Free mobile for Wikipedia starts with Orange
The Wikimedia Foundation is working to make knowledge freely available to every person in the world, but for many potential readers in developing countries, the only way to access the Internet is by paying for data on a mobile phone. Cost is a barrier that prevents data usage and makes access to a vast repository of knowledge like Wikipedia impossible. In some developing countries, the poorest fifth of the population already spends over 20 percent of their income on mobile phone services [1]. We don’t want people sacrificing their basic human needs to spend money on data, so we decided to do something about it.
Today we are proud to announce [2] a significant step in breaking down barriers to free knowledge: the Wikimedia Foundation and Orange are partnering to offer access to Wikipedia for Orange mobile customers free of charge. Orange has committed to provide this service in twenty countries across Africa and the Middle East, for three years, and has included access to all of Wikipedia’s enormous store of images. We have worked with Orange over the last few years and they have really come to understand the value of our mission. Thanks to their leadership, we will reach tens of millions of people that wouldn’t otherwise have access to Wikipedia — and all for free.
Over the past year, we’ve been urging mobile operators around the world to consider waiving data charges to access Wikipedia, even when we didn’t have the internal capacity to support such an endeavor. Despite not having a full-time mobile developer on staff until eight months ago, we operated in the mode of “if we build it, they will come.” I’ve focused our mobile team to help in developing countries, as we’ve fostered negotiations with operator partners. And over the last six months we’ve grown our mobile team to six people, with additional contractors (and more hires on the way). Many people on our mobile team have been critical to making this happen including Amit Kapoor, Patrick Reilly, Phil Chang and Tomasz Finc, with special help from tech ops including CT Woo and Asher Feldman – and dozens of volunteers from around the world.
The Orange rollout will begin over the next several months, starting in Tunisia and the Ivory Coast, with four to six more countries including Mauritius and Cameroon and others shortly after. The first countries will require a lot of testing and if you’re an Orange customer in one of the regions where the rollouts are happening, we’d love your comments. You can read more about this partnership via our Q&A [3]. We’ll keep you updated on our progress in future blog posts.
Orange has helped us get one step closer to making it possible to give everyone free access to the sum of all knowledge. We sincerely thank them for that. This is a really important precedent. Now we need more operators around the world to join in offering Wikipedia to their customers free of data charges. The movement for free mobile for Wikipedia has just begun.
Kul Takanao Wadhwa
Head of Mobile
Awesome idea… but what about net neutrality?
You’re right, that is an issue. If we were going to abide strictly to the fundamental philosophy of net neutrality then we would reject even this plan (no matter the benefits) out of principle because one type of traffic shouldn’t be distinguished from another. I was on a panel w/ Tim Berners-Lee and John “Mad Dog” Hall in Brasil last year and I stood closer to the side of pure net neutrality than they did. However, they made some good points from a practical perspective that there needs to be a balance on managing certain users and/or the amount of data they use so it doesn’t completely degrade the network for other users, and thus, ultimately damages the sustainability of network operators. These are valuable points that has somewhat opened my eyes to having a more flexible approach to this issue, but, of course, it has to be done on the right way. Also, if you take WMF’s major priority, which is increasing access to free knowledge to everyone on the planet, we need to find the most practical way to do this and programs such as “free mobile” really help to accomplish that. On the flip side, there could be a positive effect on net neutrality from this and like-minded programs in that it could bring more awareness to governments and businesses to treat data access as a basic necessity like access to food and healthcare. Thus, overall data services are subsidized and maintained like basic infrastructure that make net neutrality the norm. Honestly, I don’t know how this will play out but we couldn’t afford to wait for years or even decades while the digital divide continues to increase. If plans like this ultimately have an overwhelming negative effect on protecting net neutrality then we would have to revisit this issue and have community-wide discussions. We can’t treat this as a black and white issue otherwise too many people lose out. We accept the tradeoffs…for now.
Sounds like a reasonable trade off. Best of luck!
WTF? Is Wikimedia out of its mind?
This is not “a really important precedent”, this is the end of the Web and everybody should be aware of this.
Is the community aware of this decision?
You are in effect providing a socially acceptable mean for Orange (and other access providers) to impose their DPIs! Do you really think Wikipedia would have had the same reach (and success) if DPI were in use back in 2001??
This is awesome! I want to bridge the digital divide, too. Over the weekend I went to the [http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Hackathon_January_2012 Wikipedia San Francisco Hackathon] and [[User:NeilK|NeilK]] and I whipped up an SMS-phone gateway to Wikipedia using Twilio. You send an SMS with your query to (415) 799-4519, and that number calls you back in 2 seconds and reads you the text of the Wikipedia article. Right now it doesn’t know about disambiguation, redirects, or capitalization yet, but the concept is there: it makes Wikipedia available to people without computers and without smartphones. Once we get calling in & speaking your query implemented (which might be hard haha), then you won’t need a computer or smartphone or reading. I’m really excited about this. Thank you for bringing Wikipedia to more people with the Orange partnership, even with the implications for net neutrality. =\ I feel that “otherwise too many people lose out,” too. And I do want to see a future, like you do, where access to information/data/the web becomes a basic necessity/utility.
Great initiative :) Just wondering why all the countries haven’t been named here. In an interview with UK WM CEO, Jon Davies, (https://www.youtube.com/user/BalancingActAfrica#p/u/8/Y_cZ9rUSVHw) he says that it’s ‘Egypt + other countries’ (along with a reference to ‘Africa as a country’?!) but Egypt isn’t mentioned in the press release here?
The countries are in all 20 of Orange’s operations in MEA. They are Botswana, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Guinea Conakry, Jordan, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Mali, Madagascar, Morocco, Niger, Tunisia, Uganda, Niger, Senegal and Congo. Vanuatu (though not in MEA) is also included in the partnership.
You can find more info about the partnerships on the Q&A posted on Meta:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Projects/Partnerships/Q_and_A#Q.26A_about_the_partnership
–Kul