Wikimedia blog

News from the Wikimedia Foundation and about the Wikimedia movement

Wikipedia Zero

Wikimedia projects reach more than 500 million people per month

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.

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

 

Axiata joins Wikimedia Foundation as newest Wikipedia Zero partner

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

Wikipedia Zero wins 2013 SXSW Interactive “Activism” award

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.

Wikipedia_Zero_1_Mumbai_Guy_on_phone

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

Getting Wikipedia to the people who need it most

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

Cellphone user in Mumbai, India

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


VimpelCom partnership grows the reach of Wikipedia Zero to 330 million mobile users

We’re excited to announce VimpelCom, the sixth largest mobile network operator in the world, as the newest partner in the Wikipedia Zero program. By waiving data fees to access Wikipedia on mobile phones, VimpelCom will join the Wikimedia Foundation in our effort to give every single person on the planet access to the free knowledge on Wikipedia.

VimpelCom’s footprint covers eighteen countries with a base of almost 210 million mobile subscribers primarily in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. We are setting out to bring Wikipedia Zero to a minimum of 100 million VimpelCom subscribers in developing countries later this year, with more to follow in 2014. Together with the 230 million customers of our existing partners, this makes Wikipedia Zero available to 330 million people.

The primary target of Wikipedia Zero is people whose primary or only access to the internet is via a mobile device, and VimpelCom’s geographies fit this definition very well. In our analysis of the twenty-five countries with the highest percentage of mobile traffic (based on a minimum of 500K Wikipedia mobile page views), VimpelCom operates in five of them (Zimbabwe, Cambodia, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Bangladesh). The table below shows that nine of their markets exceed the global average for mobile usage, and for those that currently don’t, free access to mobile Wikipedia will help increase that percentage significantly.

VimpelCom Emerging Markets Mobile Percentages

In seven of VimpelCom’s operating territories, Russian is the primary language for Wikipedia readership. A quick glance at the readership of Russian Wikipedia shows how fast mobile usage has risen in these countries over the last year. As of December 2012, 14.1 percent of Russian Wikipedia traffic was to the mobile site, on par with the English Wikipedia ratio of 14.6 percent. More telling of this growth is that two years ago, the Russian percentage was half that of English. It’s a testimony of the decreasing price of internet-capable mobile phones having made access to knowledge in local languages attainable for much of the world’s population. By removing data cost as a barrier, VimpelCom will make this even more of a reality.

English and Russian Mobile Wikipedia Traffic

Wikipedia Zero has already proven to accelerate mobile Wikipedia traffic within our existing partners’ networks. The marketing efforts which VimpelCom operators put behind the program will raise awareness of Wikipedia in places where it is less well known, and we hope to see similar spikes in traffic in each of these territories. We look forward to sharing the results, news, and case studies here.

See also the press release: VimpelCom partners with the Wikimedia Foundation to offer free mobile Wikipedia access through Wikipedia Zero, and the accompanying Q&A

Amit Kapoor, Senior Manager, Mobile Partnerships

Wikimedia Foundation winner of Knight News Challenge

We’re very excited to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation was named a winner in the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight News Challenge for our work to expand and improve Wikimedia mobile projects, particularly for users in developing countries.

Knight Foundation supports expansion of access to Wikipedia via mobile

As mobile technology is increasingly the primary opportunity for billions of people around the world to access the Internet, our mobile teams are working to remove the two biggest hurdles to access free knowledge: cost and accessibility. The $600,000 News Challenge grant will be utilized in four areas:

  • Improving the way that users experience our mobile platform on feature phones;
  • Expanding Wikipedia Zero, which gives mobile users free access to Wikipedia on their phones;
  • Developing features to improve the mobile experience regardless of how feature-rich the device is, including new ways to access Wikipedia via texting;
  • Increasing the number of languages that can access Wikipedia on mobile.

“Knight Foundation’s funding will support us making the mobile version of Wikipedia easier to use, as well as enabling us to expand Wikipedia Zero, our project with mobile operators that lets their customers access Wikipedia for free,” said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. “I’m very happy Knight has chosen to support us; it’s an important affirmation of our mobile work.”

The Wikimedia Foundation is one of eight mobile projects to receive a total of $2.4 million today through the Knight News Challenge, which aims to accelerate projects with funding and advice from Knight’s network of media innovators. A full list of the News Challenge Mobile winners is at knightfoundation.org.

“Wikipedia has helped define the way that people collaboratively create content. Making the site available to more people  across the world will help foster and spread that culture,” said John Bracken, director for journalism and media innovation at Knight Foundation.

