Joe Slovo Park (Cape Town, South Africa) as seen from the entrance to Sinenjongo High School.

Joe Slovo Park is a slum.

Mass unemployment. Drunkenness and drug addiction. Gangs. Teenage pregnancy. Tuberculosis. HIV/AIDS. Single room shacks that house five people. Illegal power connections. Lots of children without shoes. It’s a shantytown made up of whatever materials people can scrape together. It’s overcrowded and dirty. You have to know people to be safe.

In the middle of this place there is a high school made of used shipping containers and prefab buildings where students from the area come to study and learn. A class of students at the school has a simple request: they want free access to Wikipedia from their mobile phones so that they can do their homework. They started a campaign on Facebook for “Free Access to Wikipedia from Cellphones” and wrote an open letter to all the telecoms in the country:

Kul Wadhwa speaking at 0:55:05 about a news article about the class at Sinenjongo High School.

The Grade 11A Class who penned the open letter for free access to Wikipedia on their cellphones, (photographed in February 2013 as the 12A class).

A cellphone repair shop built from a shipping container in Joe Slovo Park. The store is across the street from the school.

Children in Joe Slovo Park, photographed next to computer and cellphone repair stores.

A small internet services store in Joe Slovo Park.

Pam Robertson, Grade 12A maths and science teacher at Sinenjongo High School.

Here I am on a photo walk through Joe Slovo Park with the 12A class.

I had given out Wikipedia stickers to the learners earlier in the week and when I came to Ntsika’s house, I saw that he had put the sticker on his refrigerator. I asked him why he did that.

Myself, Charlene Music and Oarabile Mudongo setting up cameras in one of the two computer labs at Sinenjongo High School.

Charlene Music explaining to Sinako (one of the learners) how to shoot a documentary.

A sample from a Cape Town radio interview between Kieno Kammies and Pam Robertson, Maths and Science teacher at Sinenjongo High School about her class and their campaign for free access to Wikipedia on their cellphones.

Open letter to Cell C, MTN, Vodacom and 8ta

We are learners in a Grade 11 class at Sinenjongo High School, Joe Slovo Park, Milnerton, Cape Town. We recently heard that in some other African countries like Kenya and Uganda certain cell phone providers are offering their customers free access to Wikipedia.

We think this is a wonderful idea and would really like to encourage you also to make the same offer here in South Africa. It would be totally amazing to be able to access information on our cell phones which would be affordable to us.

Our school does not have a library at all so when we need to do research we have to walk a long way to the local library. When we get there we have to wait in a queue to use the one or two computers which have the internet. At school we do have 25 computers but we struggle to get to use them because they are mainly for the learners who do CAT (Computer Application Technology) as a subject. Going to an internet cafe is also not an easy option because you have to pay per half hour.

90% of us have cell phones but it is expensive for us to buy airtime so if we could get free access to Wikipedia it would make a huge difference to us.

Normally when we do research Wikipedia is one of the best sites for us to use and so we go straight to it. The information there is clear, updated and there is information on just about every topic.

Our education system needs help and having access to Wikipedia would make a very positive difference. Just think of the boost that it will give us as students and to the whole education system of South Africa.

— From Sinombongo, Sinako, Busisiwe, Ntswaki, Bomkazi, Lindokuhle, Ntsika, Patrick, Ndumiso, Sinazo, Bathandwa, Nokuthembela, Lutho, Mandlilakhe, Zingisile, Aviwe, Nezisa, Ncumisa, Nokubonga, Pheliwe, Zama, Unathi, Malixole and Ntombozuko.

The letter made headlines in the South African press, and my colleague Kul Wadhwa, who manages the Wikipedia Zero program at the Wikimedia Foundation, shared the news with me. I’m always looking for stories to tell about Wikipedia and this was the first grassroots effort (that I know of) that anyone made to get this kind of access to Wikipedia.

Three months ago, I didn’t know anything about this school and had never been to Africa. Being a Wikipedian at heart, I started a page for the school thinking that maybe the page might grow and help me with my research. I then got ahold of Pam Robertson (one of the teachers) at the school via the Facebook campaign page. I asked if I could ask her pupils a few questions (I later learned that the ‘learners,’ as they call themselves, were excited that someone in America even read their letter). I asked her pupils three things: Who are you? Where are you from? What does Wikipedia mean to you?

