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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.

5 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Itâ(TM)s hypocritical for anyone to support Wikipedia zero and also support net neutrality.

  2. So much for net neutrality by wvmarle · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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).

  3. Wikishit by Tsolias · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Donation allocations at WMF by arth1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Wikipedia is still a wall of text with a few static images, just like it was in 2001.

    Good! Text has, by far, the highest content-to-bit ratio. It should be encouraged, and not be replaced with prolefeed.

  5. Re:Top Barrier: the Editors by alvinrod · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Another huge annoyance is the kind of people who stake out ownership of an entire page and are completely unwilling to accept anyone else contributing to it. They'll gladly revert any change you make, even if it's only one that cleans up the wording or rephrases something in order to make it more clear.

    I'm not really sure what makes them into such petty tyrants, but dealing with them is an exercise in frustration. It's as though they take their editing as some kid of sacred mission from god, and heaven forbid if you do try to correct a legitimate mistake, because no amount of facts or sources will convince them that they are wrong.