Hi everyone, As we consider the new strategic direction we identified from Wikimedia 2030[1], the Foundation is evolving how we work with partners to address barriers to participating in free knowledge around the world. After careful evaluation, we’ve decided to discontinue the Wikipedia Zero program[2] as one of the partnership approaches we offer. Over the course of this year, we won’t be taking on any new Wikipedia Zero partnerships, and current partnerships will expire. The Wikipedia Zero program was first created to address one barrier to participating in free knowledge 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. 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. As stewards of Wikipedia Zero, I want to congratulate and thank the Global Reach team for the success of this program during its tenure, and for their leadership in continuing to support new and meaningful partnerships aligned with our movement’s values and vision. In the past couple of years, we identified a few developments that have impacted Wikipedia Zero’s continued relevance. Beginning in 2016, we’ve seen a significant drop off in adoption and interest in Wikipedia Zero, and as a result, our reach today stands at a quarter of where it was at its peak. During this time, we also conducted research[3] to better understand the full scope of barriers to using Wikipedia around the world. For example, awareness is one of the key issues we identified - even when people have smartphones and use Facebook, Google, or WhatsApp, many of those same people have never heard of Wikipedia. In addition, limited local language content is another barrier we identified that inhibits the discovery and use of our projects. We’ve had initial success with projects and partnerships[4] designed to build awareness in parts of the world where Wikipedia is not widely known or used. These successes have given us several ideas for where we may take our partnership work next, and over the coming year, we will explore other ways we can leverage the findings from our research and the Wikipedia Zero program to direct future work with partners. We remain committed to creating impactful partnerships that align with our own values and direction for the Wikimedia movement’s future. We look forward to sharing more information and updates on our work with partners in the coming year. Thank you, Lisa We’ve also published a blog post about this announcement here: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/02/16/partnerships-new-approach/ [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Direction [2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_Reach/Insights and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_Readers [4] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/09/21/nigeria-wikipedia-awareness/ On Fri, Feb 16, 2018 at 1:11 PM, Lisa Gruwell &lt;lgruwell(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: from to After first globally: their aligned continued adoption at conducted issues Google, partnership impactful Wikimedia updates https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Direction -- *Samantha Lien* Communications Manager Wikimedia Foundation 1Montgomery Street Suite 1600 San Francisco, CA 94104 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>