Hoi, The BBC shows how dramatically expensive internet is in Africa.. For in my opinion local political reasons Wikipedia Zero has terminated. That is ok up to a point; the point being that we understand the consequences from this action.
Given that our data is NOT local, people have to pay a premium. What are we going to do to compensate for expensive Wikipedia that replaced Wikipedia Zero? Did we study the effects or are we not interested in the consequences of our actions? Thanks, GerardM
We have offline Wikipedia. I have shipped devices to Kinshasa, and they arrived :-)
Of course they do not at all address the need for two way communication.
I am hoping Starlink will help when it comes online in a few years.
James
On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 12:19 AM Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, The BBC shows how dramatically expensive internet is in Africa.. For in my opinion local political reasons Wikipedia Zero has terminated. That is ok up to a point; the point being that we understand the consequences from this action.
Given that our data is NOT local, people have to pay a premium. What are we going to do to compensate for expensive Wikipedia that replaced Wikipedia Zero? Did we study the effects or are we not interested in the consequences of our actions? Thanks, GerardM
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-50516888 _______________________________________________ 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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Hoi, Kiwix and off line Wikipedia did exist at the start of Wikipedia Zero. It is great that you brought some to Africa but you do not scale and it is not a study into the effects of what the effects are of terminating Wikipedia Zero.
No idea what "Starlink" is but it is not a reality for a few more years.. It sounds like we have thrown all these kids under the bus but hey, we have plan. A plan/action is having our own caches in Africa and providing edit and read capabilities for all who care to use it... and then measure the extend it helps us recover from our Wikipedia Zero public. Thanks, GerardM
On Tue, 26 Nov 2019 at 02:48, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
We have offline Wikipedia. I have shipped devices to Kinshasa, and they arrived :-)
Of course they do not at all address the need for two way communication.
I am hoping Starlink will help when it comes online in a few years.
James
On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 12:19 AM Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, The BBC shows how dramatically expensive internet is in Africa.. For in
my
opinion local political reasons Wikipedia Zero has terminated. That is ok up to a point; the point being that we understand the consequences from this action.
Given that our data is NOT local, people have to pay a premium. What are
we
going to do to compensate for expensive Wikipedia that replaced Wikipedia Zero? Did we study the effects or are we not interested in the
consequences
of our actions? Thanks, GerardM
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-50516888 _______________________________________________ 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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
I agree with Gerard. The Wikimedia Foundation invested substantial money, and substantial reputational capital, into Wikipedia Zero, for many years. A sober analysis of the consequences of those decisions would be valuable
Jason Koebler wrote a fascinating and somewhat disturbing series of articles for Vice, about unintended consequences of the program; not long after, the program was shut down.
For a major, multi-year effort of one of the world's top web sites, which is known to have had complex outcomes, it would be really worthwhile to have solid, well-vetted research into what the consequences and lessons were. I thought Koebler's take was fascinating, but it wasn't peer reviewed analysis, and I'm not aware of anybody else who dug into things the way he did, or any basis to confirm or challenge his conclusions.
If anyone knows of internal Wikimedia program evaluation, or of independent research, it would be good to know about it.
-Pete -- Pete Forsyth User:Peteforsyth
On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 9:34 PM Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, Kiwix and off line Wikipedia did exist at the start of Wikipedia Zero. It is great that you brought some to Africa but you do not scale and it is not a study into the effects of what the effects are of terminating Wikipedia Zero.
No idea what "Starlink" is but it is not a reality for a few more years.. It sounds like we have thrown all these kids under the bus but hey, we have plan. A plan/action is having our own caches in Africa and providing edit and read capabilities for all who care to use it... and then measure the extend it helps us recover from our Wikipedia Zero public. Thanks, GerardM
On Tue, 26 Nov 2019 at 02:48, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
We have offline Wikipedia. I have shipped devices to Kinshasa, and they arrived :-)
Of course they do not at all address the need for two way communication.
I am hoping Starlink will help when it comes online in a few years.
James
On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 12:19 AM Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, The BBC shows how dramatically expensive internet is in Africa.. For in
my
opinion local political reasons Wikipedia Zero has terminated. That is
ok
up to a point; the point being that we understand the consequences from this action.
Given that our data is NOT local, people have to pay a premium. What
are
we
going to do to compensate for expensive Wikipedia that replaced
Wikipedia
Zero? Did we study the effects or are we not interested in the
consequences
of our actions? Thanks, GerardM
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-50516888 _______________________________________________ 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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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Hi Gerard,
It would be great if you could keep a slightly more constructive tone in your messages. On one hand, you seem genuinely interested to help access to free knowledge in Africa, but in your second email, you seem to jump (after one response) to conclusions already. If you like to get real responses to your emails, you may want to try a more constructive attitude. For me, it is at least sufficiently offputting to disengage (I removed the rest of my response/suggestions).
-- Lodewijk
On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 9:34 PM Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, Kiwix and off line Wikipedia did exist at the start of Wikipedia Zero. It is great that you brought some to Africa but you do not scale and it is not a study into the effects of what the effects are of terminating Wikipedia Zero.
No idea what "Starlink" is
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=starlink&s=l
but it is not a reality for a few more years.. It sounds like we have thrown all these kids under the bus but hey, we have plan. A plan/action is having our own caches in Africa and providing edit and read capabilities for all who care to use it... and then measure the extend it helps us recover from our Wikipedia Zero public. Thanks, GerardM
On Tue, 26 Nov 2019 at 02:48, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
We have offline Wikipedia. I have shipped devices to Kinshasa, and they arrived :-)
Of course they do not at all address the need for two way communication.
I am hoping Starlink will help when it comes online in a few years.
James
On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 12:19 AM Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, The BBC shows how dramatically expensive internet is in Africa.. For in
my
opinion local political reasons Wikipedia Zero has terminated. That is
ok
up to a point; the point being that we understand the consequences from this action.
Given that our data is NOT local, people have to pay a premium. What
are
we
going to do to compensate for expensive Wikipedia that replaced
Wikipedia
Zero? Did we study the effects or are we not interested in the
consequences
of our actions? Thanks, GerardM
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-50516888 _______________________________________________ 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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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Lodewijk, What I asked for is: do we understand what the impact was of the Wikipedia Zero project. In the answer of James, a board member of the WMF someone who could know, there is nothing that answers that question. All the answer does is deflect the question to something else. A notion that it is "not that bad because we have these other things". These things we had before Wikipedia Zero, they are not Wikipedia and they do not scale.
What I have noticed is that once consensus has been reached, we do not want to be confronted with the consequences of our actions. Wikipedia Zero has damaged our outreach and what the BBC info reminds us of is that Internet, the cost of Internet, is not comparable in Africa with what we are used to. It means that we no longer reach the girls and boys in Soweto as we showed in our film clip at the Erasmus award.
We do not cover Africa properly, we do not need to seek consensus about this, that is easily to be shown. Our focus on outreach is in America, then Europe, then the rest of the world and there is Africa. From the moment we stopped Wikipedia Zero, we have invested heavily in infrastructure in Africa, the organisational presence in the USA is now such that it rivals Wikimania and is used as an excuse by some to even dismantle Wikimania. As an organisation, a movement the "centre periphery" model is alive and well. We happily embrace Burke's peerage in Wikidata and we balk at the fact that covering science takes resources away from pet projects.
You tell me to be constructive and here I lay out what the situation is. How can you be constructive as our movement does not support science, the people who need our information most are disenfranchised because we do not cover them, support them in an equal manner. Thanks,
On Sun, 1 Dec 2019 at 04:31, effe iets anders effeietsanders@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Gerard,
It would be great if you could keep a slightly more constructive tone in your messages. On one hand, you seem genuinely interested to help access to free knowledge in Africa, but in your second email, you seem to jump (after one response) to conclusions already. If you like to get real responses to your emails, you may want to try a more constructive attitude. For me, it is at least sufficiently offputting to disengage (I removed the rest of my response/suggestions).
-- Lodewijk
On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 9:34 PM Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com
wrote:
Hoi, Kiwix and off line Wikipedia did exist at the start of Wikipedia Zero.
It
is great that you brought some to Africa but you do not scale and it is
not
a study into the effects of what the effects are of terminating Wikipedia Zero.
No idea what "Starlink" is
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=starlink&s=l
but it is not a reality for a few more years.. It sounds like we have thrown all these kids under the bus but hey, we
have
plan. A plan/action is having our own caches in Africa and providing edit and read capabilities for all who care to use it... and then measure the extend it helps us recover from our Wikipedia Zero public. Thanks, GerardM
On Tue, 26 Nov 2019 at 02:48, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
We have offline Wikipedia. I have shipped devices to Kinshasa, and they arrived :-)
Of course they do not at all address the need for two way
communication.
I am hoping Starlink will help when it comes online in a few years.
