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Wikipedia used to be free on mobile in Nepal. When a service doesnt get counted against a mobile subscribers data plan, thats called a zero rating. In places where the dominant online encyclopedia is free, its calledWikipedia Zero. Private cellular provider Ncell cancelled the service at the end of March, according to Indian news siteThe Wire. The crowd-sourced encyclopedia remains free in parts of the developing world as different as Tajikistan and Angola,according to the Wikimedia Foundations website. In fact, that page shows that Afghanistan is the latest place where the program went live, doing so just last week for people subscribed to theRoshan mobile carrier.

As weve previously reported, Wikipedia isnt just a place to get information. It also gives people a chance to contribute to one of the most robust repositories of knowledge on Earth, making it a transformational resource for the worlds poorest people. That said, while Wikipedia is good, the whole internet is better. Some open web advocates worry that free mobile access to one of the most widely used services online inhibits demands for infrastructure sufficient to provide access to the entire web.

The cost of mobile data can be a barrier to accessing the free, volunteer-contributed information on Wikipedia. In Iraq, for example, a recent survey revealed that the high cost of data limited internet use for a majority of participants, Juliet Barbara, a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, wrote the Observer in an email. Wikipedia Zero exists to address the affordability barrier in countries where our readers and editors cant afford the mobile data charges to access Wikipedia.

The foundation administers Wikipedia, but it doesnt provide editorial control. Its zero rating program operates under a series of principles, one of which is this: no one gets paid. Wikimedia doesnt pay the provider and the provider doesnt pay Wikimedia. It also makes partners commit to not editing or changing pages on the site.

Yes. On a global scale, the digital divide is bad.

Last year, the World Economic Forum reported that four billion people lack internet access; however, the mobile internet is minting far more new internet users these days than desktops connected to broadband, as the Pew Research Center has reported.

One commonality between the developing world and ours: data costs money on mobile. The more subscribers use, the more it costs, but if Wikipedia doesnt count against a data plan, then people wont hesitate to go to the encyclopedia and learn about the world (or to contribute to it, so that the rest of the world can learn about ignored places).

Its debatable.

If one site is free to visit and another isnt, users will more likely become habituated to using the free site. Twitter and Facebook startedpaying for free access to users around the world about three years ago. Then Google followed suit. Obviously this costs the companies money in the short term, but it locks in audience over time.

Although it may seem like a humane strategy to offer users from developing countries crumbs from the Internets table in the form of free access to walled-garden services, such service may thrive at the cost of stifling the development of low-cost, neutral Internet access in those countries for decades to come, Jeremy Malcolm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in 2014. EFF doesnt always oppose zero ratings. It has a detailed breakdown of the complex issues raised by zero rating certain resources.

In 2014, tech companies and advocates in the U.S. hada big fight over internet speed. Big companies wanted to pay for priority access to internet users. For example, Google might have paid some internet providers so that its music service loaded faster for itssubscribers, so people on that network might decide to switch to Google Music from Spotify. The fight was referred to as net neutrality. As usual, John Olivers explainer was best.

Making the data for a service free on mobile has a very similar effect to making it faster on the web. Both create an unfairly superior user experience. When Wikimedia Foundation embraces a free data model for its most famous product, that makes itharder to explain whats pernicious about free access to tech giants websites. The new head of the FCC, Ajit Pai, has made it clear that he sees free data programs as a net benefit to consumers.

Yes. In a 2014 blog post, Deputy Director Erik Mueller wrote, The Wikimedia Foundation believes that the principle of net neutrality is critical to the future of the open internet.

Its hard for any organization that supports a walled-garden approach to internet access to also defend everyones right to chose where they go and what they do online, Timothy Karr of the advocacy group Free Press wrote the Observer in an email. Wikimedia, he argued,could use its considerable influence to defend open internet protections while supporting universal access to all of the world wide web, and not just to a part of it.

Also in 2014, another Wikimedia staff member, Gayle Karen Young, admitted to theWashington Post that we have a complicated relationship toit.We believe in net neutrality in America. She went on to predict that as data charges dropped around the world, Wikipedia Zero wouldnt be necessary any longer. Honestly, we dont think well have to do it for very long, she said.

The longest running Wikipedia Zero programs still running are in Montenegro and Thailand, which both launched Wikipedia Zero in 2012. In total, the Wikimedia Foundation shows 49 countries with active zero rating programs for the encyclopedia.

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Wikipedia Is Not Free in Nepal Because of a Cellphone Company - Observer

caption Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales. source Carl Court/Getty Images

LONDON - It was Kellyanne Conway who convinced Jimmy Wales to create a media company.

On Tuesday, the Wikipedia cofounder announced Wikitribune, a new community-powered news outlet that aims to combat fake news and mistrust of the media - and he says it was remarks by the controversial Trump advisor who inadvertently pushed him to do so.