The $600,000 News Challenge grant is for two years and follows a general support grant of $250,000 that Knight Foundation awarded to the Wikimedia Foundation in December 2012.

The Wikimedia Foundation and the other winners of the challenge will present their projects from a gathering on the future of mobile at Arizona State University via live Web stream at 12:30 p.m. ET/9:30 a.m. PT, Friday, Jan. 18 at knightfoundation.org/live. (Follow #newschallenge on Twitter.) For more, visit knightfoundation.org or newschallenge.org.

Matthew Roth, Global Communications Manager, Wikimedia Foundation

The countries in which mobile matters most

At the beginning of this year, we launched Wikipedia Zero with the aim of reducing barriers to accessing knowledge on mobile devices. Many people in the developing world use mobile phones as their primary–or only–means to access the Internet. Through partnerships with telecommunications companies, Wikipedia Zero removes the cost of data as an obstacle between individuals and the power of knowledge.

There are close to 6 billion mobile subscriptions in the world, but less than 600 million broadband connections, or 1/10th. Broadband connections are relatively scarce in developing countries, with less than 5 connections per 100 people, but there is nearly one mobile subscription per every single person on the planet [1].

As mobile becomes more of a ubiquitous access point in developing countries, it has immense potential to bring knowledge to many people who previously had limited means to access information. We’ve repeated this message throughout the year, and I wanted to share some data that substantiate our target for the Wikipedia Zero program. Below is a list of the top 25 most mobile-centric countries, meaning those that have the highest ratio of mobile to overall traffic on Wikipedia:

Top mobile countries to Wikipedia.

Of the top 25, there are 22 countries classified as developing. Twelve of them, including all of the top 8, are in Africa. Even more telling is that 16 of these countries have mobile usage percentages greater than 20 percent. Compare that to the global average of 11.5 percent–and 15.6 percent in the U.S.–and you get a sense for how much potential mobile has to change the world.

In 2012, we announced Wikipedia Zero partnerships in 31 developing countries. Eleven of those have launched so far, and from what we’ve seen, they’ve had measurable impact. In 2013, we plan to bring a lot more partners and countries on board, many of them on the list above. We expect the percentages in the list to increase even more next year, and we hope that our efforts help drive the accessibility and awareness of Wikipedia to accelerate the trend.

(Special thanks to volunteer Kajari Ghosh for helping compile this data.)

Amit Kapoor, Senior Manager, Mobile Partnerships

[1] http://mobithinking.com/mobile-marketing-tools/latest-mobile-stats/a#subscribers

Wikipedia Zero grows readership in Africa and Asia

A little over six months ago, we deployed our first Wikipedia Zero partnership with Orange in Uganda, offering mobile internet users access to Wikipedia without data charges. Since then, nine additional operators in different countries have launched the program, and twenty-two others are in the current queue. We are now beginning to see the impact of the program, and the first numbers are encouraging: page views from our partners in Niger and Kenya have risen sharply, as have unique visitors in Malaysia.

Context

Our stated mission for the Wikipedia Zero program is to reduce barriers for accessing Wikipedia on mobile devices. From the outset, it has been our goal to manage this program with an analytical lens. With the cost of data removed, we expect an increase in the amount of people accessing Wikipedia for the first time, and also hope that existing readers aren’t deterred from reading more articles. The best proxy to measure this is to look at the growth of Wikipedia page views that come from a mobile partner’s IP address range, and compare it to the growth rate of mobile page views from the rest of that same country. Ultimately, we also want to measure unique visitor additions from the program (to verify that new readers are indeed being introduced), but, internally, we can only measure page views for now.

Page View Growth

Two of our partners agreed to let us publish Wikipedia Zero traffic figures from their network for this blog post. Orange Niger and Orange Kenya both launched the program in July of this year. Both countries are extremely mobile-centric, with 41 percent of all Wikipedia page views in Kenya and 29 percent in Niger coming from mobile (compared to a global total of 12 percent)[1]. The chart below shows Wikipedia mobile page views for each partner and country respectively:

The news is good. Since the month prior to launch, we’ve seen 77 percent growth in page views through Orange Niger (compared to 7 percent for rest of Niger), and 88 percent for Orange Kenya (compared to -7 percent for rest of Kenya). For each of these two operators, their “Wikipedia share” (the percentage of mobile page views in that country from the partner’s customers) has nearly doubled in that time. Data sets for these two partners are both relatively small, so we’re careful to not to draw too many conclusions from them. However, we’re excited about what it might imply for the future impact of the program.

