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

Today we’re excited to announce a new partnership with Telefónica, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world.  Telefónica will be working with the Wikimedia Foundation to increase the reach and accessibility of free knowledge for millions of their customers.  Through their mobile, IPtv, broadband, and other platforms they will soon begin to provide fast and innovative access to educational information from Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

Telefónica has a particularly strong presence in Latin America, a part of the world experiencing an incredible rise in access to the internet, and a place where we hope to see considerable increases to our free knowledge materials.

Over the course of this three-year partnership we plan to jointly develop new approaches to sharing Wikimedia project information, particularly through Telefónica’s very large base of mobile subscribers. Telefónica has also expressed a strong interest in working with local chapters to support local outreach and education activities.  Last year they supported Wikimania in Buenos Aires.

It’s my pleasure to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation has signed a strategic mobile and web partnership with Orange. Orange is one of the leading wireless and broadband internet providers in the world, and with this agreement we’ll begin integrating trademarked Wikipedia content onto their mobile and web channels. This is not just a way for me to improve my French (although that does need a lot of work. . .) – we’re also working with Orange to co-develop content channels and think about new ways to innovate and expand access to free knowledge. We’ve developed a QA as well dealing with aspects of the partnerships.

This is great news for Orange’s 175 million mobile customers and web users, as they’ll get better access to Wikipedia’s trove of knowledge throughout their daily lives. We’re starting out in the UK, Poland, Spain and France with plans to work together throughout Orange’s European footprint. This gets Wikipedia knowledge in front of more people in new ways, which helps us in our mission to expand knowledge to more people in more places. I especially want to praise all the volunteers who’ve made Wikipedia the world’s leading information resource. This partnership will help showcase their important work in front of more people than ever before.

I’ve been negotiating with Orange for a while, and I have been consistently impressed by their dedication to the Foundation’s mission of spreading free knowledge. They appreciate the importance of our community in everything we do, they’re committed to supporting neutral point-of-view, and they have an increasing interest in open source technology. The Foundation is always interested in business partnerships which understand our culture and help expand our mission, and Orange is an ideal partner for us.

This is an important new revenue stream to build on our successful fundraising campaigns. All the proceeds will go toward Wikimedia Foundation projects, with an emphasis on organizational sustainability and new services to make Wikipedia and our other projects better and easier to use. We’re a very lean nonprofit organization—just 27 of us help maintain the fourth-biggest website in the world—and this partnership will help us better support the vibrant community that makes Wikipedia possible.

Please join me in welcoming Orange as a new partner supporting the Wikimedia community!

Kul Wadhwa, Business Development<

No, it’s not democracy on wheels… Mobile Asia Congress, or MAC, is the top annual fiesta for the GSM Association in (you guessed it) Asia. GSMA is a global trade group representing more than 750 mobile operators across 218 countries and territories-more than 86% of the world’s mobile phone connections.

I was honored to be invited to speak at a panel at MAC last month in Macau, China. You might be asking yourself why a busy guy like me would sit on a plane for 15 hours, surrounded by screaming babies, to fly half way around the world to talk to executives of the mobile communications industry. Well, it wasn’t for the frequent flier miles (though those were nice too). The Wikimedia Foundation is committed to spreading knowledge to more people in more ways. If you look at how people are connecting with information these days, mobile devices are becoming more and more important. In developing countries, a lack of infrastructure and internet access means mobile devices are sometimes the only way that people can access information online.

My panel was on Monetising the assets of mobile for a new Internet – location, charging and demographics. That may sound strange, seeing as we don’t charge anyone to use or edit Wikipedia or any of our other projects. However, all the terrific content on Wikipedia can add a lot of value to the mobile experience.
*    Imagine GPS-powered software automatically offering up Wikipedia content based on your trip to London or Tokyo
*    Or photo-recognition software providing the Wikipedia article based on your mobile-phone picture at the Golden Gate Bridge.

We’re exploring partnerships with prominent mobile carriers, device makers, application developers, etc., to make these kinds of dynamic experiences a reality. It’s all about giving people the most relevant knowledge, whenever and wherever they need it.

While I was in Asia, I also had the opportunity to visit dedicated Wikipedians in Hong Kong, Macau and Japan. We already have a chapter in Hong Kong, and Macau is on it’s way to forming one. The Japanese Wikipedians are thinking about starting up a chapter and I was able to help them out with some Dos and Dont’s (such as DO buy the Head of Business Development a round of Kirin; DON’T stop at one round). We’re excited to expand the Wikipedia presence in Asia, where it’s growing faster than monkeyweed on Miracle Grow (also known as Japanese knotweed).

It was a lot of fun to meet all the smart, committed people working to make Wikipedia bigger and better. Wikipedia is currently accessible by people in mainland China and it growing at a rapid rate due to all the Chinese speaking contributors from every corner of the world. Japanese Wikipedia is our sixth-biggest language, with more than 540,000 articles. I want to thank all the Wikipedians that took the time to meet with me: Jerry (Hong Kong); Agostinho and Albert (Macau); and, Shun, Kotaro, Kazuhiro, and Tomoaki (Japan).

Also, a special thanks to Simone Craig, Lisa West, Andy McGuire, and everyone at GSMA for making me part of their great event.

Kul Wadhwa, Business Development<