"I've been thinking about this for quite a long time, I've been working on ideas and so forth, it was always a backburner project," he told Business Insider in a telephone interview on Monday.

"But there was a moment: A friend had persuaded me that we should all give Donald Trump 100 days, we should just assume the best and hope he would do well, and be supportive of the presidency in general.

"And then on day one, Kellyanne Conway came out and said 'alternative facts,' and I was like 'that's it, game over, I'm done, I can't put up with this.' So that's when I really started pushing forward, to say this really needs to happen - I need, for my personal feeling of values in the world, I need to be involved in trying to help with this problem."

Wikitribune will work as a kind of hybrid between a traditional news organisation and Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Professional journalists will work alongside community volunteers to write and edit stories, "working side-by-side as equals," Wales said.

The 50-year-old internet entrepreneur will, at least at first, serve as CEO and in an editor-in-chief-esque role managing the site's output.

Generating revenue is a notoriously tricky problem for media organisations, who see organisations like Google and Facebook gobble up advertising revenue while news consumers grow accustomed to free access to news. Wikitribune won't attempt to buck this trend by charging a compulsory membership fee - instead it will ask readers if they're willing to pay a voluntary subscription or make a donation to fund its operations, in a similar vein to Wikipedia.

Wales said Wikitribune will focus on news stories with impact over viral pieces: "You can't beat them at your own game, you've got to do something different and interesting." This kind of citizen-augmented journalism will prove valuable in stories like data breaches, he said, when large numbers of eyeballs are needed to "go through really tedious stuff" to find the newsworthy information hidden inside.

There has been debate in liberal circles about "fake news" for months amid historically low levels of trust in the mainstream media. Some have even suggested that fake news stories circulating on platforms like Facebook helped Donald Trump win his shock victory in the US presidential election.

But "citizen journalism" and community-driven investigations can have problems with reliability too - perhaps most notoriously when would-be sleuths on Reddit accused the wrong man of being behind the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.

"Reddit has some amazing fantastic communities, it has some horrible places, it's a big noisy place, but it isn't really designed for - and it doesn't really aim at - doing fact-checked journalism and publishing stories," Wales said.

"In that particular case I actually felt like Reddit as a whole got treated a bit unfairly, like, a handful of people on a messageboard started claiming that 'hey, we think this guy did it.' Well, that's the internet for you, it's broad, wide open."

He added: "For us, it's a matter of: If you were going to publish a story you would really want to have that fact-checked, approved, and so forth ... the difference is you've got to set firm social norms and rules up front about what it is we're trying to accomplish."

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Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales is launching a community-powered news site - Business Insider Nordic

The Muji Hut is a minimalist's dream, at least until it's filled to the brim with all those adorable Muji products. The Japanese retailer has just unveiled the diminutive house, which clocks in at less than 100 square feet (or roughly the same size asone of their body fit cushions).The Muji Hut is priced at 3,000,000 (USD $27,000) and, sadly, will only be for sale in Japan.

The very tiny house features sliding glass windows, plywood interiors, a corrugated roof, and a "Shou Sugi Ban" wood exterior, sourced from Japan. It does not have plumbing, heating, or exhaust, though, so plan accordingly (as in, put it next to a real house that has all of those things). AsCore 77 points out, the Muji Hut does not include plans for electricity, despite the fact that a (Muji) lamp is featured in the photos. Ponder that mystery as you sit in your minimalist and chic tiny hut in the backyard.

[Photo: Muji] ML

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Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales is launching Wikitribune to fight fake news - Fast Company

In February, The Guardian reported that editors at Wikipedia had voted to ban the Daily Mail as a source for the website after deeming it generally unreliable.

The Daily Mail, a UK-based daily print and online publication with a daily newsprint circulation of 1.5 million and 238 million unique visitors a month, responded with a series of angry articles, ambushed one editor at his mother's home, and released a statement saying it banned its own reporters from using Wikipedia as a source in 2014.

Except, Wikipedia never truly banned the Daily Mail. Many citations pointing back to the Daily Mail are still live, and new ones have appeared on Wikipedia since the kerfuffle. So what's going on?

H.G. Wells predicted the need for something like Wikipedia back in 1937, saying that without a world encyclopaedia to hold men's minds together in something like a common interpretation of reality, there is no hope whatever of anything but an accidental and transitory alleviation of any of our world troubles.

Wikipedia editor Andrew Davidson shared that quote at the beginning of a talk in London earlier this month in which he explained how Wikipedia editors clean up the site. The site's editors, who are volunteers, have always struggled over the essence of facts. Famous battles breaking out over the origin of hummus, when to use Gdansk versus Danzig, and how to spell the word yoghurt. This process is decentralized, democratic, and well-documented; these arguments play out on the "talk" pages for individual entries as well as forum threads dedicated to editor discussion, where they are saved forever.

