IN A PRESS RELEASE today by the Wikimedia Foundation and Orange, it was announced that mobile users across Africa and the Middle East will soon have access to the entirety of Wikipedia — without incurring a single data charge (so long as they’re using Orange).
Back in December, I interviewed Wikipedia programmer, designer, and all-around-knowledge-lover Brandon Harris about Wikipedia’s mission to bring all of the world’s knowledge to every part of the world in as many languages as possible — and he mentioned the idea of Wikipedia pushing for free access to its data across mobile servers. The way he explained it (I think — I’m not positive on this) was that there are these satellites in space, they have a massive amount of bandwidth, and the Wikipedia information could be piggybacked through that extra bandwidth without costing the telecom companies anything.
