 500M people reading it every month!), and it would be really sad, I think, to sit on such a resource! One good place to start in terms of identifying content is to leverage the list of articles use for the Malayalam Offline edition - that probably would get us a good step of the way there in terms of which articles are India-relevant and worthy of inclusion.
I have a lot more I can say about this, but will stop myself here for now :)
Jessie
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Jessie Wild
Global Development, Manager
Wikimedia Foundation