There are no rules on Wikipedia, just guidelines. Of Wikipedia's five pillars, the fifth is that there are no firm rules. There is no formal hierarchy either, though the most dedicated volunteers can apply to become administrators with extra powers after being approved by existing admins. But even they don't say what goes on the site. If there's a dispute or a debate, editors post a "request for comment," asking whoever is interested to have their say. The various points are tallied up by an editor and co-signed by four more after a month, but it's not a vote as in a democracy. Instead, the aim is to reach consensus of opinion, and if that's not possible, to weigh the arguments and pick the side that's most compelling. There was no vote to ban the Daily Mail because Wikipedia editors don't vote.

The Daily Mail is known, especially online, for sensationalist content, sloppy reporting, borderline plagiarism, and the occasional fabrication. The paper made up an entire story with quotes and colorful description reporting the wrong verdict in the Amanda Knox trial. However, it has won kudos for original reporting and was named newspaper of the year at the latest Press Awards. Wikipedia editors frequently argued about its validity as a source in the discussion section for individual entries. In this case, an editor submitted a broader request for comment about its general reliability. Seventy-seven editors participated in the discussion and two thirds supported prohibiting the Daily Mail as a source, with one editor and four co-signing editors (more than usual) chosen among administrators declaring that a consensus, though further discussion continued on a separate noticeboard, alongside complaints that the debate should have been better advertised.

Though it's discouraged, the Daily Mail can be (and still is) cited. An editor I met at a recent London Wikimeet said he'd used the Daily Mail as a source in the last week, as it was the only source available for the subject he was writing about. The site has a link filtering tool that automatically bans spamming sites, text with excessive obscenities, and persistent vandalism (trends such as leaving "your mom" on pages), but it has not been activated for the Daily Mail.

The change is less of a ban and more of a general rule not to use Daily Mail references when better ones exist, said John Lubbock, communications coordinator for Wikimedia UK, the charity that helps fund and organise the encyclopedia, but doesn't direct its efforts.

Lubbock noted that the move means editors will replace Daily Mail links with better sources, but with some 10,000 in use, that work may never be fully completed. If there's no more reliable source, editors have to make a judgement call: if only the Daily Mail is saying something, can we trust it? If not, delete the fact. If so, keep the link.

That practice isn't new on the site, and it isn't limited to the Daily Mail. Buzzfeed is generally considered not reliable by Wikipedia editors discussing the issue on the Reliable Sources noticeboard, though such discussion isn't binding and won't be seen by many editors. While its listicles may be of little use to an encyclopedia, it has an investigations team and was shortlisted for a Pulitzer this year.

Meanwhile, less-reputable sources including Russia Today and Breitbart aren't listed as unreliable. However, editors on the site and those I spoke to pointed out that editors shouldn't need reminding that those aren't trustworthy sources.

Debate aside, the Daily Mail itself noted that the "vote" saw 53 editors decide for the millions who use Wikipedia, but the encyclopedia isn't a democracy. The Request for Comments pages where such debates happen are rooms for remote debate that anyone can take part in. And there, consensus isn't about tallying votes, but weighing the merit of arguments.

That means a minority could win a dispute by making a better case, though in the case of the Daily Mail, a majority of editors involved in the conversation did back the ban. It's a small slice of the the 135,000 people who edit the site each month, though one editor pointed out that the vote was watched by more than 2,000 users, more than a usual debate would see.

Editors often do reach consensus. They have to in order to disable open contributions for controversial pages, for example. They recently introduced tighter guidelines for entries on living people to avoid fake death reports and libel. They've also agreed to use systematic reviews rather than individual studies as citations on medical pages.

Enforcement is a different matter. These decisions are typically enforced by editors who revert changes that don't meet the agreed-upon standards. This means the back-and-forth continues on Wikipedia's pages. The Daily Mail decision supported using an automated edit filter, but with it not in place and no apparent plans to do so, there's no reason a person new to the site would even know about the ban. And even if an automatic edit filter was used, it wouldn't outright ban the Daily Mail as a source. Though that is technically possible, it would simply show a warning message but then let the editor still click to save the link to the Daily Mail. Remember, there are no firm rules.

In the end, there was no vote, there is no ban, and plenty of other newspapers have had similar treatment, with a Wikipedia guide to potentially unreliable sources listing the Sun, Daily Mirror, TMZ, and Forbes.com. Listing the Daily Mail as an unreliable source is merely a trump card for editors to batter each other with during their constant debates about sources. If you want to link to the Daily Mail, be prepared to defend why. If you can't, the link will be replaced.

