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The Wikipedia Zero Program Will End This Year (medium.com)
Wikimedia: Wikimedia 2030, the global discussion to define the future of the Wikimedia movement, created a bold vision for the future of Wikimedia and the role we want to play in the world as a movement. With this shared vision for our movement's future in mind, the Wikimedia Foundation is evolving how we work with partners to address some of the critical barriers to participating in free knowledge globally. 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. 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. Further reading: Medium.
Itâ(TM)s hypocritical for anyone to support Wikipedia zero and also support net neutrality.
Isn't this a blatant violation of net neutrality?
How would this not violate various net neutrality rules? Preferential treatment to one destination over another is what we're all railing against.
You want to "increase participation"? Fire all the editors and start fresh.
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.
These agreements ought to be illegal, and in many countries they would be (and rightfully so).
The realization that it violates net neutrality is one reason that the article cites to wind down the program. Another is that people in the Republic of Angola were routinely uploading infringing copies of movies to Wikimedia Commons to exploit Wikipedia Zero.
Wiki used to be about facts and nothing more. Now it's like any other forum, image board, social media website.
There are countless times where I corrected articles, placed citations, but just because some guy with a bot could manipulate the page, reverted anything back to the previous accepted version.
Until a couple years ago, the Linux page was about the Linux, an operating system... obviously such thing doesn't exist. In 2017 iirc, the page remained with the same almost content, removed anything related to the kernel, placed in there more about operating systems and the linux_kernel page was created.
Facts: Linus never named his kernel "linux kernel", the kernel's name is linux, as in Mach, NT, e.t.c., there's no such thing as Linux, a family of operating systems, because Linux refers to a kernel and is a registered trademark as "Linux".
What we see here is that the general misconception, manipulates an "encyclopedia" in such way to make the mob's opinion less incorrect.
That being said, I think that Wiki and other biased, wrong and public-opinion-manipulating outlet should be constrained as much as possible. Wiki is just a super-set of sites that provide info about games, actors, movies, products. It has no value for anything beyond that.
I'd like to see it fail miserably, this is not far away with all the money they flush down the toilet, and I'd like to see a better alternative with proper data evaluation before someone puts it up there in the public domain.
That's how important it was. Stick with the website, not side-deals.
I was the principal engineer on Wikipedia Zero, and one of the top code contributors to the MediaWiki itself, first as a volunteer, and later as an employee. I think Wikipedia Zero was a great attempt at promoting open knowledge in the less developed locations. I suspect that by now it is not as critical as it once was, and it would be good for the Wikimedia foundation to focus on better allocation of funds.
That said, I do have serious concern with how WMF does its allocation and chooses its priorities. Foundation collects over $80 million a year, and employs nearly 300 people, yet the **only** team that is directly driven by the community is a tiny 10 person Community Tech team. Community tech runs community surveys, and picks just the top 10 items to work on. Think about this - foundation that was created and prospers financially due to the community's efforts only lets 3% of its work, and even less of its funds be directly driven by that same community. Instead of allocating funds based on comunity's preferences, and in the same order, WMF has choosen the order and fund allocation according to the internal goals and inside politics. The recent priority setting efforts (which took nearly a year) may change that, but the process so far has seem to be far too complex, whereas the community tech team's voting was much more straightforward and simple to follow and participate.
There is fundamentally only one reason WMF gets the $80 millions in donations -- content. People value Wikipedia's content, and wish to support that content as much as possible. Despite this, almost none of these money goes towards improvements in the content -- Wikipedia is still a wall of text with a few static images, just like it was in 2001. I am still hopeful that a more interactive content would make its way to Wikipedia pages, avoiding stagnation and keeping the whole project relevant for the future.
Facts: Linus never named his kernel "linux kernel", the kernel's name is linux, as in Mach, NT, e.t.c., there's no such thing as Linux, a family of operating systems, because Linux refers to a kernel and is a registered trademark as "Linux".
Wikipedia's policy of a neutral point of view causes editors to use the name most commonly used by third-party reliable sources and teach the controversy, as in the "GNU/Linux naming controversy" article.
My own writing style is to use "GNU/Linux" for typical desktop and server distributions to distinguish them from Android, BusyBox-based small distributions, and other specialized operating environments built around Linux that contain little or no code from the GNU project. I have found "GNU/Linux" or "X11/Linux" the most succinct way to satisfy fans of Richard Stallman while ducking some Slashdot users' insinuation that a tablet running Android with a paired keyboard or a laptop running Chrome OS can adequately substitute for a laptop running Ubuntu. But because this writing style happens not to match that of the scholarly and mainstream media that Wikipedia relies on, Wikipedia does not use it.