Unique Visitor Growth

As mentioned before, we’re unable to measure partner unique visitors yet through our internal analytics (our public, global figures for unique visitors are measured by comScore Mediamatrix). However, some partners, such as Digi (Telenor’s subsidiary in Malaysia), do have their own mechanisms for measurement. Since they launched the program in May, unique visitors to Wikipedia on their network have jumped 42 percent, from 91,000 to 131,000. Though it is not yet something we can measure on a recurring basis, it’s a telling indicator that Wikipedia Zero partnerships are successful in bringing new readers to the site.

What’s next

These three data points make us really optimistic. They show growth, though we need to continually manage and measure to see if growth persists when we work with larger bases, and also need to test what happens over time. We’ll share more data as we can, and we also hope to deep dive into a few markets over the next several months to learn exactly what type of partner marketing activity is most effective in driving the growth we described. Stay tuned.

Amit Kapoor
Senior Manager, Mobile Partnerships

1. From http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportCountryData.htm, Sept 2012 (mobile site page views / total page views): Kenya (4.1 M / 10.4 M), Niger (69 K / 244 K), World (2.2 B / 18.5 B)

Wikipedia Zero reaches 230 million mobile users with Saudi Telecom partnership

We are proud to announce our newest Wikipedia Zero partnership, which moves us another step closer to giving every person on the planet access to the free knowledge on Wikipedia. On Sunday, Saudi Telecom Company (STC) joined with the Wikimedia Foundation to offer free access to Wikipedia on mobile for STC customers in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain.

The partnership is part of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Wikipedia Zero program, which focuses on reaching billions of people around the world whose primary opportunity to access the Internet is via a mobile device. 25 million STC subscribers can now access Wikipedia, in both Arabic and English, without incurring data fees by pointing their mobile browsers to m.wikipedia.org. A lightweight, text-only version optimized for slower connections is also available at zero.wikipedia.org.

Improving access to the Wikimedia projects in the Arabic speaking world is a strategic priority for the Wikimedia Foundation, and Saudi Arabia is a central part of that. The most edits to Arabic Wikipedia come from within Saudi Arabia and 43 percent of Wikipedia page views within Saudi Arabia are to the Arabic version. More significantly, 29.5 percent of Wikipedia page views in Saudi Arabia are from mobile devices as of September. That’s the second-highest of any large readership country (defined as greater than 5 million page views per month) in the world, and more than twice the rate of Europe.[1] Therefore, with STC removing the cost barrier, millions more people will have access to free knowledge, not only English, but in their native language.

STC is the third parent company to join Wikipedia Zero, which altogether allows 230 million mobile users in 31 countries to access Wikipedia free of data charges. Ten of those countries have already launched the program.

For more information about this partnership and Wikipedia Zero, please read the Q&A: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mobile_partnerships#STC

Kul Takanao Wadhwa, Head of Mobile

1. Nigeria has the highest rate of mobile penetration, with 59 percent of its 12.5 million Wikipedia page views coming from mobile devices. Europe’s combined rate is 13 percent.  http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2012-09/SquidReportCountryData.htm

Marketing Free Knowledge on Mobile in Africa

Free Wikipedia poster from Orange in Kampala

Over the last few months, we have written several blog posts about the launch of our mobile partnerships to provide access to Wikipedia without incurring data charges, so I thought it would be a good idea now to describe what one of these partners is doing to promote our common program. Orange Uganda is a great example.

Orange Uganda was the first Orange affiliate to launch the free access program we announced together in January. Since April 4, Orange customers in Uganda have been able to access Wikipedia on their mobile phones without accruing any data fees. Our shared philosophy is that this should remove barriers to knowledge access, giving people who previously may not have been able to access Wikipedia the opportunity to do so now.

This raises an interesting challenge in itself, though: how do you communicate the offer of free knowledge to the masses, many of them who have never used Wikipedia before and may not know what it is? Businesses deal with marketing products and services all the time, but promoting the availability of knowledge without cost is a creative endeavor that we need to pursue together with our mobile partners.

Orange’s approach in Uganda has been through an “upgrade your knowledge” campaign that is blanketed throughout the country. They’ve put up over 100,000 flyers, 100 street pole posters (pictured), and noticeboards at 11 universities. In addition, they’ve even run radio ads. All this helps get the word out about free knowledge, and for many people in Uganda, it may be the first time they’ve heard of Wikipedia. In an ideal scenario, someone who doesn’t have internet access at home may see one of these messages, turn on their phone’s browser, and look up their first Wikipedia article.

We’re planning to do similar outreach with a number of our current and future partners. If you’re in one of these countries and you come across any of these materials, let us know, or snap a picture and send it to us. Also, tell us your ideas – how would you market free knowledge on mobile?

Amit Kapoor, Senior Manager, Mobile Partnerships