James
On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 12:19 AM Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, The BBC shows how dramatically expensive internet is in Africa.. For
in
my
opinion local political reasons Wikipedia Zero has terminated. That
is
ok
up to a point; the point being that we understand the consequences
from
this action.
Given that our data is NOT local, people have to pay a premium. What
are
we
going to do to compensate for expensive Wikipedia that replaced
Wikipedia
Zero? Did we study the effects or are we not interested in the
consequences
of our actions? Thanks, GerardM
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-50516888 _______________________________________________ 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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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On Sun, 1 Dec 2019 at 11:09, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote: ...
What I have noticed is that once consensus has been reached, we do not want to be confronted with the consequences of our actions. Wikipedia Zero has damaged our outreach and what the BBC info reminds us of is that Internet, the cost of Internet, is not comparable in Africa with what we are used to. It means that we no longer reach the girls and boys in Soweto as we showed in our film clip at the Erasmus award.
...
The disconnect between what matters and the different realities we live in is easy to see when a fundraising appeal for the WMF was based on virtual charity tin rattling to raise $3 being the "price of a coffee".[1] For some, $3 pays for our Sunday lunch.
We should accept that it is impossibly hard for Wikimedia Foundation employees to take to heart that San Francisco or the Trump dominated America is not the "real world", and the ever thin rationales to keep on funding the WMF head office there, rather than relocating to anywhere else in the world that would in every practical way be run at half the cost has been a jarring reminder. The "Wikimedia Community" has never been the Wikimedia Foundation, and yet the Wikimedia Community is failing when it leaves decisions like Wikipedia Zero to be created and cancelled entirely under the authority of the Wikimedia Foundation.
In the long term, the Foundation does not bear the responsibility for these actions, it is us. It is up to us to find better and more transparent ways to govern the operational business that acts in our name and which left to its own devices will become less transparent every year, and less accountable for why high budget and staff/contractor growth is a "good" thing when money for volunteer activities flatlines.
Link 1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oversized_donation_notice.png
Fae
Gerhard, I am also interested in what the impact of Wikipedia Zero was, but it is not obvious to me how it would be measured. The board members are unlikely to have personally researched this, but might know if there is or was a project and if so what they are or were trying to measure. Equally, someone from WMF might be able to report on what has been or is being done in this regard. It is also possible that nothing has been done, or someone who does not read this list is working on it. If anyone reads this and can enlighten us, either to whether it is an ongoing project, has been done and the information is available somewhere, or nobody is known to be working on it, please let us know. Anyone who has ideas on how it could be measured or why it can't is also welcome to comment. Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Gerard Meijssen Sent: 01 December 2019 08:19 To: Lodewijk Gelauf; Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Remember Wikipedia Zero.. Where is the research about the effects of its demise?
Lodewijk, What I asked for is: do we understand what the impact was of the Wikipedia Zero project. In the answer of James, a board member of the WMF someone who could know, there is nothing that answers that question. All the answer does is deflect the question to something else. A notion that it is "not that bad because we have these other things". These things we had before Wikipedia Zero, they are not Wikipedia and they do not scale.
What I have noticed is that once consensus has been reached, we do not want to be confronted with the consequences of our actions. Wikipedia Zero has damaged our outreach and what the BBC info reminds us of is that Internet, the cost of Internet, is not comparable in Africa with what we are used to. It means that we no longer reach the girls and boys in Soweto as we showed in our film clip at the Erasmus award.
We do not cover Africa properly, we do not need to seek consensus about this, that is easily to be shown. Our focus on outreach is in America, then Europe, then the rest of the world and there is Africa. From the moment we stopped Wikipedia Zero, we have invested heavily in infrastructure in Africa, the organisational presence in the USA is now such that it rivals Wikimania and is used as an excuse by some to even dismantle Wikimania. As an organisation, a movement the "centre periphery" model is alive and well. We happily embrace Burke's peerage in Wikidata and we balk at the fact that covering science takes resources away from pet projects.
You tell me to be constructive and here I lay out what the situation is. How can you be constructive as our movement does not support science, the people who need our information most are disenfranchised because we do not cover them, support them in an equal manner. Thanks,
On Sun, 1 Dec 2019 at 04:31, effe iets anders effeietsanders@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Gerard,
It would be great if you could keep a slightly more constructive tone in your messages. On one hand, you seem genuinely interested to help access to free knowledge in Africa, but in your second email, you seem to jump (after one response) to conclusions already. If you like to get real responses to your emails, you may want to try a more constructive attitude. For me, it is at least sufficiently offputting to disengage (I removed the rest of my response/suggestions).
-- Lodewijk
On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 9:34 PM Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com
wrote:
Hoi, Kiwix and off line Wikipedia did exist at the start of Wikipedia Zero.
It
is great that you brought some to Africa but you do not scale and it is
not
a study into the effects of what the effects are of terminating Wikipedia Zero.
No idea what "Starlink" is
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=starlink&s=l
but it is not a reality for a few more years.. It sounds like we have thrown all these kids under the bus but hey, we
have
plan. A plan/action is having our own caches in Africa and providing edit and read capabilities for all who care to use it... and then measure the extend it helps us recover from our Wikipedia Zero public. Thanks, GerardM
On Tue, 26 Nov 2019 at 02:48, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
We have offline Wikipedia. I have shipped devices to Kinshasa, and they arrived :-)
Of course they do not at all address the need for two way
communication.
I am hoping Starlink will help when it comes online in a few years.
James
On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 12:19 AM Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, The BBC shows how dramatically expensive internet is in Africa.. For
in
my
opinion local political reasons Wikipedia Zero has terminated. That
is
ok
up to a point; the point being that we understand the consequences
from
this action.
Given that our data is NOT local, people have to pay a premium. What
are
we
going to do to compensate for expensive Wikipedia that replaced
Wikipedia
Zero? Did we study the effects or are we not interested in the
consequences
of our actions? Thanks, GerardM
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-50516888 _______________________________________________ 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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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_______________________________________________ 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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Hoi, Peter we were celebrated when we received the Erasmus prize. It was a joyous occasion and a clip was shown with children from Soweto explaining what Wikipedia Zero meant for them. At the time we DID have statistics on growth from Africa. We did know what growth was attributable to Wikipedia Zero. We have continued to measure our performance so the answer is one where someone with appropriate knowledgeable or skills looks at the numbers, extrapolate a growth path and compare. Not really problematic. What is problematic is for us to accept that our choices have consequences. *Our *maturity can be measured by our ability to know and accept the consequences of our actions.
Contrary to some, I do think as an organisation we are doing quite well. What we do is still biased and if we are to be less biased we have to both ask for money and spend more money in Africa, South America and Asia. As it is, European and North Americans have the expectation that they are entitled because they pay for things. Fundraising in Africa, South American and Asia may not be as "profitable" but the value we gain by asking people to support *themselves *is of value in itself.
We could and should spend more where our potential impact is biggest. As it is we do not even know the science that establishes or refutes what we have in our Wikipedias. As it is we only know somewhat what we used as a reference, hardly representative particularly when you broaden your horizon. Oh and when will we have a formal register of organisations we partner with like the Internet Archive? Thanks, GerardM
On Sun, 1 Dec 2019 at 13:13, Peter Southwood peter.southwood@telkomsa.net wrote:
Gerhard, I am also interested in what the impact of Wikipedia Zero was, but it is not obvious to me how it would be measured. The board members are unlikely to have personally researched this, but might know if there is or was a project and if so what they are or were trying to measure. Equally, someone from WMF might be able to report on what has been or is being done in this regard. It is also possible that nothing has been done, or someone who does not read this list is working on it. If anyone reads this and can enlighten us, either to whether it is an ongoing project, has been done and the information is available somewhere, or nobody is known to be working on it, please let us know. Anyone who has ideas on how it could be measured or why it can't is also welcome to comment. Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Gerard Meijssen Sent: 01 December 2019 08:19 To: Lodewijk Gelauf; Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Remember Wikipedia Zero.. Where is the research about the effects of its demise?
Lodewijk, What I asked for is: do we understand what the impact was of the Wikipedia Zero project. In the answer of James, a board member of the WMF someone who could know, there is nothing that answers that question. All the answer does is deflect the question to something else. A notion that it is "not that bad because we have these other things". These things we had before Wikipedia Zero, they are not Wikipedia and they do not scale.
What I have noticed is that once consensus has been reached, we do not want to be confronted with the consequences of our actions. Wikipedia Zero has damaged our outreach and what the BBC info reminds us of is that Internet, the cost of Internet, is not comparable in Africa with what we are used to. It means that we no longer reach the girls and boys in Soweto as we showed in our film clip at the Erasmus award.
We do not cover Africa properly, we do not need to seek consensus about this, that is easily to be shown. Our focus on outreach is in America, then Europe, then the rest of the world and there is Africa. From the moment we stopped Wikipedia Zero, we have invested heavily in infrastructure in Africa, the organisational presence in the USA is now such that it rivals Wikimania and is used as an excuse by some to even dismantle Wikimania. As an organisation, a movement the "centre periphery" model is alive and well. We happily embrace Burke's peerage in Wikidata and we balk at the fact that covering science takes resources away from pet projects.
