Comments on: Free mobile for Wikipedia starts with Orange

By: Kul

Kul — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:23:58 +0000

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

By: Heather Ford

Heather Ford — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:09:17 +0000

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?

By: Wikipedia and Orange partner to bring free access to developing world | FP Tech Desk | Financial Post

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:23:39 +0000

[...] “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,” Wikipedia’s head of mobile, Kul Takanao Wadhwa, wrote in a blog post. [...]

By: Judy Tuan

Judy Tuan — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:33:59 +0000

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.

By: Trazeris

Trazeris — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:23:49 +0000

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??

By: Tim McLean

Tim McLean — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 02:01:51 +0000

Sounds like a reasonable trade off. Best of luck!

By: Kul

Kul — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:44:22 +0000

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.

By: Tim McLean

Tim McLean — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:04:21 +0000

Awesome idea… but what about net neutrality?