Here are a few quotes from emails they sent me:

…I attend school at Sinenjongo high school one of the public school in Cape Town. If I can draw you a picture of school, it can look as follows; my school is made of prefabs, it is surrounded by many shacks, there rubbish dump in front of our school, About 15 classes,1 science lab, 2 computer labs, very tiny garden, no playing fields. Nonetheless our school is one the schools that is obtaining good matric results, this shows that we have potentials. After school I want to have a job that i will earn good money so that I can provide for family and live my life to the fullest-not forgetting about giving back to my community. I want to be a role model. Wikipedia means the world. Wikipedia is up dated, it has valid information and it can link you to other websites. We also use it for our projects. If we can get wikipedia free our lives can be easy.

— Nezisa Mdludlu

I am a 17 year old boy staying with a single mother, sister and a brother not forgetting my cousin and her child. We stay in a small shack having no one working surviving with only R1100 supporting grant in each and every month…When I pass my grade 12 I want to do Bsc Degree in Geology and work here at South Africa. Wikipedia can be very useful to me in such a way that when I am doing my assignments and projects I just go to wikipedia and it provide every information I need. Every term my marks are improving because of the information that I get on Wikipedia.

— Lutho

…I would love studying something like Actuarial Science, Astronomy or Medicine. Big complicated numbers and the amazing theories of the birth and the current state of universe fascinate me a lot.

— Sinombongo

…my brother was shot in 2005… Wikipedia is one of the most sites I use to search for information for my career it help of use for project because the isn’t facilities at school and the local library is to far that’s why it’s much easier to use our phones for the internet. But it costs us a lot because we have to stay on the internet for hours and most of the airtime is used and sometimes we save our pocket money to buy airtime. So by having free internet on our phones is easy and saves time.

— Ndumiso

…In my community we don’t have places where we can express our careers…

— Patrick

…As much as we do not have adequate facilities at my school we are determined, proud pupils in the way we perform. The current matric results were rating 94% and we are one of the most improving schools in the Western Cape…

— Sinazo

…I live with my mother and my three brothers; we stay in a one roomed house…

— Lindokuhle

…Learning conditions are poor because we lack sources for over time studies like research, internet for finding new things that are being established now. I would like to be a surgeon, study medicine at university and help my family, provide the love for my mother that she is giving me right now…

— Unathi

…The minute i heard about Wikipedia zero by Mr Piet Strieker I became very interested and would be very happy to access it from my cellphone. Without Wikipedia my schoolwork and my assignments are worth no marks.

— Zamatshatshu

After about the second paragraph, I had tears running down my face. I read pages and pages of quotes like these, describing similar circumstances, each from a different point of view.

I did some more research and found that the principal of the school had made a TED presentation about how she had turned Sinenjongo High School around from a joke of a school that was going to be closed and made it one that gets a 98 percent graduation rate. She did this in 2 years. In the video she talked about how she made the school work:

True transparency and trust…I was open in every decision, every advice from anyone…it was easy for me to gain their trust… People believe in transparency and also people believe in honesty and openness….Everyone is going to be owning this school, it belongs to all of us, not only me.

— Malinga Nopote

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The Nearby feature in Vatican City

We are quick to use mobile applications to find places that fulfil our needs, whether it’s a place to grab a coffee that your friend recommends, where the nearest bus stop is, or where to go for a perfect first date.

But how hard have you thought about the history of your neighborhood, or the events that have shaped the place where you live? There is a wealth of information all around you as you read this blog post. There are historic sites, parks, museums, theatres, cafes and religious buildings. Thanks to the terrific work of our editor community, Wikipedia has accumulated a massive amount of location data associated with its millions of articles; until now we have not fully taken advantage of this information.

We are happy to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation mobile team has been working on a Nearby page to surface this information. Along with the goal of bringing awareness of the surrounding areas to our existing readers, we hope that this simple tool can attract new editors to these articles, whether it is to update the information on the exhibits in a local museum, or simply to add a photo of a nearby park that is in severe need of a properly licensed lead image.