You tell me to be constructive and here I lay out what the situation is. How can you be constructive as our movement does not support science, the people who need our information most are disenfranchised because we do not cover them, support them in an equal manner. Thanks,
On Sun, 1 Dec 2019 at 04:31, effe iets anders effeietsanders@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Gerard,
It would be great if you could keep a slightly more constructive tone in your messages. On one hand, you seem genuinely interested to help access
to
free knowledge in Africa, but in your second email, you seem to jump
(after
one response) to conclusions already. If you like to get real responses
to
your emails, you may want to try a more constructive attitude. For me, it is at least sufficiently offputting to disengage (I removed the rest of
my
response/suggestions).
-- Lodewijk
On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 9:34 PM Gerard Meijssen <
gerard.meijssen@gmail.com
wrote:
Hoi, Kiwix and off line Wikipedia did exist at the start of Wikipedia Zero.
It
is great that you brought some to Africa but you do not scale and it is
not
a study into the effects of what the effects are of terminating
Wikipedia
Zero.
No idea what "Starlink" is
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=starlink&s=l
but it is not a reality for a few more years.. It sounds like we have thrown all these kids under the bus but hey, we
have
plan. A plan/action is having our own caches in Africa and providing
edit
and read capabilities for all who care to use it... and then measure
the
extend it helps us recover from our Wikipedia Zero public. Thanks, GerardM
On Tue, 26 Nov 2019 at 02:48, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
We have offline Wikipedia. I have shipped devices to Kinshasa, and they arrived :-)
Of course they do not at all address the need for two way
communication.
I am hoping Starlink will help when it comes online in a few years.
James
On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 12:19 AM Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, The BBC shows how dramatically expensive internet is in Africa..
For
in
my
opinion local political reasons Wikipedia Zero has terminated. That
is
ok
up to a point; the point being that we understand the consequences
from
this action.
Given that our data is NOT local, people have to pay a premium.
What
are
we
going to do to compensate for expensive Wikipedia that replaced
Wikipedia
Zero? Did we study the effects or are we not interested in the
consequences
of our actions? Thanks, GerardM
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-50516888 _______________________________________________ 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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
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-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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Top-down and Bottom-up: Wikipedia relies on volunteers and can really be considered to be a "bottom-up" encyclopedia project, where the readers can also add content and become part of the project. I consider that the Kiwix offline Wikipedia is also very democratic in that anyone can copy and share the files, install them on their own devices and really feel like they own the knowledge.
Wikipedia Zero is a top-down way of distributing the encyclopedia and users of Wikipedia zero are just that: users. They will consume the knowledge and will have no role in distributing it further except maybe by promoting one particular cell phone operator instead of another.
I have been a few times to Senegal, visiting schools and sharing Kiwix and off-line Wikipedia with the teachers and the educational community. The files that I brought on USB thumb drives have been copied and shared hundreds and hundreds of times. But I am just one guy and that is really not enough to reach the whole continent. But we can scale up...
Wikimedia Zero was never even present in Senegal, at least not when I was there: in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2019. I think that it never took off before the whole project was abandoned. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Global_Reach/MEA#Wikipedia Zero in Senegal with Tigo [Affordability] [Private Sector]
That been said, it would be interesting to measure the effectiveness of the "Wikipedia Zero" project...
On Sun, Dec 1, 2019 at 1:13 PM Peter Southwood peter.southwood@telkomsa.net wrote:
Gerhard, I am also interested in what the impact of Wikipedia Zero was, but it is not obvious to me how it would be measured. The board members are unlikely to have personally researched this, but might know if there is or was a project and if so what they are or were trying to measure. Equally, someone from WMF might be able to report on what has been or is being done in this regard. It is also possible that nothing has been done, or someone who does not read this list is working on it. If anyone reads this and can enlighten us, either to whether it is an ongoing project, has been done and the information is available somewhere, or nobody is known to be working on it, please let us know. Anyone who has ideas on how it could be measured or why it can't is also welcome to comment. Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Gerard Meijssen Sent: 01 December 2019 08:19 To: Lodewijk Gelauf; Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Remember Wikipedia Zero.. Where is the research about the effects of its demise?
Lodewijk, What I asked for is: do we understand what the impact was of the Wikipedia Zero project. In the answer of James, a board member of the WMF someone who could know, there is nothing that answers that question. All the answer does is deflect the question to something else. A notion that it is "not that bad because we have these other things". These things we had before Wikipedia Zero, they are not Wikipedia and they do not scale.
What I have noticed is that once consensus has been reached, we do not want to be confronted with the consequences of our actions. Wikipedia Zero has damaged our outreach and what the BBC info reminds us of is that Internet, the cost of Internet, is not comparable in Africa with what we are used to. It means that we no longer reach the girls and boys in Soweto as we showed in our film clip at the Erasmus award.
We do not cover Africa properly, we do not need to seek consensus about this, that is easily to be shown. Our focus on outreach is in America, then Europe, then the rest of the world and there is Africa. From the moment we stopped Wikipedia Zero, we have invested heavily in infrastructure in Africa, the organisational presence in the USA is now such that it rivals Wikimania and is used as an excuse by some to even dismantle Wikimania. As an organisation, a movement the "centre periphery" model is alive and well. We happily embrace Burke's peerage in Wikidata and we balk at the fact that covering science takes resources away from pet projects.
You tell me to be constructive and here I lay out what the situation is. How can you be constructive as our movement does not support science, the people who need our information most are disenfranchised because we do not cover them, support them in an equal manner. Thanks,
On Sun, 1 Dec 2019 at 04:31, effe iets anders effeietsanders@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Gerard,
It would be great if you could keep a slightly more constructive tone in your messages. On one hand, you seem genuinely interested to help access
to
free knowledge in Africa, but in your second email, you seem to jump
(after
one response) to conclusions already. If you like to get real responses
to
your emails, you may want to try a more constructive attitude. For me, it is at least sufficiently offputting to disengage (I removed the rest of
my
response/suggestions).
-- Lodewijk
On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 9:34 PM Gerard Meijssen <
gerard.meijssen@gmail.com
wrote:
Hoi, Kiwix and off line Wikipedia did exist at the start of Wikipedia Zero.
It
is great that you brought some to Africa but you do not scale and it is
not
a study into the effects of what the effects are of terminating
Wikipedia
Zero.
No idea what "Starlink" is
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=starlink&s=l
but it is not a reality for a few more years.. It sounds like we have thrown all these kids under the bus but hey, we
have
plan. A plan/action is having our own caches in Africa and providing
edit
and read capabilities for all who care to use it... and then measure
the
extend it helps us recover from our Wikipedia Zero public. Thanks, GerardM
On Tue, 26 Nov 2019 at 02:48, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
We have offline Wikipedia. I have shipped devices to Kinshasa, and they arrived :-)
Of course they do not at all address the need for two way
communication.
I am hoping Starlink will help when it comes online in a few years.
James
On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 12:19 AM Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, The BBC shows how dramatically expensive internet is in Africa..
For
in
my
opinion local political reasons Wikipedia Zero has terminated. That
is
ok
up to a point; the point being that we understand the consequences
from
this action.
Given that our data is NOT local, people have to pay a premium.
What
are
we
going to do to compensate for expensive Wikipedia that replaced
Wikipedia
Zero? Did we study the effects or are we not interested in the
consequences
of our actions? Thanks, GerardM
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-50516888 _______________________________________________ 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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe:
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Kul,
Would you please send a few or more paragraph description of the accomplishments and costs of the Wikipedia Zero program to the wikimedia-l list?
I also would love to see it back. The concerns about zero rating service abuse are real, but they did not apply to WZ no matter how many people implied they did at the time.
Best regards, Jim
On Sun, Dec 1, 2019 at 4:13 AM Peter Southwood peter.southwood@telkomsa.net wrote:
Gerhard, I am also interested in what the impact of Wikipedia Zero was, but it is not obvious to me how it would be measured. The board members are unlikely to have personally researched this, but might know if there is or was a project and if so what they are or were trying to measure. Equally, someone from WMF might be able to report on what has been or is being done in this regard. It is also possible that nothing has been done, or someone who does not read this list is working on it. If anyone reads this and can enlighten us, either to whether it is an ongoing project, has been done and the information is available somewhere, or nobody is known to be working on it, please let us know. Anyone who has ideas on how it could be measured or why it can't is also welcome to comment. Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Gerard Meijssen Sent: 01 December 2019 08:19 To: Lodewijk Gelauf; Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Remember Wikipedia Zero.. Where is the research about the effects of its demise?
