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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
(Score: 2) by pipedwho on Thursday March 01 2018, @12:49AM (5 children)
This might have been useful back in the days of $0.02/kb, but these days with data costs 1000s of times lower, the amount of bandwidth that the average person uses from Wikipedia amounts to virtually nothing. Especially considering it would be dwarfed to insignificance by all the other multimedia traffic.
The amount of effort required for a carrier to separate out service access for something with such a low duty cycle use is an enormous waste of time/money compared to the benefits (to anyone). It's bad enough the carriers offer all sorts of a 'free bandwidth' to certain multimedia services (eg. iTunes, Fox channels, etc) as part of packages as a marketing exercise to sucker people in to using them over another carrier.
Wikimedia should drop this approach as it seems utterly pointless.
(Score: 3, Informative) by isj on Thursday March 01 2018, @01:28AM (4 children)
Depends on where you are. Eg. I just checked the prices in Zimbabwe - still approximately 1USD/MB. Combined with the income of an average household, the data traffic is still quite expensive.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by pipedwho on Thursday March 01 2018, @03:07AM (3 children)
Zimbabwe is around $20/GB up to 0.15c per MB.
But, ignoring the absolute value, since maybe someone in Zimbabwe earns $1 per hour, it's still about relative data usage for the average consumer. No one is going to prioritise a plan that advertises "free Wikipedia" over one that offers "free Facebook" or something they spend 99% of their time using. So, in the end, it's still not an incentive for the vast majority of potential users that might consumed 99MB of social medial on the same day they consumed 500kB of Wikipedia. It's like giving someone a less than 1% discount on their data.
Maybe it would encourage people to go down the Wikipedia "rabbit hole" more often on their mobile devices. Or it might be useful for someone that spends all day doing research, and very little time on social media or Youtube. But, in the end, I can't imagine it being even a minor blip on anyone's radar when it comes to saving money on mobile data.
People get a data plan to cover their primary usage - in this day and age, it's Facebook/other social media platforms, maybe some audio streaming/download service, and possibly data syncing (photos/etc). So data plans have to have relative costs low enough to deal with the typical media volume on those platforms.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday March 01 2018, @03:36PM
I hope someone spending all day doing research is working on something that requires more than access to Wikipedia.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday March 01 2018, @08:15PM (1 child)
I was going to scream "That's U.S.-centric!" until I looked this up:
https://www.techzim.co.zw/2016/08/top-10-visited-websites-zimbabwe/ [techzim.co.zw]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by pipedwho on Thursday March 01 2018, @09:05PM
Sadly, even third worlders have "first world problems". Keep in mind that anyone with internet access in places like Zimbabwe are not going to be the poverty stricken villagers.
Social media, in whatever form (eg. Baidu in China) seems to be the main driving force for people 'requiring' connectivity these days. The desire/need to communicate and interact with others to maintain (or advance) social standing is strong.
I was using 'Facebook' as a generic concept, but as you've uncovered, it turns out that Facebook itself is the prominent social tool in Zimbabwe. (Well at least for those that are rich enough to afford internet connectivity.) I was surprised to see Youtube so high on that list, but I suppose that is probably similar to those in the western world. The drives/addictions of people around the world seem to be similar no matter where you go.