Wikimedia in Iraq has nearly 12M subscribers free of mobile data charges

https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/02/28/wikipedia-zero-iraq/

by The_ed17 • 9 years ago

97 84 9 years ago

blog.wikimedia.org

seibelj3• 9 years ago

Wouldn't net neutrality supporters be enraged because all data is not being treated equally now? Upstart wikis will never be able to compete!

schoen2• 9 years ago

Zero-rating has indeed become a big network neutrality controversy.

seibelj3• 9 years ago

I know, it's a travesty that we allow Iraqis to access Wikipedia for free. We are literally ending wiki competition. Simply awful. Iraqis must demand net neutrality and stop accessing Wikipedia for free!

gbl08ma3• 9 years ago

You kid, but as much as I like Wikimedia (and as much as I would like to access Wikipedia free of mobile data charges), I think this objectively makes it harder for projects in the same field to compete, even if just a tiny bit.

I like to think I'm a net neutrality supporter, but when my mobile plan included unlimited data for the carrier's own music streaming service, I started using it and the unlimited data came in really handy. I used other streaming services much less because of that; Spotify, for example, didn't stand a chance of seeing my money.

I guess you can't have your cake and eat it too...

megalodon• 9 years ago

There is a pretty big difference between a charitable non-profit organization and a proprietary music streaming service.

smsm4211• 9 years ago

think this objectively makes it harder for projects in the same field to compete, even if just a tiny bit.

I think this is true in theoretical sense, but not in any practical sense. Just as it's true that you breathing reduces amount of breathable oxygen around, but that's not a ground for me to sue you for air pollution and depriving me of vital oxygen ;) There are things so tiny as to consider them as if they weren't is to seriously distort the matter, and I think it's one of such things.

To make it substantial, one needs to point out that a) there are viable competitors b) they are influenced by things like bandwidth costs and c) this difference is causing real and noticeable preference shift.

I can believe it's true for mobile music streaming services, but I don't see it being true for Wikipedia.

There's one more point - the argument against NN goes "it'd kill Wikipedia Zero". I don't think saying "well, so what, but it'd help Spotify" really a strong counter to it - if I had to choose between living without Wikipedia and living without Spotify, I'd choose Wikipedia without even pausing to think for a second. So NN proponents have to offer better answer than that, if they mean to go the utilitarian road.

WikipediasBad• 9 years ago

As much as I like competition, I think Wikipedia (in terms of Wikis) is as close to Google (in terms of search) as it can get to having a monopoly. And I am more OK with Wikipedia having a monopoly than Google since it is a non-profit. The closest true competitors to Wikipedia are Everipedia, Infogalactic, and Wikia (sort of..kind of) and they all have a fraction of a fraction of Wikipedia's total traffic combined. I am fairly active in Wikipedia's editor community and although there are some issues in the community and real toxicity sometimes in there between different editor factions and deletionists etc, I have met very few people who think Wikipedia has a net negative impact on humanity. It is truly a force for good, so increasing their impact on impoverished areas of the world can only be a good thing.

tdb7893• 9 years ago

In my opinion zero rating is one of those things that is good until it is abused, and it would be much less of a problem if there was actual competition between ISPs. In my opinion net neutrality is largely to keep monopolies (either a web company or an ISP) from gaining even more power over the market. I would prefer to have no zero ratings at all because having any opens the door to abuse but practically it isn't actually bad in this situation otherwise.

boomboomsubban3• 9 years ago

Other sources of information can't compete, and it's fairly easy for one source to be controlled by some person or organization. Additionally, when this has been done in the past people turn Wikipedia into the normal internet, hiding media on various pages and using it as a social media stand in.

The money would be better spent lowering the normal cost, but then Wikipedia doesn't get the huge supply of editors.

seibelj3• 9 years ago

You are right, the best possible solution is to ban free access to Wikipedia. It just isn't fair.

smsm4211• 9 years ago

It's easy to tell other people where their money are best spent, but the situation as it is is that in these countries, the prices of data vs. the salaries are such that 1G may cost you a month's salary. In that situation, the choice is not "listening streaming music on that or this service", it's "zero-rated sites or no internet at all". I'd rather these people had at least Wikipedia access. Even if it may put some Silicon Valley startup in a tougher spot.

yosamino7• 9 years ago

Upstart wikis will never be able to compete!

The problem is not "upstart wikis" it's upstart everything. The internet is a lot bigger than just wikipedia, or indeed the web.

gpvos3• 9 years ago

Although zero-rating Wikipedia in itself is rather benign (it has already outcompeted other encyclopedias anyway), it does run the risk of creating more acceptance for zero-rating of other, possibly commercial services.

geforce• 9 years ago

You can't possibly mad for people gaining access to knowledge. For me personally, it's the single most important thing Internet gives.

But as for net neutrality? Of course I'm sad. How are they going to check the sources of the articles? Wikipedia is still pretty limited in some areas of knowledge.