Lodewijk, What I asked for is: do we understand what the impact was of the Wikipedia Zero project. In the answer of James, a board member of the WMF someone who could know, there is nothing that answers that question. All the answer does is deflect the question to something else. A notion that it is "not that bad because we have these other things". These things we had before Wikipedia Zero, they are not Wikipedia and they do not scale.
What I have noticed is that once consensus has been reached, we do not want to be confronted with the consequences of our actions. Wikipedia Zero has damaged our outreach and what the BBC info reminds us of is that Internet, the cost of Internet, is not comparable in Africa with what we are used to. It means that we no longer reach the girls and boys in Soweto as we showed in our film clip at the Erasmus award.
We do not cover Africa properly, we do not need to seek consensus about this, that is easily to be shown. Our focus on outreach is in America, then Europe, then the rest of the world and there is Africa. From the moment we stopped Wikipedia Zero, we have invested heavily in infrastructure in Africa, the organisational presence in the USA is now such that it rivals Wikimania and is used as an excuse by some to even dismantle Wikimania. As an organisation, a movement the "centre periphery" model is alive and well. We happily embrace Burke's peerage in Wikidata and we balk at the fact that covering science takes resources away from pet projects.
You tell me to be constructive and here I lay out what the situation is. How can you be constructive as our movement does not support science, the people who need our information most are disenfranchised because we do not cover them, support them in an equal manner. Thanks,
On Sun, 1 Dec 2019 at 04:31, effe iets anders effeietsanders@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Gerard,
It would be great if you could keep a slightly more constructive tone in your messages. On one hand, you seem genuinely interested to help access to free knowledge in Africa, but in your second email, you seem to jump (after one response) to conclusions already. If you like to get real responses to your emails, you may want to try a more constructive attitude. For me, it is at least sufficiently offputting to disengage (I removed the rest of my response/suggestions).
-- Lodewijk
On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 9:34 PM Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com
wrote:
Hoi, Kiwix and off line Wikipedia did exist at the start of Wikipedia Zero.
It
is great that you brought some to Africa but you do not scale and it is
not
a study into the effects of what the effects are of terminating Wikipedia Zero.
No idea what "Starlink" is
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=starlink&s=l
but it is not a reality for a few more years.. It sounds like we have thrown all these kids under the bus but hey, we
have
plan. A plan/action is having our own caches in Africa and providing edit and read capabilities for all who care to use it... and then measure the extend it helps us recover from our Wikipedia Zero public. Thanks, GerardM
On Tue, 26 Nov 2019 at 02:48, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
We have offline Wikipedia. I have shipped devices to Kinshasa, and they arrived :-)
Of course they do not at all address the need for two way
communication.
I am hoping Starlink will help when it comes online in a few years.
James
On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 12:19 AM Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, The BBC shows how dramatically expensive internet is in Africa.. For
in
my
opinion local political reasons Wikipedia Zero has terminated. That
is
ok
up to a point; the point being that we understand the consequences
from
this action.
Given that our data is NOT local, people have to pay a premium. What
are
we
going to do to compensate for expensive Wikipedia that replaced
Wikipedia
Zero? Did we study the effects or are we not interested in the
consequences
of our actions? Thanks, GerardM
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-50516888 _______________________________________________ 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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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The offline apps have also been downloaded 100 of thousands of times mostly from people in LMIC.
Wikipedia Zero faced the controversial about net neutrality. And thus we were legally banned from continuing in India.
Douglas Scott and I discussed the effects of the program in South Africa. Have cc'ed him to comment further but basically it sounded not all that great due to all the further limitations that were added by the telecoms.
James
On Sun, Dec 1, 2019 at 4:25 PM James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
Kul,
Would you please send a few or more paragraph description of the accomplishments and costs of the Wikipedia Zero program to the wikimedia-l list?
I also would love to see it back. The concerns about zero rating service abuse are real, but they did not apply to WZ no matter how many people implied they did at the time.
Best regards, Jim
On Sun, Dec 1, 2019 at 4:13 AM Peter Southwood peter.southwood@telkomsa.net wrote:
Gerhard, I am also interested in what the impact of Wikipedia Zero was, but it is not obvious to me how it would be measured. The board members are unlikely to have personally researched this, but might know if there is or was a project and if so what they are or were trying to measure. Equally, someone from WMF might be able to report on what has been or is being done in this regard. It is also possible that nothing has been done, or someone who does not read this list is working on it. If anyone reads this and can enlighten us, either to whether it is an ongoing project, has been done and the information is available somewhere, or nobody is known to be working on it, please let us know. Anyone who has ideas on how it could be measured or why it can't is also welcome to comment. Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Gerard Meijssen Sent: 01 December 2019 08:19 To: Lodewijk Gelauf; Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Remember Wikipedia Zero.. Where is the research about the effects of its demise?
Lodewijk, What I asked for is: do we understand what the impact was of the Wikipedia Zero project. In the answer of James, a board member of the WMF someone who could know, there is nothing that answers that question. All the answer does is deflect the question to something else. A notion that it is "not that bad because we have these other things". These things we had before Wikipedia Zero, they are not Wikipedia and they do not scale.
What I have noticed is that once consensus has been reached, we do not want to be confronted with the consequences of our actions. Wikipedia Zero has damaged our outreach and what the BBC info reminds us of is that Internet, the cost of Internet, is not comparable in Africa with what we are used to. It means that we no longer reach the girls and boys in Soweto as we showed in our film clip at the Erasmus award.
We do not cover Africa properly, we do not need to seek consensus about this, that is easily to be shown. Our focus on outreach is in America, then Europe, then the rest of the world and there is Africa. From the moment we stopped Wikipedia Zero, we have invested heavily in infrastructure in Africa, the organisational presence in the USA is now such that it rivals Wikimania and is used as an excuse by some to even dismantle Wikimania. As an organisation, a movement the "centre periphery" model is alive and well. We happily embrace Burke's peerage in Wikidata and we balk at the fact that covering science takes resources away from pet projects.
You tell me to be constructive and here I lay out what the situation is. How can you be constructive as our movement does not support science, the people who need our information most are disenfranchised because we do not cover them, support them in an equal manner. Thanks,
On Sun, 1 Dec 2019 at 04:31, effe iets anders effeietsanders@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Gerard,
It would be great if you could keep a slightly more constructive tone in your messages. On one hand, you seem genuinely interested to help access to free knowledge in Africa, but in your second email, you seem to jump (after one response) to conclusions already. If you like to get real responses to your emails, you may want to try a more constructive attitude. For me, it is at least sufficiently offputting to disengage (I removed the rest of my response/suggestions).
-- Lodewijk
On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 9:34 PM Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com
wrote:
Hoi, Kiwix and off line Wikipedia did exist at the start of Wikipedia Zero.
It
is great that you brought some to Africa but you do not scale and it is
not
a study into the effects of what the effects are of terminating Wikipedia Zero.
No idea what "Starlink" is
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=starlink&s=l
but it is not a reality for a few more years.. It sounds like we have thrown all these kids under the bus but hey, we
have
plan. A plan/action is having our own caches in Africa and providing edit and read capabilities for all who care to use it... and then measure the extend it helps us recover from our Wikipedia Zero public. Thanks, GerardM
On Tue, 26 Nov 2019 at 02:48, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
We have offline Wikipedia. I have shipped devices to Kinshasa, and they arrived :-)
Of course they do not at all address the need for two way
communication.
I am hoping Starlink will help when it comes online in a few years.
James
On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 12:19 AM Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, The BBC shows how dramatically expensive internet is in Africa.. For
in
my
opinion local political reasons Wikipedia Zero has terminated. That
is
ok
up to a point; the point being that we understand the consequences
from
this action.
Given that our data is NOT local, people have to pay a premium. What
are
we
going to do to compensate for expensive Wikipedia that replaced
Wikipedia
Zero? Did we study the effects or are we not interested in the
consequences
of our actions? Thanks, GerardM
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-50516888 _______________________________________________ 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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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Sending on behalf of Douglas as his message did not make it through:
"Hi everyone,
James is right about South Africa. Although there is a strong appetite for Wikipedia Zero in South Africa (and surrounding countries as well I would bet) there were some unexpected hurdles encountered here. The appetite was strong enough for a class of school children in Cape Town to write an open letter calling for it that the WMF made a video about. We also go two of those school children to give a speech at Wikimania 2018. Unfortunately this was unsuccessful in getting real progress on zero rating Wikipedia in South Africa.
The back story is that the major telecoms firms in South Africa just did not see the point of zero rating Wikipedia even though it would give them a competitive advantage over other South African telecoms firms. This is mostly because the telecom sector in South Africa is a duopoly of effectively two colluding companies that practice what I would call a type of exploitative pricing.