Look out for the camera icon to show those articles that need your photos

As a first pass, the mobile team has focused on using the Nearby page to surfaces articles in close proximity that lack images, inviting users to add one. Upon visiting those pages, the user will be prompted to illustrate the article, which they can do quickly and easily if they’re on a mobile device that supports taking and uploading photos.

The Nearby feature, although designed with the Wikipedia mobile experience in mind, also works on the desktop version of Wikipedia. In the future, we envision this as a useful step in the editing onboarding process, helping new users learn about editing by encouraging them to improve an article on a topic nearby.

Help make Wikipedia more beautiful, vibrant and educational for all our readers! Explore your local area and find the pages near you that need a photo or updated information. Stay tuned to the Wikimedia blog for more opportunities to contribute via the mobile web, coming soon.

Jon Robson
Software Engineer, Mobile
Wikimedia Foundation

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The mobile web engineering team at the Wikimedia Foundation confronts a significant question every day: How does a team stay synchronized and productive when teammates are scattered around the globe? Our team is highly distributed and effective communication is a challenge. We focus on some of the highest priority engineering areas for the WMF, and at any point our team may include members in California, Colorado, Arizona , Russia, India, Poland, and the United Kingdom. To help us clear our geographic and temporal hurdles, we embrace a culture of continuous improvement in the ways we engage with one another and our work.

For many, having a collocated team is critical for success. We, on the other hand, see big advantages in our geographic distribution. The diversity of opinions, world experiences, and cultural knowledge that we can bring to the table through global distribution helps us better cope with some of the challenges we face in developing easy-to-use and accessible tools for a global audience. Of course, we might achieve this by generally hiring people from around the world, but the pool of exceptional recruits is much bigger when you don’t have a relocation requirement.

Similarly, having team members in other locales gives us greater exposure to people using our products on devices you might not commonly find in the US. Our geographic distribution also gives us closer to around-the-clock coverage in case of emergencies. Finally, building support for working remotely into the team gives us all a huge amount of freedom; any of us can travel (for business, pleasure, emergencies, etc) and not have to worry about falling out of sync with the rest of the team.

We make it all work with a multitude of communication tools, organizational practices, and discipline. While sometimes it can feel like there is no real substitute for face-to-face communication, our approach to these challenges has given us great strength, freedom, and resilience. The list of tools we use is long, and many of them are useful even for collocated teams. I will cover a few of the most crucial in detail below.

Video conferencing

The mobile web team using Google Hangout for a regular meeting where nearly every participant is in a different location.

Due in part to its simplicity, we rely on Google Hangouts for all of our regular meetings and for the occasional ad-hoc meeting where asynchronous communication will not do. In order to be effective, it’s important for video chat tools to stay out of the way so we can focus on communicating rather than wrestling with technical complications. Of the many tools we use, only one closely approximates in-person, face-to-face communication: group video chat. It’s the highest-bandwidth (yeah, pun intended) tool at our disposal and when used right, it can make all of the distance between us melt away.

Hangouts does this very well; it highlights the video of the person speaking, mutes your microphone when you’re typing, and screen-sharing is very simple. Audio and video quality adjusts automatically based on your bandwidth, and toggling your camera or mic on/off is trivial. The ‘effects’ feature lets you dress up participants in things like pirate hats and mustaches, making meetings more fun and helping the miles between participants disappear. Oh, and it’s free if you use GMail or Google Apps.

We have been iterating to find the best hardware setup for supporting Google Hangouts in the office in as unobtrusive a way as possible. While the mobile web team and other distributed teams have been working hard for improvements, the IT department has been doing an outstanding job helping to find and implement what works. We’ve dedicated one conference room to be our test subject and we are very close to finding an excellent set up. It’s unclear whether this will work well in our other conference rooms (do not underestimate how challenging room acoustics can be!), but we have come a long way from wasting half of our meeting time trying to get the technology to work for remote teammates.

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Login screen on the Commons app for Android.

Love taking photos on your smartphone? Now you don’t need to wait to get home to upload your high quality educational photos to Wikimedia Commons, the free image repository used by Wikipedia and many other projects.

The official Wikimedia Commons app for iOS and Android allows you to quickly and easily upload your photos to Commons. You can also upload multiple files and add categories (Android only so far) and share your uploads through your favorite image sharing sites. Your contributions to Commons can help illustrate the world’s largest encyclopedia and make knowledge come to life for millions of readers around the globe.

