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

Accepted submission by takyon at 2018-02-20 01:25:13
Career & Education

Wikipedia's zero-rated access [wikipedia.org] program will be discontinued [wikimedia.org]:

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 [a4ai.org]. At this same time, we conducted extensive research [1] [wikimedia.org] [2] [wikimedia.org] 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 [wikimedia.org] 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 [wikimedia.org] 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 [techcrunch.com], Boing Boing [boingboing.net], and BetaNews [betanews.com].

Related: Wikipedia's 'Complicated' Relationship with Net Neutrality [soylentnews.org]
A Dark Web Version Of Wikipedia [soylentnews.org]


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