Nothing is perfect. I'm very happy they get to browse wikipedia. It is magnitude of order better than not having access to it.

guelo• 9 years ago

I am not enraged but this is not good. We don't want ISPs to use their monopolies to pick and choose the web's winners and losers. Just because Wikipedia is a great nonprofit resource doesn't mean that competitors should be disadvantaged.

ISPs don't zero-rate because of the goodness of their non-existant hearts. They do this to get people hooked on using more data to get them to buy more data. Either that or they can use it to start competing services or as blackmail to get web services to pay them.

smsm4211• 9 years ago

Either that or they can use it to start competing services or as blackmail to get web services to pay them.

Who is being blackmailed here? Can you point out somebody who is really hurt by this arrangement, not in theoretical conspiracy scenario but in real world?

rocky1138• 9 years ago

As a fan of net neutrality I have no problem with zero rating any non-profit website/service.

gpawl3• 9 years ago

non-profit just means there is no corporate owner. A non-profit can still be run in a way that enriches management and employees, and a for-profit can have a strong social contribution.

smilekzs• 9 years ago

Meanwhile in People's Republic of China, a peaceful (as in not troubled by war) country, People's access to Wikipedia still depends on the mood of those in power...

handedness• 9 years ago

The calm of despotism vs. the tempestuous sea of liberty.

astrodust• 9 years ago

China has been at war with its own people for generations now.

vkou• 9 years ago

Every government (Or at least, the people they represent) is at war with its servants.

strgrd• 9 years ago

Wikimedia recognizes the user is on that operator's network and serves a banner on the top of the page indicating free data courtesy of their mobile operator, which reinforces a positive brand experience for the operator.

I would like to know just how different Wikipedia Zero is. Can people still make accounts and contribute articles with this service?

yosamino7• 9 years ago

From the same article:

Through the Wikipedia Zero program, mobile data fees are waived for subscribers of participating mobile operators so that they may read and edit Wikipedia without using any of their mobile data.

anc84• 9 years ago

I would much rather see devices fitted with full dumps of the text content of Wikipedia(s). The english Wikipedia is just 60 Gigabytes for heaven's sake!

gpvos3• 9 years ago

Keeping that up to date would cost huge amounts of bandwidth though, of which 99.99% would be wasted.

The_ed17• 9 years ago

That's already a thing. :-) https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/10/11/kiwix-ten-years/

eugeniub• 9 years ago

Most smartphones in Iraq probably have 4–16gb of storage, and 64gb flash storage would be prohibitively expensive for most Iraqis. The English Wikipedia is 60gb, but that's without _any_ multimedia. The total size of all media in Wikimedia Commons is 23 terabytes.

We could create a minified version of the Iraq Wikipedia that could be around 40gb, but many will not want it, so we'd have to sell Wikipedia phones and non-Wikipedia phones.

You could sell copies of the minified Wikipedia on microSD cards, but a 64gb microSD card still costs about $20, but that price is out of reach for most in the war torn country.

Then there's the issue of updated content. One of the main uses for Wikipedia is learning about current events, current status of crises, recent elections, recent deaths, etc. You wouldn't really be able to do that with this system.

guaka• 9 years ago

The Arabic ZIM file of February 2017 is 5.4G. http://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages

cooper122• 9 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiReader was one such attempt. Though reading the limitations, it seemed to do some heavy processing that threw away data to save space.

yosamino7• 9 years ago

Well, I don't know anything at all about wikimedia infrastructure, but I would think it caches rather well.

Then all the ISP would have to do is coordinate with wikimedia to put such a device in their datacenter and save a lot on that precious upstream bandwith, keeping traffic on their local network where it's not costing them as much.

That's a plus, in addition to the free karma.

ikeboy2• 9 years ago

Problem is there are updates every day. The dump is only good if you don't need the latest page.

ikeboy2• 9 years ago

Text only compressed is even less, in the 10-15GB range. I used to have it on an SD card and used https://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/4755 to put in on a cheap media player.

koolba• 9 years ago

So how long till someone makes a VPN that uses Wikipedia edits as the underlying communication channel? The latency would be on the order of seconds but the throughput would be decent.

To those of you who think I'm joking, it's already been done with DNS lookups so why not here too?

yosamino7• 9 years ago

Way ahead of you

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wikipedia-zero-fa...

DanBC• 9 years ago

Here's the HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11358846

ju-st• 9 years ago

1.8 MB background image...

smsm4211• 9 years ago

Ingenious, but probably would get one banned on Wikipedia pretty quickly. Not a scalable or long-term model.

gpvos3• 9 years ago

That would get moderated out of existence really quickly.

cooper122• 9 years ago

Well in Angola they only have access to Wikipedia and Facebook, so Angolan users started to hide movies in JPEGs and PDFS, and link them in private Facebook Groups. [0] The issue with using edits for a VPN is that it will likely require a fast edit rate which would automatically get you flagged as a bot account.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

yosamino7• 9 years ago

Does this mean users of this thing will not be able to substantially edit wikipedia, because they won't be able to cite sources ?

