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posted by janrinok on Wednesday February 28 2018, @10:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the cutting-losses dept.

Wikipedia Zero Discontinued Due to Lack of Adoption and Interest Outside North America and Europe

Wikipedia's zero-rated access program will be discontinued:

In the program's six year tenure, we have partnered with 97 mobile carriers in 72 countries to provide access to Wikipedia to more than 800 million people free of mobile data charges. Since 2016, we have seen a significant drop off in adoption and interest in the program. This may be due, in part, to the rapidly shifting mobile industry, as well as changes in mobile data costs. At this same time, we conducted extensive research [1] [2] to better understand the full spectrum of barriers to accessing and participating in Wikipedia.

One of the critical issues we identified as part of this research was low awareness of Wikipedia outside of North America and Europe. To address this, we experimented with new projects and partnerships to increase awareness of Wikipedia, and we've experienced some initial success in this work. In Iraq, for example, we raised awareness of Wikipedia by more than 30%. In Nigeria, we partnered with Nigerian community members and Nollywood stars to introduce more than 15 million people to Wikipedia and how it works. These successes have given us several ideas for where we may take our partnership work next, and over the coming year, we will explore other ways we can leverage the findings from our research and the Wikipedia Zero program to direct future work with partners.

Also at TechCrunch, Boing Boing, and BetaNews.

Related: Wikipedia's 'Complicated' Relationship with Net Neutrality
A Dark Web Version Of Wikipedia

Wikipedia Ceases Zero-Rating Programme

The Wikimedia Foundation, most well-known for Wikipedia, has participated in zero-rating for long enough to see a massive decline in it being a source of visits. That settles that. So now Wikipedia is turning around and resuming its efforts to instead be available to any visitor.

After careful evaluation, the Wikimedia Foundation has decided to discontinue one of its partnership approaches, the Wikipedia Zero program. Wikipedia Zero was created in 2012 to address one barrier to participating in Wikipedia globally: high mobile data costs. Through the program, we partnered with mobile operators to waive mobile data fees for their customers to freely access Wikipedia on mobile devices. Over the course of this year, no additional Wikipedia Zero partnerships will be formed, and the remaining partnerships with mobile operators will expire.

Source : Building for the future of Wikimedia with a new approach to partnerships


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by frojack on Thursday March 01 2018, @12:21AM

    by frojack (1554) on Thursday March 01 2018, @12:21AM (#645516) Journal

    Well apparently Wiki is paying carriers to provide free access to wiki content.

    zero-rating plans exempt particular data from counting against a user's data cap, or from accruing any excess usage charges. The most dangerous of these plans, such as the AT&T and Verizon offerings, only offer their users zero-rated data from content providers who pay the carriers money to do so.

    So Wikipedia runs their own BEGGING season asking money to turn it over to cell providers who basically have more money than God, so that they can offer free access to people who don't appear to have any problem shelling out for an expensive smartphone.

    This happens every year inspite of Wiki sitting on 50 million in cash, and another 55 million in short term investments [wikimedia.org]. Their net asset value has been growing at 20 million a year.

    Of course either At&T or Verizon make Wikimedia look like homeless beggars by comparison.

    So definitely first world problems here. Both those companies are funded by Joe Sixpack, but one begs money yearly and survives on the work of unpaid volunteers.

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