The “my uploads” view on the Commons app for iOS.

In the future, we hope to add more features and make it easier to browse and discover all the great content Commons has to offer. We also look forward to being able to run more campaigns like Wiki Loves Monuments, encouraging expert Commons users and people new to Wikimedia projects alike to contribute to high-need content areas.

As always, we need your help and input to make these apps better. Take the apps for a test drive and let us know if you encounter bugs, or if you have great ideas for features we should add in the future.

And if you don’t have an iOS or Android device, don’t feel left out! Uploads to Commons for a wider selection of phones and browsers are supported on the mobile version of all Wikimedia projects.

Maryana Pinchuk, Associate Product Manager, Wikimedia Foundation

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In the Wikimedia movement, we have a vision statement that inspires many contributions to our endeavor: “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.”

comScore traffic data to Wikimedia sites.

We’re still a long way from realizing that vision, but we’ve recently surpassed an important milestone: as of March 2013, the combined sites hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation reached more than 500 million monthly unique visitors, according to the latest comScore Media Metrix data. Our traffic increased to 517 million in March, five percent higher than our previous record: 492 million in May 2012.

While more people are coming to Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia sites, they are also staying longer and reading more. Over the past 12 months, Wikipedia monthly page requests increased from 17.1 billion to 21.3 billion, with the mobile share increasing to roughly 15 percent of the total, or more than 3 billion monthly views (data). We’re also gratified to see growth in significant target areas: in India, traffic as a percentage of our worldwide total increased from 4.0 percent to 4.8 percent; in Brazil it increased from 3.6 percent to 5.9 percent.

To reach the entire planet, we will need to not only continue to expand our mobile offerings, but also eliminate barriers to access. With Wikipedia Zero, we’re partnering with mobile providers in the developing world to reduce or eliminate data fees for accessing Wikipedia on a mobile phone. In March, we announced the fifth major Wikipedia Zero partnership, which means that the program will be available to 410 million mobile users around the world.

For those who don’t have an Internet connection at all, Wikimedia movement contributors are enabling offline access to Wikipedia, such as the work by Kenyan volunteers who travel to rural schools and install copies of the encyclopedia on computers there. And now, there’s also an open source application for Android phones and tablets that makes it easy to download and read offline copies of Wikimedia content.

The idea of enabling every single human being to freely share in the sum of all knowledge is still as audacious as ever — but it’s also starting to look like an achievable goal, if we come together to make it happen.

Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation

The Nardis Waterfall (Cascate Nardis) in Trentino, Italy, uploaded via mobile.

Wikipedia isn’t just the encyclopedia anyone can edit—it’s also the encyclopedia anyone can illustrate. Starting this week, logged in users browsing the mobile web on smartphones with upload capability will see a new feature: the ability to add images to articles that lack them.

In one easy step, you can upload an image from your phone’s camera or image library and add it directly to an article that has no images. You can also donate images for use on articles that already have images but may need more.

Images enhance the visual appeal of Wikipedia and its sister projects and help bring our content to life, but they’re also a powerful educational tool. There’s no better way to describe a notable building or landmark than with a current photo. Not only will you be illustrating knowledge, you’ll also be sharing your photographs with billions of people around the globe.

An example of an article lacking images on the mobile English Wikipedia.

For example, a quick snapshot from your smart phone’s camera can showcase the beauty of the Nardis Waterfall in Trentino to Wikipedia readers who have never set foot in Northern Italy. With millions of articles on Wikipedia, no matter where you are, it’s likely that you have an important piece of knowledge to illustrate right in your backyard.

Smartphones with cameras are becoming increasingly prevalent, and more mobile sites and apps are focused on getting people to explore and photograph the world around them, so it made sense for our mobile web team to bring this feature to Wikipedia.

Unlike many other image sharing sites on the web, images donated via Wikimedia mobile are released under a free license and can be shared and reused by anyone, anywhere, for free. When you donate images to Wikimedia projects, you’re not just sharing photos with your friends, you’re sharing them with everyone in the world.