As foolish as some Wikipedia battles may seem, eventually consensus is reached, reality is decided upon, and we can feel like we're on solid ground. The site's volunteer editors are bickering their way to a common interpretation of reality, something we desperately lack here in 2017, with newsroom cuts gutting fact-checking, the rise of fake news, and a president who constantly contradicts himself. We don't have the certainties we used to that leaves people unsure what's reliable and who to believe, one editor told me. People in politics play off that, to confuse people, to paralyze them.

Knowledge is power

The Whitehouse.gov reset broke Wikipedia links en masse

Heres what editors are doing about it.

Read More

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Wikipedia's method for sorting out good and bad sources is a mess - The Outline

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Mrinalini Mukherjee at MS University, Baroda1969. PIc/source: Jyoti Bhatt. Courtesy: The Baroda Archives project, Asia Art Archive

The late Mrinalini Mukherjee, who fashioned the most sensuous sculptures out of hemp, is a name that Indian art history cannot afford to miss out. Mukherjee, who passed away in 2015, was notable for her iconic figures at once robust and curvaceous inspired by goddesses, vegetation and archetypal forms. Her works are part of collections at Tate and New Delhi's National Gallery of Modern Art. It should come as a surprise, then, that Mukherjee got a Wikipedia page only about a fortnight ago.

A full list of her exhibitions and biographical details are just a click away now, thanks to a daylong event in Chandigarh called the Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon. The event, organised by a non-profit called Heritage Lab, hits Mumbai on April 29 at Lower Parel's Piramal Museum of Art, where artists like Damyanti Chowla, Sunayni Devi, Nilima Sheikh and Madhvi Parekh are set to get Wikipedia entries. The Edit-a-Thon is an attempt to make the free online encyclopaedia a space where women artists from India can find equal representation as their male counterparts. "It is easy to find an artist like Amrita Sher-Gil on Wikipedia. She had an edge over others as she was declared a National Treasure artist. But, what about the remaining female artists?" says Medhavi Gandhi, who founded Heritage Lab in 2015.

Medhavi Gandhi

The feminine touch Gandhi, an MBA graduate who has been working towards improving the visibility of the arts and museums, has partnered with the Art+Feminism Movement (art.plusfeminism.org) to bring this Edit-a-Thon to India. The global movement, which started in 2014 in the US as "a conversation between four friends who wanted to create meaningful changes to the body of knowledge available about feminism and the arts on Wikipedia", partners with interested individuals and establishments the world-over.

Cultural theorist and curator Nancy Adajania says, "The Euro-American art worlds have become more vocal in recent times about the under-representation of women artists in art history. Museum exhibitions and publications on women artists are addressing this issue. In India, we have long had very prominent women artists, whose work has been well acknowledged. We need to ensure that global public platforms such as Wikipedia reflect this."

At a time when having a Wikipedia page seems to be the easiest, and the most obvious, Internet resource, what's stopping our artists from getting one of their own? "Editing a Wikipedia page is a gendered activity, with most of it being done by male users. There is a misconception that using a Wikipedia dashboard requires a knowledge of coding, but that's not the case at all. It is important that diverse sets of people add their research to these pages," says Gandhi, who was introduced to editing the online portal through members at Art+Feminism.

At the Edit-a-Thon in Chandigarhs Government Museum and Art Gallery, participants create a Wikipedia page for Sheela Gowda

Adajania says that the last decade has seen major publications on women artists such as Nalini Malani, Amrita Sher-Gil, Arpita Singh, Nilima Sheikh, Navjot Altaf and Sheba Chhachhi, among others. "Our publishing scene is definitely improving. However, in some cases, outsized and expensive publications can be a deterrent to those who are really interested in art," she says. Many of these publications, however, are housed at reputable museums across the country. The last two Edit-a-Thons that Heritage Lab organised at the National Museum, New Delhi, and Chandigarh's Government Museum and Art Gallery saw students, journalists and teachers use research material and publications housed in these museums' libraries. It is also, as she puts it, an important way for museums and their resources to connect with the virtual user.

"Several people asked us if this was an event meant for women only. It is for anyone who is interested," Gandhi adds. Did any art historian sign up? Not yet, says Gandhi.

What does the under-representation of women artists on Wikipedia say about the art milieu in India? Artist Sharmistha Ray, who draws on queer politics in her works, says, "If you look at the most significant pool of India's 10 galleries of established and emerging artists, the representation of women artists stands at about 36%. If you look at the international percentages of the gender split at major galleries, it's far less positive. So, overall, I would say India is in a better place. That's not to say it's a perfect balance yet."

As for Wikipedia, she adds, "It's not the measure of an artist by any standard. It's great if there's a bigger effort being made to represent women artists, but I would like to think that a Wikipedia entry is not the ultimate validation of an artist's legacy."

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Heritage Lab comes to Mumbai to help create space on Wikipedia for female artists - Mid-Day