Submissions/Wikipedi-0-Fi

After careful consideration, the Programme Committee has decided not to accept the below submission at this time. Thank you to the author(s) for participating in the Wikimania 2015 programme submission, we hope to still see you at Wikimania this July.

Submission no.: 4026

Title of the submission: Wikipedi-0-Fi

Type of submission (discussion, hot seat, panel, presentation, tutorial, workshop): Presentation

Author of the submission: Jim Carter (Rudra Pratap Sinha)

E-mail address: (removed)

Username: Jim Carter

Country of origin: India

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)

Personal homepage or blog: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jim_Carter

Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal): Hello everyone, I know the title of this submission may look a bit odd but I can’t think of any other title. Wikipedi-0-Fi is an idea by which an entire village will get free access to Wikipedia! Yes, I mean, without paying money for internet connection.

The main aim of this proposal is to create awareness about the sum of all human knowledge, Wikipedia and to encourage people to join Wikipedia. According to en:2011 census of India there are more than a half million villages in India and about .5 billion people lives in those villages. Other countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Morocco, Ghana, Myanmar etc. have millions of village and small towns with billions of people. While Wikipedia receives a good amount of traffic from the above mentioned countries (Average as of 2012: 51 million unique visitors monthly) but it is just 1/50 (1 out of 50) of the huge population. It can be assumed that half of the total population don’t even know about Wikipedia. While India is the second largest in the world based on the total number of telephone users (both fixed and mobile phone) and third largest in internet access but millions of villages don’t even have internet access (I know because I was one of them). The main reason why they don’t have internet access is they don’t want to waste money for internet connection although they have phones that can be used to browse internet (Mostly Android phones) but they don’t use it. To fix this problem, Wikipedia started a project in 2012 named, en:Wikipedia Zero to provide Wikipedia free of charge on mobile phones in the above mentioned countries. Being one of the users to get “free of charge Wikipedia access” (Verify) I came to know that most of the people of my town don’t even know that Wikipedia can be accessed for free of charge. The main reason they can’t use this facility because those people don’t use the same mobile operator. For example: In India only Aircel Telecom Company provides this service hence only those can access Wikipedia for free who uses Aircel Operator. Beside this, most of the Aircel users don’t even know that Wikipedia is free. So my idea is to use long range Wi-Fi i.e. Municipal Wireless Network in those villages. The internet connection will be provided by dtac, Saudi Telecom Company, Mobilink, Dialog Axiata, Aircel etc. mobile operator companies which already provides free access to Wikipedia. This will create awareness of using Wikipedia among villagers and hence they will be able to acquire knowledge, while others will share knowledge without spending money for internet connection.

The above is just a brief summary; during the presentation I will provide full details of how it is possible; I hope now you can understand why I chosen “Wikipedi-0-Fi”, it means Wikipedia Zero Wi-Fi. Thank you.

Track

It fits two tracks

Technology, Interface & Infrastructure
Legal & Free Culture

Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long): 30 minutes

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?: Yes (I hope)

Slides or further information (optional)

Special requests

Interested attendees

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Ochilov (talk) 10:34, 24 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
--Higimo (talk) 11:31, 24 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]
--Touzrimounir (talk) 16:19, 10 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 09:08, 23 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Rosiestep (talk) 15:15, 23 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
SusunW (talk)
I JethroBT (talk) 09:21, 25 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Acagastya (talk) 10:44, 26 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
W.carter (talk) 23:27, 27 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
CT Cooper · talk 13:00, 28 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Rsrikanth05 (talk)