Help make Wikipedia more beautiful, vibrant and educational for all our readers! Log in or create an account on any one of the over 280 language Wikipedias or sister projects to try out this feature. And stay tuned for more opportunities to contribute via the mobile web, coming soon.

Maryana Pinchuk, Associate Product Manager
Mobile Web

Monday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced Axiata Group Berhad as the newest partner in the Wikipedia Zero program. Through this partnership, Axiata will offer Wikipedia on mobile devices free of data charges to its customers in Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. In three of the countries (Indonesia, Cambodia, Sri Lanka) this will be the first implementation of Wikipedia Zero.

In many countries within Asia and throughout the developing world, the barriers to accessing Wikipedia can be substantial. For example, in Cambodia, where there is an active Wikipedia editor community, mobile penetration is over 100 percent, but gross national income per capita is still less than $1,000 a year. Soon, however, anyone in Cambodia with a Smart Axiata SIM card and browser-enabled phone will be able to access Wikipedia Zero without cost being an issue.

This announcement comes soon after other exciting news for Wikipedia Zero, including a partnership with Vimpelcom, a grant from the Knight Foundation, and a SXSW Interactive Award for activism. As Kul Wadhwa wrote in last week’s blog post, Wikipedia Zero is “activism” because the program advocates a paradigm shift to a world where free access to knowledge is a fundamental human right.

Reducing barriers, really, is what Wikipedia is all about. An open-source, collaborative encyclopedia, compiled exclusively by a volunteer community, challenges the idea that information must be commodified. The editor community, in overcoming that barrier, has created over 25 million articles since Wikipedia was started in 2001. Past surveys demonstrate that the most common motivation volunteers express for editing Wikipedia is that they like the idea of sharing knowledge.

They want to reduce the gap between the information they have and someone else’s ability to benefit from it. However, even once that information is available, many potential readers run into economic and technical impediments that prevent access. Wikipedia Zero partner organizations have taken a bold step, like Axiata has today, to reduce those.

We applaud Axiata and look forward to more mobile carriers partnering with us to bring free knowledge to every single person on the planet.

Amit Kapoor, Senior Manager, Mobile Partnerships

Several months ago I learned that Wikipedia Zero was nominated as a finalist for the SXSW 2013 Interactive Awards. I was obviously thrilled, since we were one of only five projects to receive this honor in the Education category. We’ve always thought of Wikipedia as an educational resource, because learning starts by providing people with knowledge and it was great to be recognized for that.

My thinking changed earlier this year when I got an email from Andrew A. McNeill, the Festival Coordinator at SXSW Interactive. He asked what I thought about switching award categories from Education to Activism. I was initially surprised by the suggestion. We focus on knowledge and education, right? Isn’t that what Wikipedia’s all about? I was so mired in day-to-day operations I never had the chance to reflect back on what we were really doing.

Activism? Really? I just had my head down, along with the rest of my team, moving our work along and doing what needed to be done.

But getting this program up and running was no easy task. We rely heavily on partners to eliminate the data cost to users to access Wikipedia on mobile devices. This involves weeks, if not months, of negotiations with mobile operators, along with various technical changes to make the program a reality. We had to educate everyone we work with about what Wikipedia is and isn’t: we do not and will not filter or censor content, and the site is maintained and improved by the community of volunteer contributors. There is no up-sell or compelling business proposition that we can really offer. This is about changing the mindset of partners, and ultimately users and the entire public. We’re working to convince people that everyone on the planet should have access to free knowledge, that this should be a fundamental human right.

That’s when I realized we weren’t just selling a program, we’re trying to shift a paradigm. In order to fulfill our mission, we had to change the way people thought about what’s important in life. We really were activists. I didn’t realize that because this is just what we needed to do.

True activism, however, must be driven at the grass-roots level and we’re beginning to see that develop. People are demanding free access to knowledge, but we need to see much more of it. Much more.

In some ways, Wikipedia Zero is different from what we’ve done in the past at the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia and its sisters sites are the number five most visited website in the world (comScore Mediamatrix), and we’ve experienced phenomenal growth. However, we have never spent any resources on marketing, SEO, or other web traffic driving techniques. It has all been organic growth.

