GerardM writes:
> With Wikipedia Zero people have access to knowledge that they would not
> have otherwise. It is well established that having information readily
> available is an important indicator for further development. Not having
> Wikipedia available is absolutely a worse situation than having it.
>
> [...]
> My answer is sure HOWEVER given that the objective of Wikipedia is to share
> in the sum of all knowledge, your argument is decidedly secondary. Sources
> may be important but they are secondary to having the information available
> in the first place. As long as we have sources in full blown Wikipedia, as
> long as it is WMF that provides the Wikipedia Zero content... what is your
> point. Yes, ideally we want people to ensure that people know about
> sources. When sources are just statements of fact and they are in turn not
> accessible because of cost. What is your point in practical terms?
>
> Wikipedia Zero is very much a fulfillment of our aspirations. Do not forget
> who you are: white, privileged and well educated. What you propose is
> taking away something that you take for granted. Not nice.
I agree with everything Gerard says here. My mission as a Wikimedian,
both during my tenure as an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation and
in my time as a volunteer Wikimedian, has been to get the world's
knowledge into everybody's hands for free. Wikipedia Zero is so
consistent with this primary goal that I value it even more highly
than network neutrality (which I also favor, as a general rule, in
countries with developed and humanely priced internet services).
It should be noted that the Federal Communications Commission, in its
recent Report and Order requiring network neutrality for American
telcos and service providers, expressly refused to draw a categorical
conclusion whether zero-rated services (including Wikipedia Zero)
harmed competition. Instead, the Commission said it would make
case-by-case determinations based on the particular services each
zero-rated service is providing. If it were shown that Wikipedia Zero
is suppressing competition from other encyclopedic knowledge bases or
suppressing sharing of knowledge, that would be something for the
Commission to consider -- but of course there are no facts that
support this argument, at least not yet.
I've spent the last two years working on internet-policy issues in
developing countries, from Myanmar to Cambodia to South Sudan, and my
personal experience has been that Wikipedia Zero is a profoundly
important developmental resource in developing countries, where the
key barrier to Wikipedia access (as a user or contributor) is the data
caps on the mobile devices that the vast majority of users need to get
access to the internet. Wikipedia Zero gets us past that barrier in
these countries. Yes, in an ideal world, perhaps, there might be an
argument against privileging Wikipedia Zero in this way -- but in an
ideal world everybody would have free access to Wikipedia already.
To get to an ideal world, we'll need everyone to have access to
Wikipedia (and to Wikimedia resources generally) -- not just those of
us in developed countries, but to everyone everywhere. Wikipedia Zero
is a strategic approach to expanding access for everybody in every
country. As we do this, we'll be creating incentives for developing
countries' telcos and internet providers to expand their access and
facilities in ways that will enable more and more citizens to fully
participate as users and contributors to Wikipedia. Any other approach
reminds me of the beginning chess player who looks at a board prior to
the first move and says "how do I get to checkmate from here?" The
experienced chess player knows you have to make a number of strategic
decisions and deployments in advance in order to make eventual victory
possible. Wikipedia Zero is one strategy that gets us to the end
result we all want to see.
Best regards,
--Mike Godwin
WMF General Counsel 1007-2010
Director of Innovation Policy and General Counsel, The R Street Institute
Dear Wikimedians,
We are happy to share with you the draft work plans for the period July
2015 to June 2016 [1]. We have more or less followed the same work plan
templates from last year. Some of these plans have been done in
consultation with the community members. We look forward to receiving
your feedback and inputs on the talk pages. This time we have included
an endorsement section at the end of every program plan for the
community members to endorse, should they wish to do so.
Based on these plans we have also put up the next round of FDC proposal
here[2].
We intend to revise these draft work plans based on your and FDC
feedback in July, 2015, subject to grant support from FDC.
Best,
Vishnu
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge/Work_plan_July_20…
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round2/The_C…
Jens,
Why do you say net neutrality has anything to do with price? It's about
best-effort delivery of packets without censorship or, for example,
treating packets that say "do you want to join our radical fundamentalist
agnostic cell," the same way as we treat packets that say, "do you want to
subscribe to our newsletter."
In 1973, the packet switching X.25 systems which resemble today's internet
more closely than the IMP point-to-point testing at the time had no
provisions for packet inspection or "quality of service" adjustments. But
if you didn't subscribe to a database that you might want to access (which
may or may not cost money) then you had no access because if there were no
login credentials then you could tell everyone how to use the database when
it could only handle on the order of dozens of users at a time. What you
want in saying that you think zero rating violates net neutrality is the
MIT open Multics movement, which exists on the internet today in the form
of free and ad-supported hosting services like Wikia. Net neutrality is
about no preferred qualities of packet delivery service, because those
are best handled by adaptive rate coding at the application layer, which is
what the WMF causes the implementation of when they contract with cell
carriers to allow access to Wikipedia content for no charge. The fact that
Wikipedia is civilization's best summary of accumulated knowledge so far is
the reason why carriers are willing to provide the transmission power to
their users at no charge in areas where they still ordinarily compete on a
per-bit fee. That is an economic application design choice that has nothing
to do with packet delivery choices.
Similarly, in the 1860s the Hayes printing telegraph ticker tape had no
restrictions on who could send a transmission or what it's content might
be, and in cases of congestion, the operator noticing a collision first
would back off, and the other would re-transmit in an egalitarian
fashion, but the data you sent would obtain a response in proportion to the
amount the recipient was being paid.
Wikipedia Zero is a great program and I hope something like Wikiversity
Zero assessments will be how hundreds of millions of people learn new facts
pertinent to their lives and helpful to them in ten years. With adaptive
instruction coupled to Wikipedia Accuracy Review, I believe that such a
system will support the transition from creating new articles to
maintaining existing content. I hope both the WMF and the WEF support this
effort, because if the WEF was paying for it, it would likely not influence
the safe harbor provisions protecting the WMF from legal liability due to
inaccuracies. I am sad when dictatorships use Wikipedia Zero for propaganda
purposes, but I am not sure how much of a problem that is relative to the
advantages.
Best regards,
James Salsman