Wouldn't it be by far the easiest if this program would be a small "web server" which would retrieve and serve Wikipedia pages to user's web browser of choice? That way it could be made quickly, small, and portable.
It would be. Also, it would suck. (not to mention that implies installing MySQL on user's machine - a requirement that I wouldn't like to put in an end-user application).
The whole point of writing an offline, native client is to provide much better browsing and/or editing experience for users. If it's not much better, people won't bother to install it.
Users don't care about how easy (or hard) it is to develop software. Only programmers care about that. Users care about value added. If there is no value added in native client, there is no reason for them to use it.
The only value added of such solution would be ability to run Wikipedia offline. While a noble thing, it's not really that much of a change. There's much more that could be done and much more will have to be done if anyone expects people to actually use said application.
Krzysztof Kowalczyk | http://blog.kowalczyk.info