Wikipedia Zero, however, is about reaching the people who need access to knowledge  and who aren’t getting it. Therefore, we have to proactively get to users, which is something we hadn’t done before. It takes enormous time, effort and will-power; it is a tremendous task to reach people in the developing world who face barriers such as cost, poor infrastructure, low-end mobile phones that aren’t data-enabled, and even those who are illiterate. We also have to invest in campaigns that drive awareness and understanding of Wikipedia, because we are trying to reach people that have had little or no exposure to it’s benefits.

I’m happy to say we are making great inroads. Wikipedia Zero is now available to 330 million mobile users around the world and we’ll be announcing more partnerships soon. We are honored that Wikipedia Zero won at SXSW and we appreciate the validation the award conveys to our efforts. But this is only the beginning. Activism is step one. Next stop, accelerating this program so it becomes a movement to benefit all of humankind.

As I said in our acceptance speech, “Thank you for keeping knowledge free,” and we need to continue to do that. Lobby your mobile operator and your government. Tell your friends. Help us make free knowledge accessible to everyone.

Kul Takanao Wadhwa, Head of Mobile, Wikimedia Foundation

Wikimedia Commons holds millions of images and thousands of audio and video clips, created by Wikimedians or contributed from the outside through free content licenses.

Many of the high-end photographs are created with professional-level equipment and post-processing software, but it’s often said that “the best camera is the one you have with you.” And in this day and age, that usually means the mobile phone.

Wikimedia’s Mobile Apps team has been putting together Android and iOS apps for Wikimedia Commons, allowing you to take photos on the camera you always have with you and upload them to Commons either immediately or at your leisure.

• The Android beta is available now on the Google Play store.
• iOS betas are distributed on an opt-in invite basis; sign up here on your iPhone or iPad and you’ll be notified when the next beta is ready. (Due to Apple restrictions, you won’t be able to install betas from before you signed up.)

At this stage of development we’re mostly looking for testers who are experienced Commons users — you’ll need to sign in to the app with an existing Wikimedia account — and hoping for feedback on the workflows and on any bugs we haven’t ironed out yet.

So far we’ve had 55 unique uploaders using the apps in the last two weeks (49 on Android, 9 on iOS, and of course a little overlap!), uploading images like these:

Taken with iPhone 4S

Taken with Samsung Galaxy S3

Our goal is to hit 1000 uploaders per month once we’re in full release.

As always, these tools are completely open source — you’re all welcome to follow our progress on the project page, file bugs, or even submit patches directly on GitHub (Android, iOS).

And for those using different mobile operating systems, we haven’t abandoned you. Photo upload support is in beta on the mobile web site as well… stay tuned for more information!

Brion Vibber, Lead Software Architect, Wikimedia Foundation

Footnotes

• Copyright notes: “CountryLink XPT at platform 1 at Southern Cross Station (1)” by User:Bidgee, under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported, from Wikimedia Commons; “Musée d’Orsay – 5th floor – Visitors look at Paris through the window of a big turret clock” by User:Oliver H, under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported, from Wikimedia Commons.

This post has also been published on the blog of the Knight Foundation.

We’re in the middle of an information revolution that’s changing the way billions of people in developing countries obtain news and knowledge. With a $10 cell phone, a high school student in New Delhi or a cab driver in Dakar can access the Internet and — through Wikipedia and other websites — learn volumes about virtually any subject. If knowledge is power, then the developing world, with almost five billion cell-phone subscriptions, is poised to make amazing changes.

There’s just one catch: An overwhelming percentage of new mobile users in India, Senegal and other developing countries can’t afford data charges, so they’re effectively excluded from sites like Wikipedia. It’s a de facto blackout, a kind of information segregation that shunts potential Internet users to the side of a very important road.

That’s why the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, has established Wikipedia Zero, a program where we partner with mobile operators to give their mobile users free-of-charge access to Wikipedia and its growing trove of 24 million articles.

In 2012, the Wikimedia Foundation signed Wikipedia Zero partnerships with three mobile operators, which is bringing free Wikipedia access to 230 million mobile users in 31 countries. In January of 2013, we signed a fourth partnership that extends Wikipedia Zero to at least 100 million more mobile users in five more countries.

