Wikipedia Zero: !

Knowledge Set Free

Jimmy Wales - November 5, 2013

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is

given free access to the Sum of all Human knowledge

27MILLION ARTICLES

285LANGUAGES

Key stats

• 8 languages have over 1,000,000

• 46 languages have at least 100,000

• 120 have at least 10,000

• 223 have at least 1,000

Scandanavia

• Swedish - 1.6 million articles (but Lsjbot has created 1,000,000 of them!)

• Bokmål - 400,000 articles

• Nynorsk - 106,000 articles

• Saami - 7,616

• Danish - 182,998

516MILLION UNIQUE

VISITORS

Who?

Why know who Wikipedians are?

This is why.

87% male

Average age of 26

Double the % of PhDs

By the numbers

The Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is thecharity that runs Wikipedia.

Just over 150 employees and 100,000 volunteers!

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is

given free access to the Sum of all Human knowledge

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is

given free access to the Sum of all Human knowledge

Here is what you know

True enough but... clouds the mind!

What you probably don’t know

Internet usage

• Let’s just look at one country, Nigeria

• 2000 - 0.1% of country online

• 2006 - 3.1%

• 2009 - 16.1%

• 2011 - 29.0%

Bandwidth

• January 02 - 72Mbit/s

• January 07 - 693Mbit/s

• End of 2012 - 12,000Mbit/s

New York

Lagos, Nigeria

What are people doing?

• Are they searching for prices for crops?

• Are they reporting malaria outbreaks?

• Maybe, but...

Top sites across Africa

• Google

• Facebook

• Twitter

• Wikipedia

• Local newspapers

What you need to know

• Ongoing march of technology is making real and usable Internet access available to tens of millions TODAY

What you need to know

• Think forward 20 years

• Massive connectivity

• To real Internet

• For hundreds of millions

• Who do not speak English or French

Wikipedia Zero

500M reach and growing

Telenor Wikipedia Zero countries

•Thailand

•Malaysia

•Montenegro

•Bangladesh

•India

•Pakistan

•Serbia

Next step: focus on usage

Free page views

How to increase usage?

Innovative new interface to reach mobile users who do not yet use mobile internet - Kenya

zero versus m

Demand from consumers

Announcing Myanmar!

• Telenor has been awarded a mobile license and will start providing services in 2014. Wikipedia Zero will be part of that pioneering mobile offer.

• Less than 10% of people have mobile access - among the lowest in the world

• Myanmar government target is 80% by 2016

Burmese language

• Burmese Wikipedia: 32K articles, 8 active editors, 1 very active

• Burmese language requires zawgyi encoding (incompatible with unicode)

• People read the English Wikipedia

Thank You!