The closest we came to getting Zero rating in South Africa was a response from one of the telecom companies (MTN) to the open letter from the school children back in 2014. MTN agreed to zero rate Wikipedia and made a video about it (now taken down I see) to get some free media off of it. However, what they did not tell people as that Wikipedia was zero rated only around schools, during school hours, and only on devices running MTN's proprietary version of the Opera browser. Since school kids are typically not allowed to us cell phones at school in South Africa this basically meant that almost no one got to get access to zero rated Wikipedia.
In South Africa's case I feel that there is still a great need and demand for zero rated Wikipedia. That is why I am supportive of another effort to push for getting local telecom companies to zero rate it. However, I also feel that the South African telecom companies are still suck in their profit-maximising oligopolic collusion orientated mind set. As such I think we need to change the narrative in South Africa around access to knowledge to get them to change their mind set which is a bigger challenge. However the high cost of data in South Africa combined with the "Data Must Fall" movement has created a friendlier environment for us. So I feel we should at the very least 'ask again' if we can get Wikipedia zero rated or at least restart the conversation to do that.
Regards,
Douglas."
On Sun, Dec 1, 2019 at 4:48 PM James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
The offline apps have also been downloaded 100 of thousands of times mostly from people in LMIC.
Wikipedia Zero faced the controversial about net neutrality. And thus we were legally banned from continuing in India.
Douglas Scott and I discussed the effects of the program in South Africa. Have cc'ed him to comment further but basically it sounded not all that great due to all the further limitations that were added by the telecoms.
James
On Sun, Dec 1, 2019 at 4:25 PM James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
Kul,
Would you please send a few or more paragraph description of the accomplishments and costs of the Wikipedia Zero program to the wikimedia-l list?
I also would love to see it back. The concerns about zero rating service abuse are real, but they did not apply to WZ no matter how many people implied they did at the time.
Best regards, Jim
On Sun, Dec 1, 2019 at 4:13 AM Peter Southwood peter.southwood@telkomsa.net wrote:
Gerhard, I am also interested in what the impact of Wikipedia Zero was, but it is not obvious to me how it would be measured. The board members are unlikely to have personally researched this, but might know if there is or was a project and if so what they are or were trying to measure. Equally, someone from WMF might be able to report on what has been or is being done in this regard. It is also possible that nothing has been done, or someone who does not read this list is working on it. If anyone reads this and can enlighten us, either to whether it is an ongoing project, has been done and the information is available somewhere, or nobody is known to be working on it, please let us know. Anyone who has ideas on how it could be measured or why it can't is also welcome to comment. Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Gerard Meijssen Sent: 01 December 2019 08:19 To: Lodewijk Gelauf; Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Remember Wikipedia Zero.. Where is the research about the effects of its demise?
Lodewijk, What I asked for is: do we understand what the impact was of the Wikipedia Zero project. In the answer of James, a board member of the WMF someone who could know, there is nothing that answers that question. All the answer does is deflect the question to something else. A notion that it is "not that bad because we have these other things". These things we had before Wikipedia Zero, they are not Wikipedia and they do not scale.
What I have noticed is that once consensus has been reached, we do not want to be confronted with the consequences of our actions. Wikipedia Zero has damaged our outreach and what the BBC info reminds us of is that Internet, the cost of Internet, is not comparable in Africa with what we are used to. It means that we no longer reach the girls and boys in Soweto as we showed in our film clip at the Erasmus award.
We do not cover Africa properly, we do not need to seek consensus about this, that is easily to be shown. Our focus on outreach is in America, then Europe, then the rest of the world and there is Africa. From the moment we stopped Wikipedia Zero, we have invested heavily in infrastructure in Africa, the organisational presence in the USA is now such that it rivals Wikimania and is used as an excuse by some to even dismantle Wikimania. As an organisation, a movement the "centre periphery" model is alive and well. We happily embrace Burke's peerage in Wikidata and we balk at the fact that covering science takes resources away from pet projects.
You tell me to be constructive and here I lay out what the situation is. How can you be constructive as our movement does not support science, the people who need our information most are disenfranchised because we do not cover them, support them in an equal manner. Thanks,
On Sun, 1 Dec 2019 at 04:31, effe iets anders effeietsanders@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Gerard,
It would be great if you could keep a slightly more constructive tone in your messages. On one hand, you seem genuinely interested to help access to free knowledge in Africa, but in your second email, you seem to jump (after one response) to conclusions already. If you like to get real responses to your emails, you may want to try a more constructive attitude. For me, it is at least sufficiently offputting to disengage (I removed the rest of my response/suggestions).
-- Lodewijk
On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 9:34 PM Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com
wrote:
Hoi, Kiwix and off line Wikipedia did exist at the start of Wikipedia Zero.
It
is great that you brought some to Africa but you do not scale and it is
not
a study into the effects of what the effects are of terminating Wikipedia Zero.
No idea what "Starlink" is
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=starlink&s=l
but it is not a reality for a few more years.. It sounds like we have thrown all these kids under the bus but hey, we
have
plan. A plan/action is having our own caches in Africa and providing edit and read capabilities for all who care to use it... and then measure the extend it helps us recover from our Wikipedia Zero public. Thanks, GerardM
On Tue, 26 Nov 2019 at 02:48, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
We have offline Wikipedia. I have shipped devices to Kinshasa, and they arrived :-)
Of course they do not at all address the need for two way
communication.
I am hoping Starlink will help when it comes online in a few years.
James
On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 12:19 AM Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote: > > Hoi, > The BBC shows how dramatically expensive internet is in Africa.. For
in
my > opinion local political reasons Wikipedia Zero has terminated. That
is
ok
> up to a point; the point being that we understand the consequences
from
> this action. > > Given that our data is NOT local, people have to pay a premium. What
are
we > going to do to compensate for expensive Wikipedia that replaced
Wikipedia
> Zero? Did we study the effects or are we not interested in the consequences > of our actions? > Thanks, > GerardM > > https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-50516888 > _______________________________________________ > 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@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
I would be in favor of getting a Wikipedia Zero post mortem for lessons learned. The idea was inspiring, and it still sounds like a good idea, but so far as I know the discourse about what worked and what failed to work never got published or made it to wiki. One barrier in Wikipedia Zero that I felt was that it was a WMF staff project and much less a Wikimedia community project. In general, community projects require and produce documentation, and in general, WMF staff produce much less documentation. There can be tension for wiki community members to publish any documentation of projects where WMF paid staff are engaged.
In the 2018 WMF annual report the Internet in a Box project is the top listed WMF accomplishment for the year. https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/ To me, it seems like Internet in a Box is the closest thing to a focus for increased LMIC wiki access that the WMF has right now.
There are lots of possible development directions and I still think the conversation is open for advancement.
On Mon, Dec 2, 2019 at 11:38 AM James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
Sending on behalf of Douglas as his message did not make it through:
"Hi everyone,
James is right about South Africa. Although there is a strong appetite for Wikipedia Zero in South Africa (and surrounding countries as well I would bet) there were some unexpected hurdles encountered here. The appetite was strong enough for a class of school children in Cape Town to write an open letter calling for it that the WMF made a video about. We also go two of those school children to give a speech at Wikimania 2018. Unfortunately this was unsuccessful in getting real progress on zero rating Wikipedia in South Africa.
The back story is that the major telecoms firms in South Africa just did not see the point of zero rating Wikipedia even though it would give them a competitive advantage over other South African telecoms firms. This is mostly because the telecom sector in South Africa is a duopoly of effectively two colluding companies that practice what I would call a type of exploitative pricing.
The closest we came to getting Zero rating in South Africa was a response from one of the telecom companies (MTN) to the open letter from the school children back in 2014. MTN agreed to zero rate Wikipedia and made a video about it (now taken down I see) to get some free media off of it. However, what they did not tell people as that Wikipedia was zero rated only around schools, during school hours, and only on devices running MTN's proprietary version of the Opera browser. Since school kids are typically not allowed to us cell phones at school in South Africa this basically meant that almost no one got to get access to zero rated Wikipedia.
In South Africa's case I feel that there is still a great need and demand for zero rated Wikipedia. That is why I am supportive of another effort to push for getting local telecom companies to zero rate it. However, I also feel that the South African telecom companies are still suck in their profit-maximising oligopolic collusion orientated mind set. As such I think we need to change the narrative in South Africa around access to knowledge to get them to change their mind set which is a bigger challenge. However the high cost of data in South Africa combined with the "Data Must Fall" movement has created a friendlier environment for us. So I feel we should at the very least 'ask again' if we can get Wikipedia zero rated or at least restart the conversation to do that.
Regards,
Douglas."
On Sun, Dec 1, 2019 at 4:48 PM James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
The offline apps have also been downloaded 100 of thousands of times mostly from people in LMIC.
Wikipedia Zero faced the controversial about net neutrality. And thus we were legally banned from continuing in India.
Douglas Scott and I discussed the effects of the program in South Africa. Have cc'ed him to comment further but basically it sounded not all that great due to all the further limitations that were added by the telecoms.
