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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.
Talk about FWP: The discontinuation of access to educational material for vast numbers of third-world school students is announced, and the reaction is mostly some wanking around net neutrality.
Just to explain this to people sitting in airconditioned offices sipping their third latte of the day: In large areas of the world your education, if you can get one, consists of sitting under a tree or in a dirt-floored room with, if you're lucky, a handful of worn-out books shared amongst the entire class. Wikipedia Zero was created on the initiative of people working for charities and educational initiatives to try and get a replacement for otherwise nonexistent textbooks into countries like I'm describing above. It's made a huge, massive difference in educational opportunities for children whose learning prospects would otherwise be severely limited, because they have virtually zero access to any resources.
That's what shutting down Wikipedia Zero is going to do, not some theoretical wank about net neutrality.
Yep. While doing research I found that the articles relating to my work were a couple of decades out of date, poorly written, and potentially wrong even when they were written. I took my time, wrote a much better one, included citations to more recent published research, posted it, and had a bot instantly revert it. Talked to the self-imposed "owner" of the page and bot, and got nowhere. After two weeks of fighting with the dumbass, I just gave up.
In hindsight, I should have posted it under a slightly different title, and then have gone and redirected all the links to the original page to the new one. Let the guy lord over an orphaned page, so nobody bothered him again.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor