The Wikimedia Foundation has decided to discontinue 1 of its partnership approaches – the Wikipedia Zero program.
Created in 2012, Wikipedia Zero is being shut down because of the “barrier to participating in Wikipedia globally: high mobile data costs”, said the official announcement.
Through the program, the Foundation partnered with mobile operators to waive mobile data fees for their customers to freely access Wikipedia on mobile devices. Over the course of this year, no additional Wikipedia Zero partnerships will be formed, & the remaining partnerships with mobile operators will expire.
The post said in the program’s 6 year tenure, it had tied up with 97 mobile carriers in 72 countries to provide access to Wikipedia to more than 800 million people free of mobile data charges. But since 2016, there had been a significant drop off in adoption & interest in the program. According to the blog post, this may be due, in part, to the rapidly shifting mobile industry, as well as changes in mobile data costs. An extensive research also showed that 1 of the critical issues “was low awareness of Wikipedia outside of North America & Europe.”
To address this, the Foundation did experiment with new projects & partnerships to increase awareness of Wikipedia, but not much came out of that.
Over the coming year, it said it would explore other ways to leverage the findings from this research, & the Wikipedia Zero program to direct future work with partners.
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