And with the recent support of the Knight News Challenge grant, designed to accelerate media innovation by funding breakthrough ideas in news and information, a series of exciting new developments is on the horizon. We are: speeding up the development of Wikipedia Zero; hastening the development of the software that lets a simple feature phone (the dominant phone in developing countries) connect easily to Wikipedia’s mobile site; augmenting the development of the engineering that, on Wikipedia, makes hundreds of native languages readable from mobile devices; and pioneering a program to give mobile users USSD & SMS access to Wikipedia.

We’re very excited about delivering Wikipedia via text, which we expect to roll out within the next few months. With the program, users will send a text request to Wikipedia and, within seconds, they will get the article to their phone. To deliver this innovative technology, we’re partnering with the Praekelt Foundation, a nonprofit based in Johannesburg, South Africa. It’s another example of the tremendous collaborative spirit that has always driven Wikipedia and always will.

The number of mobile users who can get free access to Wikipedia is increasing rapidly, and so is its usage. In the countries where Wikipedia Zero has already been deployed, Wikipedia readership of local, non-English languages grew upwards of 400 percent in six months. On our partner’s network in Niger, Wikipedia’s mobile traffic increased by 77 percent in the first four months of Wikipedia Zero, compared to 7 percent growth on Niger’s mobile networks that don’t have Wikipedia Zero. In Kenya, the growth from Wikipedia Zero was even higher – 88 percent. The demand is there for much more growth, and word-of-mouth is spreading.

And the movement for access to knowledge is coming from all sides. Last December, a group of 11th-graders at Sinenjongo High School in Cape Town, South Africa, wrote a heartfelt letter to four mobile operators, imploring them to give their South African customers free-of-charge mobile access to Wikipedia. They had learned about Wikipedia Zero, even though the service is not yet available in South Africa. The Cape Town students have the technology in their hands, but they lack the money to pay for data charges. In their letter, which was published in Gadget, an online South Africa magazine that covers consumer technology, the 24 students wrote:

“We recently heard that in some other African countries like Kenya and Uganda certain cell phone providers are offering their customers free access to Wikipedia. We think this is a wonderful idea and would really like to encourage you also to make the same offer here in South Africa. It would be totally amazing to be able to access information on our cell phones which would be affordable to us.

Our school does not have a library at all so when we need to do research we have to walk a long way to the local library.  When we get there we have to wait in a queue to use the one or two computers which have the internet.  At school we do have 25 computers but we struggle to get to use them because they are mainly for the learners who do CAT (Computer Application Technology) as a subject. Going to an internet cafe is also not an easy option because you have to pay per half hour. 90% of us have cellphones but it is expensive for us to buy airtime so if we could get free access to Wikipedia it would make a huge difference to us…Our education system needs help and having access to Wikipedia would make a very positive difference. Just think of the boost that it will give us as students and to the whole education system of South Africa.”

Their letter is a reminder that the human spirit craves access to free information. Indeed, I firmly believe that access to free knowledge should be a universal human right. News and knowledge change lives for the better. They always have.

From the beginning of the Wikimedia movement, and more broadly across the free knowledge movement, the goal has been to break down the digital divide, and render barriers to knowledge obsolete. There’s no better time than now to make gigantic inroads in that quest. Eighty percent of all new mobile phone subscribers are in developing countries, according to the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union. For now, of the 25 countries that have the highest rate of mobile traffic on Wikipedia, 22 are developing countries. The top eight countries are all in Africa.

We will do what it takes to get free knowledge into the hands of students like those in South Africa who are clamoring for it. We will continue partnering with mobile operators who donate their resources to the service of Wikipedia Zero. In the next two years, we will write more blog posts that detail the progress we make in the developing world.

The Knight News Challenge mobile grant is an important milestone in our movement to make free knowledge available to everyone, including every person in the developing world. We see 2013 as a year of significant transition as we make our vision a long-term reality. As I said, access to knowledge should be a human right. And the Wikimedia Foundation is thrilled to be part of the Information Revolution that is bringing free knowledge around the world. We want others to join us, and as the 11th-graders in South Africa have shown us, to also be leaders in this movement. With hard work and true partnership, this dream will become a reality for the students in South Africa, and indeed, everyone, everywhere.

Kul Takanao Wadhwa, head of mobile for Wikimedia Foundation