James
On Sun, Dec 1, 2019 at 4:25 PM James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
Kul,
Would you please send a few or more paragraph description of the accomplishments and costs of the Wikipedia Zero program to the wikimedia-l list?
I also would love to see it back. The concerns about zero rating service abuse are real, but they did not apply to WZ no matter how many people implied they did at the time.
Best regards, Jim
On Sun, Dec 1, 2019 at 4:13 AM Peter Southwood peter.southwood@telkomsa.net wrote:
Gerhard, I am also interested in what the impact of Wikipedia Zero was, but
it is not obvious to me how it would be measured.
The board members are unlikely to have personally researched this,
but might know if there is or was a project and if so what they are or were trying to measure. Equally, someone from WMF might be able to report on what has been or is being done in this regard. It is also possible that nothing has been done, or someone who does not read this list is working on it.
If anyone reads this and can enlighten us, either to whether it is
an ongoing project, has been done and the information is available somewhere, or nobody is known to be working on it, please let us know.
Anyone who has ideas on how it could be measured or why it can't is
also welcome to comment.
Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org]
On Behalf Of Gerard Meijssen
Sent: 01 December 2019 08:19 To: Lodewijk Gelauf; Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Remember Wikipedia Zero.. Where is the
research about the effects of its demise?
Lodewijk, What I asked for is: do we understand what the impact was of the
Wikipedia
Zero project. In the answer of James, a board member of the WMF
someone who
could know, there is nothing that answers that question. All the
answer
does is deflect the question to something else. A notion that it is
"not
that bad because we have these other things". These things we had
before
Wikipedia Zero, they are not Wikipedia and they do not scale.
What I have noticed is that once consensus has been reached, we do
not want
to be confronted with the consequences of our actions. Wikipedia
Zero has
damaged our outreach and what the BBC info reminds us of is that
Internet,
the cost of Internet, is not comparable in Africa with what we are
used to.
It means that we no longer reach the girls and boys in Soweto as we
showed
in our film clip at the Erasmus award.
We do not cover Africa properly, we do not need to seek consensus
about
this, that is easily to be shown. Our focus on outreach is in
America, then
Europe, then the rest of the world and there is Africa. From the
moment we
stopped Wikipedia Zero, we have invested heavily in infrastructure in Africa, the organisational presence in the USA is now such that it
rivals
Wikimania and is used as an excuse by some to even dismantle
Wikimania. As
an organisation, a movement the "centre periphery" model is alive
and well.
We happily embrace Burke's peerage in Wikidata and we balk at the
fact that
covering science takes resources away from pet projects.
You tell me to be constructive and here I lay out what the situation
is.
How can you be constructive as our movement does not support
science, the
people who need our information most are disenfranchised because we
do not
cover them, support them in an equal manner. Thanks,
On Sun, 1 Dec 2019 at 04:31, effe iets anders <
effeietsanders@gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi Gerard,
It would be great if you could keep a slightly more constructive
tone in
your messages. On one hand, you seem genuinely interested to help
access to
free knowledge in Africa, but in your second email, you seem to
jump (after
one response) to conclusions already. If you like to get real
responses to
your emails, you may want to try a more constructive attitude. For
me, it
is at least sufficiently offputting to disengage (I removed the
rest of my
response/suggestions).
-- Lodewijk
On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 9:34 PM Gerard Meijssen <
gerard.meijssen@gmail.com
wrote:
Hoi, Kiwix and off line Wikipedia did exist at the start of Wikipedia
Zero.
It
is great that you brought some to Africa but you do not scale
and it is
not
a study into the effects of what the effects are of terminating
Wikipedia
Zero.
No idea what "Starlink" is
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=starlink&s=l
but it is not a reality for a few more years.. It sounds like we have thrown all these kids under the bus but
hey, we
have
plan. A plan/action is having our own caches in Africa and
providing edit
and read capabilities for all who care to use it... and then
measure the
extend it helps us recover from our Wikipedia Zero public. Thanks, GerardM
On Tue, 26 Nov 2019 at 02:48, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com
wrote:
> We have offline Wikipedia. I have shipped devices to Kinshasa,
and
> they arrived :-) > > Of course they do not at all address the need for two way
communication.
> > I am hoping Starlink will help when it comes online in a few
years.
> > James > > On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 12:19 AM Gerard Meijssen > gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote: > > > > Hoi, > > The BBC shows how dramatically expensive internet is in
Africa.. For
in
> my > > opinion local political reasons Wikipedia Zero has
terminated. That
is
ok > > up to a point; the point being that we understand the
consequences
from
> > this action. > > > > Given that our data is NOT local, people have to pay a
premium. What
are > we > > going to do to compensate for expensive Wikipedia that
replaced
Wikipedia > > Zero? Did we study the effects or are we not interested in
the
> consequences > > of our actions? > > Thanks, > > GerardM > > > > https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-50516888 > > _______________________________________________ > > 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@lists.wikimedia.org > > Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org
?subject=unsubscribe>
> > > > -- > James Heilman > MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian > > _______________________________________________ > 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@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org
?subject=unsubscribe>
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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe:
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<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org
?subject=unsubscribe>
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<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org
?subject=unsubscribe>
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New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe:
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New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe:
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New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
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-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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Hoi, Sorry but really? Is something not good enough because "the community" did not think of it?? Really, if there is one part of our movement totally involved in what we do it IS the staff of the Wikimedia Foundation. They maintain their distance and let the community do its thing.. they are to be praised for that
There are no community efforts that are focused on how to get our data to the people that truly need it. There is no attention from the community to get our data into Africa or Asia for that matter, what happened is all thanks to staff efforts.
What considers itself community is hardly cognisant of what is needed elsewhere. Thanks, GerardM
On Mon, 2 Dec 2019 at 19:20, Lane Rasberry lane@bluerasberry.com wrote:
I would be in favor of getting a Wikipedia Zero post mortem for lessons learned. The idea was inspiring, and it still sounds like a good idea, but so far as I know the discourse about what worked and what failed to work never got published or made it to wiki. One barrier in Wikipedia Zero that I felt was that it was a WMF staff project and much less a Wikimedia community project. In general, community projects require and produce documentation, and in general, WMF staff produce much less documentation. There can be tension for wiki community members to publish any documentation of projects where WMF paid staff are engaged.
In the 2018 WMF annual report the Internet in a Box project is the top listed WMF accomplishment for the year. https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/ To me, it seems like Internet in a Box is the closest thing to a focus for increased LMIC wiki access that the WMF has right now.
There are lots of possible development directions and I still think the conversation is open for advancement.
On Mon, Dec 2, 2019 at 11:38 AM James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
Sending on behalf of Douglas as his message did not make it through:
"Hi everyone,
James is right about South Africa. Although there is a strong appetite for Wikipedia Zero in South Africa (and surrounding countries as well I would bet) there were some unexpected hurdles encountered here. The appetite was strong enough for a class of school children in Cape Town to write an open letter calling for it that the WMF made a video about. We also go two of those school children to give a speech at Wikimania 2018. Unfortunately this was unsuccessful in getting real progress on zero rating Wikipedia in South Africa.
The back story is that the major telecoms firms in South Africa just did not see the point of zero rating Wikipedia even though it would give them a competitive advantage over other South African telecoms firms. This is mostly because the telecom sector in South Africa is a duopoly of effectively two colluding companies that practice what I would call a type of exploitative pricing.
The closest we came to getting Zero rating in South Africa was a response from one of the telecom companies (MTN) to the open letter from the school children back in 2014. MTN agreed to zero rate Wikipedia and made a video about it (now taken down I see) to get some free media off of it. However, what they did not tell people as that Wikipedia was zero rated only around schools, during school hours, and only on devices running MTN's proprietary version of the Opera browser. Since school kids are typically not allowed to us cell phones at school in South Africa this basically meant that almost no one got to get access to zero rated Wikipedia.
In South Africa's case I feel that there is still a great need and demand for zero rated Wikipedia. That is why I am supportive of another effort to push for getting local telecom companies to zero rate it. However, I also feel that the South African telecom companies are still suck in their profit-maximising oligopolic collusion orientated mind set. As such I think we need to change the narrative in South Africa around access to knowledge to get them to change their mind set which is a bigger challenge. However the high cost of data in South Africa combined with the "Data Must Fall" movement has created a friendlier environment for us. So I feel we should at the very least 'ask again' if we can get Wikipedia zero rated or at least restart the conversation to do that.
Regards,
Douglas."
On Sun, Dec 1, 2019 at 4:48 PM James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
The offline apps have also been downloaded 100 of thousands of times mostly from people in LMIC.
Wikipedia Zero faced the controversial about net neutrality. And thus we were legally banned from continuing in India.
Douglas Scott and I discussed the effects of the program in South Africa. Have cc'ed him to comment further but basically it sounded not all that great due to all the further limitations that were added by the telecoms.
