Wouldn't net neutrality supporters be enraged because all data is not being treated equally now? Upstart wikis will never be able to compete!
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...
This is, apart from the utility that it brings, advertisement for the operator:
> 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. [0]
It's not inconceivable that the ISP would do similar deals with $music_streaming_service. Maybe for some payment.
Just because Wikimedia is not seeking profits or even looking to somehow "stay ahead" with this deal, that doesn't mean it isn't against neutrality.
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.
I've no idea what current state is, but at one point the Wikimedia Foundation was seriously concerned about potential Wikipedia forks, such as by Facebook. And was working to make them more difficult.
Given that WP seems to have plateaued in a less-than-ideal place, with for instance, a lot of research programming languages considered non-notable, I had mixed feelings about that. A competitor with a different culture could be a good thing.
Being concerned about a theoretical possibility of something happening is not the same as it actually happening and being a viable competitor.
> A competitor with a different culture could be a good thing.
Maybe. But I don't see any right now with even tiny amount of viability. Do you?
NN, as I understand it, is not so much about the current state of things, but about making sure that future "wikipedias" and "facebooks" get the same chances as the current ones. Right now there are no viable alternatives (that you and I know of, at least) - but what about this time next year?
You can't change what NN means on a whim, to account for whether each specific type of internet service has "viable alternatives" or not. And how do you even define what are viable alternatives? What's viable for me, might not be viable for others.
> You can't change what NN means on a whim
I don't want to change what NN means. I want to emphasize that NN means that people in Iraq who now can have access to a snapshot of the world's knowledge absolutely free wouldn't have that option anymore. In service of some abstract idea of fairness that doesn't even apply to anything specific. I don't think it is a good idea.
Not free. The costs are being covered by increased pricing on the rest of their phone usage.
The money would be better spent lowering the normal cost, but then Wikipedia doesn't get the huge supply of editors.
Or the money spent providing Wikipedia data could be used to provide a limited amount of free access to the entire internet. Or on better infrastructure so service doesn't cost a months salary.
Could be. But won't be. So it's not really a choice.
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.
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.
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?
Right now there are collaboratively-edited encyclopedias in some languages (at least Chinese) that are larger than Wikipedia, like Baidu Baike, which is much larger than zh.wiki.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enciclopedia_Libre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu_Baike
There were at least two famous attempts to compete with English Wikipedia over policy disputes (Citizendium, which was concerned about verifiability and anonymity, and Conservapedia, which was concerned about the neutral point of view policy). These competitors haven't been very successful, but I can easily imagine people wanting to give each of them another go.
Right now there are about 100 online encyclopedias, each of which potentially competes in some degree with Wikipedia in some sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_encyclopedias
An example that's not particularly a result of an editorial policy dispute is Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics, a super-great online math encyclopedia (that competes with Wikipedia for attention in its coverage of math). Another is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a super-great online philosophy encyclopedia. Both of these encyclopedias are stronger in at least some parts of their respective areas than Wikipedia is, and perhaps better even on Wikipedia's own terms (e.g., I bet the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy manages to have a more "neutral point of view" on several philosophy controversies than Wikipedia currently does). But zero-rating probably means that people interested in these topics on some mobile carriers are more likely to look only at Wikipedia's articles, even if they're not the best online encyclopedia articles in those areas.
Edit: Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics has been renamed to "Wolfram MathWorld". Although Wikipedia's coverage of most math topics is really excellent, I still think MathWorld has areas where it's likely to be even better.
Edit 2: Suppose you're interested in a particular religion's official take on some religious issue. Then an encyclopedia edited by adherents of that religious tradition (like one of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_online_encyclopedias#R...) may be more helpful to you than Wikipedia, for example because it may go into more theological or ritual detail, as well as more detail about polemics or apologetics from a particular religious view. That might actually be what you were looking for, but currently none of those religious encyclopedias is zero-rated by a mobile carrier.
Great point, but Baidu is super-rich, so it's unlikely zero-rating Wikipedia would make any effect on them. Not to mention zero-rating in Iraq probably not exactly relevant for zh.wiki :)
> Right now there are about 100 online encyclopedias, each of which potentially competes in some degree with Wikipedia in some sense.
In "some" sense, surely. To be really on the level comparable to Wikipedia by breadth of coverage and participation? Unlikely. None of them would be noticeably impeded by zero-rating Wikipedia in Iraq - most of them probably get next to zero participating from Iraq anyway. Same probably applies to any other place where Wikipedia Zero works.
> but currently none of those religious encyclopedias is zero-rated by a mobile carrier.
Because it doesn't make sense to zero-rate niche sites. By the same vein I could say Wikipedia competes with a knitting site run by my friend because if you want to know about knitting, I'd go to a knitting site, and it's not zero rated. That doesn't make much sense to me - if you want to enable minimal service to people, you choose something with broadest coverage, not with deepest one, because deepest one would necessarily be niche.
I found an error once, and sent it in (it was something to do with graph theory, and the equation was missing a +1 or something, which was sort of critical). I checked about a month later and it hadn't been fixed, I can't remember what it was now, I really wish I could. It was something to do with "n/2 + 1" and they had written "n/2".
The problem is not "upstart wikis" it's upstart everything. The internet is a lot bigger than just wikipedia, or indeed the web.