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

We’ve been really interested in search lately. Last month we improved our mobile site by adding search type-ahead suggestions, term-by-term search building, and a larger input box. Those changes were really helpful but we weren’t quite done yet. As we thought more and more about search it became clear that we weren’t using our usable space very well. Screen real estate is precious and you have to use it very wisely on mobile. Rather then squishing all of our search results inside a fraction of the screen we’re testing using the whole screen for search results. When you search on the beta you’ll notice that the search interface now uses your whole screen rather then a tiny and hard-to-tap portion.

Most of our users have said that when they search they are moving forward not backward. As a result we want to focus their experience on what they are actually doing: search. By using the whole screen we can better focus our users and provide them with a richer experience. We’ll continue to iterate on the design as we get feedback from you.

As we mentioned last time, anyone can try new features by opting in to the beta. We also made it easy to track the current release features by going here. Please opt in and give use feedback. Don’t be shy, help make Wikipedia on mobile a success!

Probably the most repeated words around the Wikimedia movement are Jimmy Wales’ “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.” The Wikipedia community are the ones creating that world, and the ubiquity of mobile internet is what may actually enable it. With mobile internet users expected to surpass desktop users by 2014, mobile is fast becoming the primary medium by which people around the world can access knowledge. In the Global South particularly, many new mobile internet users are part of a generation whose first and only access to the internet is on mobile. This presents both an opportunity and a challenge to Wikipedia – how do we let these users know that the sum of all knowledge exists in their pocket, and how do we make it free? On the desktop, many readers discovered Wikipedia through search, but on mobile, sessions and queries originate differently. With this in mind, we need the help of partners – namely mobile operators and handset manufacturers – to help ensure the distribution of knowledge.  This is why we’re setting out with a global mobile partnership program.

We are looking for operator partners, particularly in the Global South, to join us in this mission. We want to work with them to help promote the availability of Wikipedia on phones — and, not just on smartphones, but across the range of data and feature phone users. This would include links through bookmarks, decks, and portals as well as marketing messages driving awareness towards the accessibility of free knowledge on mobile. Additionally, we are currently exploring ways to develop feature phone access to Wikipedia through SMS and USSD, and operator partnerships will be core to that initiative as well.

At the center of this whole strategy will be the launch of Wikipedia Zero – a lightweight, text-only version of our mobile site optimized for slower connections. The “zero” part means zero-rated, or rather zero cost to the user. Operator partners would “zero-rate” the custom site, meaning the user would not get charged data fees (nor be required to have a data plan) to access it. This will be a great asset to many mobile users in the Global South, who, although they may have an internet-ready phone, are deterred by data fees. This, to us, is in pursuit of truly enabling the “free” in “freely share in the sum of all knowledge.”

We are working to enlist new global partners now, particularly for Wikipedia Zero.  Mobile partnerships have long been seen as an important priority, but we haven’t had enough manpower to execute them on a fully global scale until now.  I joined the foundation three months ago as part of the global development mobile team (lead by Kul Wadhwa) with enlisting and managing these partnerships as my priority. Kul and I have begun to talk with new partners already, and we hope to announce some soon.  Given that we have a lot of ground to cover, we have to be systematic, so we are focusing first on India and East Asia in Q4 of this year, followed by the Middle East and Africa in Q1 2012, and Latin America in Q2 2012. This coincides in part with the global development programs including India Catalyst, Arabic Catalyst, and Brazil Catalyst.  Of course, we expect there will be some deviations from this sequence.

We’re also working very tightly with the mobile dev/product teams and community to ensure all the innovations and enhancements (including the forthcoming Android release) they are bringing are accessible throughout the world through these partnerships. We look forward to sharing the progress,  learnings, and discoveries here.

Amit Kapoor
Senior Manager, Mobile Partnerships

Over the last month, we’ve been hard at work building a Wikipedia Android app for our users and partners that prefer apps over the mobile web. It’s built with the PhoneGap framework and makes use of HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript to power all of its features. Many thanks to our partners at Nitobi for getting us here.

Thanks to the Wikimedia Operations team our blog is now mobile friendly. As the WMF expands its mobile development projects its important to make sure that our established communications tools are mobile friendly as well. To do that we’ve enabled the mobile edition plugin for all of our blogs. Let us know how it looks.

As an increasing number of people access the internet from their mobile phones Wikipedia needs to become increasingly mobile. Recently we wrote about the new mobile frontend but how do you get to a Wikipedia article in the first place, especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for or don’t speak the local language?

Introducing QRpedia.
QR codes – barcodes for the internet – have been around for decades and the technology is increasingly being used in everything from street advertising to museum object labels. QRpedia takes the concept one step further to allow a single QR code to send you seamlessly to the mobile-friendly version of any Wikipedia article in your own language. This system is unique to Wikipedia because no other website has manually created links between languages across such an incredible breadth of topics.

A QRpedia code for the Wikipedia article about the artist Joan Miró. 1 code, 40 languages. Try this one for yourself!

When you scan the code the language setting of your phone is also transmitted. QRpedia uses Wikipedia’s API to determine whether there is a version of the chosen Wikipedia article in the language your phone is using, and if so, displays the mobile-friendly version. If there is no article (yet!) in your preferred language it will show you the most relevant article instead.

Launched in April this year, the open source QRpedia was developed out of the partnership between the Derby Museum and Gallery, England and local Wikimedia contributors Roger Bamkin, chair of Wikimedia UK, and Terence Eden, a mobile web consultant. As “Wikipedian in Residence” at the Derby Museum, Roger capitalised on this system by hosting the hugely successful Multilingual Challenge (map of participants) to ensure that content of key importance to the museum was translated into as many languages as possible. Terence built the system and the museum was kind enough to install object labels incorporating the codes.

In an era when cultural funding is very constrained, the combination of QRpedia and the global Wikipedia community enabled the Derby museum to produce a multilingual visitor experience at virtually no cost. Easy mobile access to Wikipedia articles allows visitors to the museum to access unprecedented detail about the objects and their context – information that didn’t make it onto the exhibit label.

Jimmy Wales scanning the QRpedia code at the working antique carousel in the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis.

This system is now in use in other museums around the world. These include exhibitions at the on-site museum of the the National Archives of the UK, in the permanent signage of key objects at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and in a major traveling exhibition of Miró’s work in association with the Fundació Joan Miró of Barcelona.

To generate your own QRpedia codes visit http://qrpedia.org/
and simply paste the URL of any Wikipedia article into the box.
The freely licensed sourcecode can be viewed at http://code.google.com/p/qrwp/

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Liam Wyatt
Cultural Partnerships Fellow

At the same time as the #WCI11 or the Wikiconference India, there will be a genuine MediaWiki hackathon. The focus of this event will be to crush the technical obstacles that prevent Wikipedia and its sister projects to thrive in India.

This hackathon will be the first held in Asia. Many seasoned developers will be coming to Mumbai to learn first hand what can be done and see what can be done there and then.

To make it a success, there is a Wiki page with our current ideas for the hackathon. The premisses will have rooms for break-out sessions, there will be plenty space, power, internet connectivity, coffee, tea and munchies.

Most important will be that we will be there to learn from you and to show you what we are working on. The Localisation team will be there, the off-line people will be there and the mobile team will be there. We need to meet the many people working on Open Source in India because we want to make sure that whatever we will do fits in with what is already there.

We hope to see you in Mumbai.

Thanks,

Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

Thanks to everyone for participating in our first round of mobile gateway testing.

This time around we’d like you to have our new mobile gateway for your default experience.

Follow this link on your mobile phone to opt in: http://tinyurl.com/woptin and send us feedback.

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