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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.
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.
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".
That's wonderful. Other facts: when people talk about Linux in general discussion they are referring to the set of operating systems based on the Linux kernel. When people look up Linux on Wikipedia, they are almost universally looking for information about those operating systems rather than the kernel.
Encyclopaedias aren't intended to be a pedants wet dream; their purpose is to document and communicate useful information. Had you included just a single sentence clarifying the difference between the original word "Linux" and the common usage, I doubt it would have been removed. Instead you decided to rewrite the whole article because it annoys you. What did you really expect?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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