Net Neutrality is the friend of Decentralization.
Wikipedia somehow decided to be the enemy of Net Neutrality.
Creative Commons Licensing is their only saving grace.
Wikipedia is a centralized chokepoint for those who wish to spy on people's education reading habits to go f'n nuts.
I do not trust wikipedia to protect the privacy of my intellectual journeys.
There is a better way.
Red Cross spends about 10% on management, 90% on humanitarian services and programs.
Goodwill isn't one organization, and isn't purely even a nonprofit. They call themselves a "Social Enterprise" instead.
Not sure about Red Cross, but the worst are those who peddle poverty on the streets and try to guilt you into signing up to some recurring payment scheme.
Avoid the clipboarders - they sell poverty and take their cut. Africa isn't as poor as they make out. Certain villages yes, but the picture they paint is the whole continent is starving which is not the case
Did Wikipedia pay mobile network carriers to offer Wikipedia Zero for free? Or did just they wrote letters to them asking them to offer Wikipedia Zero for free?
This goes against net neutrality!
> Just like it was in 2001. I am still hopeful that a more interactive content
And that formula has been working, and Wikipedia constantly growing, since 2001. Be VERY careful about changing what works so well.
Have a look at the world's most popular web page - the Google home page. See all the animated gifs, the dynamic content with sliders and dials for the the user to.play with? Nope. Just a logo, a text field, and a button. Just like 2001.
Contrast this with the sites that WERE super popular in 2001,with lots of animated gifs. Geocities and MySpace were on top of the world. Until animated gifs and such killed them.
"to be able to say, "There is no God," you must yourself assume to be God, which is a reductio ad absurdum, an utter and a complete absurdity."
Not if the one saying it actually IS god!
And before you tell me that there's no way a person on earth can be god, remember - that's what a lot of folks said about Jesus, too. And they were definitely wrong, correct?
In the deliberate lack of an official definition of "GNU/", I have been defining "GNU/" as GNU Coreutils combined with two of GCC, Bash, Emacs, and shared glibc.
If you call a machine with a Linux kernel and GNU userspace utilities "GNU/Linux" does that mean a Windows machine with cygwin is a "GNU\Windows"?
Correct. That in fact is what "gwin" in Cygwin and "GW" in MinGW stand for. Likewise, a complete installation of DJGPP (with the compiler, Binutils, Coreutils, Make, and Bash) is GNU/MS-DOS or GNU/FreeDOS.
And a Mac with a bunch of GNU packages installed from home brew is running "GNU/macOS/BSD"?
Probably not, unless the user has replaced the Darwin counterpart to Coreutils with GNU Coreutils.
TL;DR
A definition of atheist is:
Thus, an atheist is often just someone who, having seen no credible evidence of the existence of a god and seen many examples of conflicting claims of gods that lack credibility, has no rational basis to believe there are gods and therefore doesn't assume that gods exist. It is not necessary to travel to the ends of the universe and examine every subatomic particle in the universe to rationally be an atheist.
Theists can offer no credible evidence in recorded history that gods exist and they can't even agree among themselves what gods exist. Yet, they generally claim vehemently that "their" particular gods exist and are the origin of our existence. This is a remarkable conclusion resulting from a lack of critical thinking. Rationally, few atheists are likely to spend much of their energy considering trying to help prove or accept something that "believers" have, time and time again, generation after generation, failed to provide one shred of evidence of.
It is quite possible that some, perhaps many, humans have evolved to have a strong tendency to believe in something akin to a "religion" replete with gods. In an unenlightened time where science as we know it today didn't exist and there was no way of passing information reliably from person to person and generation to generation, a "religion" trait may have helped societies survive better as it could help give a structure to society and enforce (via the fear of retribution by "big daddy in the sky") some moral codes. We have moved beyond this time, but it will take some time for evolution catch up due to humans' low reproduction rate and the tendency of modern society to interfere with natural selection.
Religion is something like a placebo, as long as one is ignorant of reality it can make some more comfortable but has little value once one figures out they are just getting a sugar pill.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Fork Wikipedia's CC content and replace the rest.
I mean ole Jimmy has been in it for the money since the beginning.
If you really want to see the internet encyclopedia improve, it isn't by supporting Wikipedia, but by supporting and providing word of mouth for its alternatives.
infogalactic is one of those.