James
On Sun, Dec 1, 2019 at 4:25 PM James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com
wrote:
Kul,
Would you please send a few or more paragraph description of the accomplishments and costs of the Wikipedia Zero program to the wikimedia-l list?
I also would love to see it back. The concerns about zero rating service abuse are real, but they did not apply to WZ no matter how many people implied they did at the time.
Best regards, Jim
On Sun, Dec 1, 2019 at 4:13 AM Peter Southwood peter.southwood@telkomsa.net wrote:
Gerhard, I am also interested in what the impact of Wikipedia Zero was, but
it is not obvious to me how it would be measured.
The board members are unlikely to have personally researched this,
but might know if there is or was a project and if so what they are or
were
trying to measure. Equally, someone from WMF might be able to report on what has been or is being done in this regard. It is also possible that nothing has been done, or someone who does not read this list is working
on
it.
If anyone reads this and can enlighten us, either to whether it is
an ongoing project, has been done and the information is available somewhere, or nobody is known to be working on it, please let us know.
Anyone who has ideas on how it could be measured or why it can't is
also welcome to comment.
Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org]
On Behalf Of Gerard Meijssen
Sent: 01 December 2019 08:19 To: Lodewijk Gelauf; Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Remember Wikipedia Zero.. Where is the
research about the effects of its demise?
Lodewijk, What I asked for is: do we understand what the impact was of the
Wikipedia
Zero project. In the answer of James, a board member of the WMF
someone who
could know, there is nothing that answers that question. All the
answer
does is deflect the question to something else. A notion that it is
"not
that bad because we have these other things". These things we had
before
Wikipedia Zero, they are not Wikipedia and they do not scale.
What I have noticed is that once consensus has been reached, we do
not want
to be confronted with the consequences of our actions. Wikipedia
Zero has
damaged our outreach and what the BBC info reminds us of is that
Internet,
the cost of Internet, is not comparable in Africa with what we are
used to.
It means that we no longer reach the girls and boys in Soweto as we
showed
in our film clip at the Erasmus award.
We do not cover Africa properly, we do not need to seek consensus
about
this, that is easily to be shown. Our focus on outreach is in
America, then
Europe, then the rest of the world and there is Africa. From the
moment we
stopped Wikipedia Zero, we have invested heavily in infrastructure
in
Africa, the organisational presence in the USA is now such that it
rivals
Wikimania and is used as an excuse by some to even dismantle
Wikimania. As
an organisation, a movement the "centre periphery" model is alive
and well.
We happily embrace Burke's peerage in Wikidata and we balk at the
fact that
covering science takes resources away from pet projects.
You tell me to be constructive and here I lay out what the
situation
is.
How can you be constructive as our movement does not support
science, the
people who need our information most are disenfranchised because we
do not
cover them, support them in an equal manner. Thanks,
On Sun, 1 Dec 2019 at 04:31, effe iets anders <
effeietsanders@gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi Gerard,
It would be great if you could keep a slightly more constructive
tone in
your messages. On one hand, you seem genuinely interested to help
access to
free knowledge in Africa, but in your second email, you seem to
jump (after
one response) to conclusions already. If you like to get real
responses to
your emails, you may want to try a more constructive attitude.
For
me, it
is at least sufficiently offputting to disengage (I removed the
rest of my
response/suggestions).
-- Lodewijk
On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 9:34 PM Gerard Meijssen <
gerard.meijssen@gmail.com
> wrote:
> Hoi, > Kiwix and off line Wikipedia did exist at the start of
Wikipedia
Zero.
It > is great that you brought some to Africa but you do not scale
and it is
not > a study into the effects of what the effects are of terminating
Wikipedia
> Zero.
> No idea what "Starlink" is
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=starlink&s=l
> but it is not a reality for a few more years.. > It sounds like we have thrown all these kids under the bus but
hey, we
have > plan. A plan/action is having our own caches in Africa and
providing edit
> and read capabilities for all who care to use it... and then
measure the
> extend it helps us recover from our Wikipedia Zero public. > Thanks, > GerardM > > On Tue, 26 Nov 2019 at 02:48, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com
wrote:
> > > We have offline Wikipedia. I have shipped devices to
Kinshasa,
and
> > they arrived :-) > > > > Of course they do not at all address the need for two way communication. > > > > I am hoping Starlink will help when it comes online in a few
years.
> > > > James > > > > On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 12:19 AM Gerard Meijssen > > gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote: > > > > > > Hoi, > > > The BBC shows how dramatically expensive internet is in
Africa.. For
in > > my > > > opinion local political reasons Wikipedia Zero has
terminated. That
is > ok > > > up to a point; the point being that we understand the
consequences
from > > > this action. > > > > > > Given that our data is NOT local, people have to pay a
premium. What
> are > > we > > > going to do to compensate for expensive Wikipedia that
replaced
> Wikipedia > > > Zero? Did we study the effects or are we not interested in
the
> > consequences > > > of our actions? > > > Thanks, > > > GerardM > > > > > > https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-50516888 > > > _______________________________________________ > > > 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@lists.wikimedia.org > > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > > <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org
?subject=unsubscribe>
> > > > > > > > -- > > James Heilman > > MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian > > > > _______________________________________________ > > 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@lists.wikimedia.org > > Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org
?subject=unsubscribe>
> _______________________________________________ > 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@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe:
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On Tue, 3 Dec 2019 at 06:38, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
There is no attention from the community to get our data into Africa or Asia for that matter, what happened is all thanks to staff efforts.
In 2015, as a volunteer, I gave a keynote presentation on Wikidata's sue of authority control identifiers, at the World Digital Library's Arab Peninsula Regional Group conference in Doha
Also in 2015, I visited Tunis and Monastir, to speak as a volunteer at WikiArabia, which was attended by both African and Asian delegates. I also gave talks to university students, met with GLAM professionals, and was interviewed a national radio station.
In 2016, I spent several days, as a volunteer, training Wikimedia volunteers in Jakarta to edit Wikidata, as well as giving a talk on Wikidata to staff of a the education ministry, with which they collaborate.
In 2017, I visited Cairo, as a volunteer, to give a workshop on Wikidata at WikiArabia.
In 2018, I and several other volunteers spoke at a GLAM conference in Yerevan, and gave talks and training workshops for Wikimedia volunteers there.
Also in 2018, while in Cape Town for Wikimania, as a volunteer, I assisted at Wikidata workshop for South African librarians.
Near the end of 2018, I visited eastern Istanbul to give a guest lecture on Wikidata to students at Üsküdar University. And yes, I did so as a volunteer.
In 2019, I introduced academics from two South African Universities, whom I met in England, to volunteers from WMZA. They are now collaborating on introducing Wikimedia projects into further education in that country.
I maintain ongoing relationships and online collaborations with many of the African and Asian Wikimedians I met on my travels.
Your statement, made in ignorance of the facts, is offensive not only to me, but chiefly to the many other volunteers who are busy growing Wikidata in Africa and Asia, both as a result of my voluntary activities and otherwise.
-- Andy Mabbett @pigsonthewing http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
On Tue, 3 Dec 2019 at 13:03, Andy Mabbett andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk wrote:
[...]
Your statement, made in ignorance of the facts, is offensive not only to me, but chiefly to the many other volunteers who are busy growing Wikidata in Africa and Asia, both as a result of my voluntary activities and otherwise.
It's been pointed out to me that I misread the email to which I replied; I apologise, and withdraw my comments.
Gerard, Was this intended as a response to Lane? If so, I do not understand what point you are trying to make. Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Gerard Meijssen Sent: 03 December 2019 08:39 To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Remember Wikipedia Zero.. Where is the research about the effects of its demise?
Hoi, Sorry but really? Is something not good enough because "the community" did not think of it?? Really, if there is one part of our movement totally involved in what we do it IS the staff of the Wikimedia Foundation. They maintain their distance and let the community do its thing.. they are to be praised for that
There are no community efforts that are focused on how to get our data to the people that truly need it. There is no attention from the community to get our data into Africa or Asia for that matter, what happened is all thanks to staff efforts.
What considers itself community is hardly cognisant of what is needed elsewhere. Thanks, GerardM
On Mon, 2 Dec 2019 at 19:20, Lane Rasberry lane@bluerasberry.com wrote:
I would be in favor of getting a Wikipedia Zero post mortem for lessons learned. The idea was inspiring, and it still sounds like a good idea, but so far as I know the discourse about what worked and what failed to work never got published or made it to wiki. One barrier in Wikipedia Zero that I felt was that it was a WMF staff project and much less a Wikimedia community project. In general, community projects require and produce documentation, and in general, WMF staff produce much less documentation. There can be tension for wiki community members to publish any documentation of projects where WMF paid staff are engaged.
In the 2018 WMF annual report the Internet in a Box project is the top listed WMF accomplishment for the year. https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/ To me, it seems like Internet in a Box is the closest thing to a focus for increased LMIC wiki access that the WMF has right now.