Or check sources ?

Because if they get free access to wikipedia only that would be the case.

If, on the other hand, only people who are already subscribers don't get their wikipedia traffic counted, then that seems a small improvement at best.

rhcom2• 9 years ago

Damn that is a good point that I hadn't thought of.

This version of wikipedia puts a lot more faith in the editors because users can't check sources.

djrogers4• 9 years ago

This is a clear violation of net neutrality principles, but it's also clearly a good thing for the Iraqi people. How do those in the hard-core NN tent square that circle?

To sidestep any straw-man arguments about war zones, different country, etc; What if this were implemented in Appalachia to give access to wikipedia to the poor an uneducated there?

sharun• 9 years ago

Who cares? Why do you pay attention to hardcore supporters of anything?

A hardcore supporter of Facebook or Google would say we could never run our sites like Wikipedia. Don't pay attention to them either.

jMyles• 9 years ago

The hardcore NN tent, at least on HN, isn't particularly hardcore, and especially not about NN. They are more hardcore (and, for that matter, more reasonable) about wanting to cripple (or in some cases "regulate") big communications providers who use their monopolies in the long-distance bus topology space to push their own media agenda. And NN happens to be a politically viable tool for that.

But if you put it to a vote, a more anarchic internet (characterized by, inter alia, 1. wholly distributed naming and cert mechanisms, 2. final-mile mesh networking, 3. few or no blanket bans on low-power radio transmission, 4. the removal of politically-enshrined content bias from the application layer (ie, copyright law and software patents)) will, I think, win such a poll. The overwhelming majority here prefer that vision as a long-term plan, compared to barely-leashed telecoms restrained by a wink-wink-nudge-nudge "net neutrality."

And so, the solution referred here, since it is pragmatic and reasonable, meets a sort of "for now" test of decency, whilst not being inconsistent with a soft, "best we can do" system of net neutrality for Comcast and Time Warner.

wtallis3• 9 years ago

but it's also clearly a good thing for the Iraqi people

Wouldn't it be even better for the Iraqi people if they could also have affordable Internet access for the purposes of communicating and conducting commerce? Unless Wikimedia is footing the bill for the data usage, this is just a case of the telcos restructuring their pricing so that the lost profits of Wikimedia access are subsidized by the rest of the data usage. At least some of that other usage is probably more valuable to the Iraqi economy and general welfare (especially in the near term) than reading Wikipedia, even if it is less idealistic sounding.

srssays• 9 years ago

The two are not mutually exclusive. If the marketplace is competitive, then ISPs are incentivised to both offer freebies and to make their services affordable.

The problems with the United States are the large area to cover, combined with a relatively uncompetitive market, and the predominance of post-paid contracts. But you can't generalise this to the rest of the world.

AndyMcConachie• 9 years ago

NN is about preventing one competitor from getting an unfair advantage. So unless you view Wikimedia as having a competitor, or some future potential competitor, this doesn't really violate any NN principles.

In essence, if we're all OK with Wikimedia having a monopoly on what it is that Wikimedia does then there is no problem.

Going back to the roots of the ICC(predecessor to the FCC) trains could carry USPS mail at different rates than other cargo. The USPS had a government sponsored monopoly on mail delivery. However, rate discrimination between similar cargo from different parties was prohibited. This is the basis for our concept of common carriers and NN.

woah• 9 years ago

NN is a pretty loosey-goosey principle that mostly just means "I don't like Comcast". There's also some partisan political football mixed in, and in the EFF's case, sizable donations from content providers like Google who want to preserve a strong bargaining position when buying bandwidth.

djrogers4• 9 years ago

So your take is that NN regulation should include a test for existing competitors, potential future competitors, and the general agreeability for an entity to become a monopoly?

Yeah, no way that could go wrong...

Broken_Hippo2• 9 years ago

Isn't net neutrality bigger issue is things like Netflix paying Comcast to be in their unmetered section - with the very real fear that small websites will get ignored?

I don't put this on the same scale. I'd seriously not mind actual educational websites to be exempt from data charges - and this would include (but not be limited to) Wikipedia. I understand this would have a few flaws and arguements, but it is a start. I'd happily add in direct mostly text-based communication as well (Messenger for facebook but not the pages, hangouts, and the like).

djrogers4• 9 years ago

How do you draw the distinction between permissible zero-rating and non-permissible zero-rating?

gpawl3• 9 years ago

If Netflix just pays for bandwidth, that's net neutrality. If Comcast discriminates pricing based on anything besides byte delivery cost, that's not neutrality.

tn13• 9 years ago

Net neutrality was a bogus hocus-pocus in my opinion to begin with. Good for Iraq but bad for us ? How and why ? The underlying principles seems completely arbitrary. People should be able to get more access for lesser price and that is always a desirable thing.

redsummer• 9 years ago

Is invading them not enough? Does the US have to force an encyclopedia of Lord of the Rings trivia on them too?

Wikimedia in Iraq has nearly 12M subscribers free of mobile data charges

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