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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.
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.
Care to justify yourself?
I am not the GPP, but I, and many people I know, stopped contributing to Wikipedia when content that we had invested hundreds of hours into creating was summarily deleted by some teenage editor with a Napoleon Complex.
In my case, the articles were either technical or refered to locations or recurring events. None were political, biased, or offensive. The rationale give was that they were "not notable". Yet they were clearly notable to the hundreds of people that read them monthly, and were invisible to the people that didn't read them.
Today, years later, most of the pages are back, written by other people, but are less accurate, more poorly written, and are missing much of the previous detail.
My time and donations now go elsewhere.
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.