There are lots of possible development directions and I still think the conversation is open for advancement.
On Mon, Dec 2, 2019 at 11:38 AM James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
Sending on behalf of Douglas as his message did not make it through:
"Hi everyone,
James is right about South Africa. Although there is a strong appetite for Wikipedia Zero in South Africa (and surrounding countries as well I would bet) there were some unexpected hurdles encountered here. The appetite was strong enough for a class of school children in Cape Town to write an open letter calling for it that the WMF made a video about. We also go two of those school children to give a speech at Wikimania 2018. Unfortunately this was unsuccessful in getting real progress on zero rating Wikipedia in South Africa.
The back story is that the major telecoms firms in South Africa just did not see the point of zero rating Wikipedia even though it would give them a competitive advantage over other South African telecoms firms. This is mostly because the telecom sector in South Africa is a duopoly of effectively two colluding companies that practice what I would call a type of exploitative pricing.
The closest we came to getting Zero rating in South Africa was a response from one of the telecom companies (MTN) to the open letter from the school children back in 2014. MTN agreed to zero rate Wikipedia and made a video about it (now taken down I see) to get some free media off of it. However, what they did not tell people as that Wikipedia was zero rated only around schools, during school hours, and only on devices running MTN's proprietary version of the Opera browser. Since school kids are typically not allowed to us cell phones at school in South Africa this basically meant that almost no one got to get access to zero rated Wikipedia.
In South Africa's case I feel that there is still a great need and demand for zero rated Wikipedia. That is why I am supportive of another effort to push for getting local telecom companies to zero rate it. However, I also feel that the South African telecom companies are still suck in their profit-maximising oligopolic collusion orientated mind set. As such I think we need to change the narrative in South Africa around access to knowledge to get them to change their mind set which is a bigger challenge. However the high cost of data in South Africa combined with the "Data Must Fall" movement has created a friendlier environment for us. So I feel we should at the very least 'ask again' if we can get Wikipedia zero rated or at least restart the conversation to do that.
Regards,
Douglas."
On Sun, Dec 1, 2019 at 4:48 PM James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
The offline apps have also been downloaded 100 of thousands of times mostly from people in LMIC.
Wikipedia Zero faced the controversial about net neutrality. And thus we were legally banned from continuing in India.
Douglas Scott and I discussed the effects of the program in South Africa. Have cc'ed him to comment further but basically it sounded not all that great due to all the further limitations that were added by the telecoms.
James
On Sun, Dec 1, 2019 at 4:25 PM James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com
wrote:
Kul,
Would you please send a few or more paragraph description of the accomplishments and costs of the Wikipedia Zero program to the wikimedia-l list?
I also would love to see it back. The concerns about zero rating service abuse are real, but they did not apply to WZ no matter how many people implied they did at the time.
Best regards, Jim
On Sun, Dec 1, 2019 at 4:13 AM Peter Southwood peter.southwood@telkomsa.net wrote:
Gerhard, I am also interested in what the impact of Wikipedia Zero was, but
it is not obvious to me how it would be measured.
The board members are unlikely to have personally researched this,
but might know if there is or was a project and if so what they are or
were
trying to measure. Equally, someone from WMF might be able to report on what has been or is being done in this regard. It is also possible that nothing has been done, or someone who does not read this list is working
on
it.
If anyone reads this and can enlighten us, either to whether it is
an ongoing project, has been done and the information is available somewhere, or nobody is known to be working on it, please let us know.
Anyone who has ideas on how it could be measured or why it can't is
also welcome to comment.
Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org]
On Behalf Of Gerard Meijssen
Sent: 01 December 2019 08:19 To: Lodewijk Gelauf; Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Remember Wikipedia Zero.. Where is the
research about the effects of its demise?
Lodewijk, What I asked for is: do we understand what the impact was of the
Wikipedia
Zero project. In the answer of James, a board member of the WMF
someone who
could know, there is nothing that answers that question. All the
answer
does is deflect the question to something else. A notion that it is
"not
that bad because we have these other things". These things we had
before
Wikipedia Zero, they are not Wikipedia and they do not scale.
What I have noticed is that once consensus has been reached, we do
not want
to be confronted with the consequences of our actions. Wikipedia
Zero has
damaged our outreach and what the BBC info reminds us of is that
Internet,
the cost of Internet, is not comparable in Africa with what we are
used to.
It means that we no longer reach the girls and boys in Soweto as we
showed
in our film clip at the Erasmus award.
We do not cover Africa properly, we do not need to seek consensus
about
this, that is easily to be shown. Our focus on outreach is in
America, then
Europe, then the rest of the world and there is Africa. From the
moment we
stopped Wikipedia Zero, we have invested heavily in infrastructure
in
Africa, the organisational presence in the USA is now such that it
rivals
Wikimania and is used as an excuse by some to even dismantle
Wikimania. As
an organisation, a movement the "centre periphery" model is alive
and well.
We happily embrace Burke's peerage in Wikidata and we balk at the
fact that
covering science takes resources away from pet projects.
You tell me to be constructive and here I lay out what the
situation
is.
How can you be constructive as our movement does not support
science, the
people who need our information most are disenfranchised because we
do not
cover them, support them in an equal manner. Thanks,
On Sun, 1 Dec 2019 at 04:31, effe iets anders <
effeietsanders@gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi Gerard,
It would be great if you could keep a slightly more constructive
tone in
your messages. On one hand, you seem genuinely interested to help
access to
free knowledge in Africa, but in your second email, you seem to
jump (after
one response) to conclusions already. If you like to get real
responses to
your emails, you may want to try a more constructive attitude.
For
me, it
is at least sufficiently offputting to disengage (I removed the
rest of my
response/suggestions).
-- Lodewijk
On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 9:34 PM Gerard Meijssen <
gerard.meijssen@gmail.com
> wrote:
> Hoi, > Kiwix and off line Wikipedia did exist at the start of
Wikipedia
Zero.
It > is great that you brought some to Africa but you do not scale
and it is
not > a study into the effects of what the effects are of terminating
Wikipedia
> Zero.
> No idea what "Starlink" is
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=starlink&s=l
> but it is not a reality for a few more years.. > It sounds like we have thrown all these kids under the bus but
hey, we
have > plan. A plan/action is having our own caches in Africa and
providing edit
> and read capabilities for all who care to use it... and then
measure the
> extend it helps us recover from our Wikipedia Zero public. > Thanks, > GerardM > > On Tue, 26 Nov 2019 at 02:48, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com
wrote:
> > > We have offline Wikipedia. I have shipped devices to
Kinshasa,
and
> > they arrived :-) > > > > Of course they do not at all address the need for two way communication. > > > > I am hoping Starlink will help when it comes online in a few
years.
> > > > James > > > > On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 12:19 AM Gerard Meijssen > > gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote: > > > > > > Hoi, > > > The BBC shows how dramatically expensive internet is in
Africa.. For
in > > my > > > opinion local political reasons Wikipedia Zero has
terminated. That
is > ok > > > up to a point; the point being that we understand the
consequences
from > > > this action. > > > > > > Given that our data is NOT local, people have to pay a
premium. What
> are > > we > > > going to do to compensate for expensive Wikipedia that
replaced
> Wikipedia > > > Zero? Did we study the effects or are we not interested in
the
> > consequences > > > of our actions? > > > Thanks, > > > GerardM > > > > > > https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-50516888 > > > _______________________________________________ > > > 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@lists.wikimedia.org > > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > > <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org
?subject=unsubscribe>
> > > > > > > > -- > > James Heilman > > MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian > > > > _______________________________________________ > > 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@lists.wikimedia.org > > Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> > <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org
?subject=unsubscribe>
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?subject=unsubscribe>
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-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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-- Lane Rasberry user:bluerasberry on Wikipedia 206.801.0814 lane@bluerasberry.com _______________________________________________ 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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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It's a reasonable question, for which the Wiki-research-l mailing list (CCed) might be a better venue.
There is some data at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundation_Audiences_Metri... (not a full analysis, highlighting just two example countries)
Regards, HaeB
On Sun, Nov 24, 2019 at 11:19 PM Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, The BBC shows how dramatically expensive internet is in Africa.. For in my opinion local political reasons Wikipedia Zero has terminated. That is ok up to a point; the point being that we understand the consequences from this action.
Given that our data is NOT local, people have to pay a premium. What are we going to do to compensate for expensive Wikipedia that replaced Wikipedia Zero? Did we study the effects or are we not interested in the consequences of our actions? Thanks, GerardM
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-50516888 _______________________________________________ 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@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
There is some data at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundation_Audiences_Metri...
"WP0 deactivated for Unitel Angola on June 29 Caused traffic for the entire country to drop from ~20 million to ~4 million views/month"
But there was no drop at all in Kuwait. Can we get Wikipedia Zero for only economically below average countries?
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org