Does the end result of more people having free access to the information wikipedia provides, justify the zero rating/preferential treatment by ISPs of the site?
But that would only make sense if Wikipedia created some sort of insurmountable barrier for newer, better information. It doesn't. Newer, better information can reach people through Wikipedia with just as much ease (provided it fits Wiki's publishing standards) as it would through any other platform.
For all intents and purposes, Wikipedia and other similar open and free general knowledge sources can (and perhaps should) be regarded as a public good. We don't complain that the government's monopoly on building public roads closes out competition to 'newer, better roads'. We recognize that these roads are vital public infrastructure. Platforms like Wikipedia should be no different.
In many cases Wikipedia's information is substandard when compared to other sources, both in presentation and content. The wiki layout is useless for certain content types, such as video.
For example, many people prefer to use imdb for movie information (which is also free to the end user), but it comes lower than Wikipedia on many search results. There have also been several recent studies that say Wikipedia's medical information is unreliable and dangerous.
So giving free access to Wikipedia, over other sites is not actually in the public good at all. The answer is more competition.
As for video, both IMDB and wikipedia 'pop up' a box in which to play video, independent of the parent page layout; they don't seem to differ in that respect, and IMDB is a specialist site that's all about video.
There have also been several recent studies that say Wikipedia's medical information is unreliable and dangerous.
As opposed to...? Online medical literature in general is noted to suck, even the specialist websites. Even paid professionals - my housemate returned from the doctor two days ago after a norovirus scare... and the doctor claimed the incubation period before symptoms was 2 weeks... when it's actually 1-2 days.
Anyway, Wikipedia is a generalist site - basically you're arguing that it's not as good as specialist sites, so to free up access to information, all that better info should be free, hence all (useful) sites (effectively) should be free. I'm not sure that's going to go down well with ISPs.
Now get some good quality evidence - something like a Cochrane review or NICE guidance - and try to edit those medical pages.
Too silly to address.
> Wikipedia's medical information is unreliable and dangerous.
Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia not a DIY medical textbook. If you see dangerous information please feel free to edit it out — Wikipedia emphatically does not give medical advice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Medical_disclaimer).
> The wiki layout is useless for certain content types, such as video.
New-ish media viewer allows video playback fullscreen or inline, it's no youtube but unclear in which way you consider this useless.
> So giving free access to Wikipedia, over other sites is not actually in the public good at all. The answer is more competition.
Firstly Wikipedia Zero does not preclude, and indeed hasn't precluded, Facebook zero etc. Regarding competition, you know Wikipedia is CC-BY-SA right? You and everyone else has a right to fork the entire project, along with the mediawiki software...
That disclaimer (hidden in the terms and conditions section) does not change the fact that many people do use Wikipedia for medical information. Each page that contains medical content should have its own disclaimer stating that the information contained in it has not been checked by doctors for accuracy and could have been changed by anyone at any time and could be incorrect. As this article points out [1]:
They discovered that 90% of the entries made statements that contradicted latest medical research. Lead author Dr Robert Hasty, of the Wallace School of Osteopathic Medicine in North Carolina, said: "While Wikipedia is a convenient tool for conducting research, from a public health standpoint patients should not use it as a primary resource because those articles do not go through the same peer-review process as medical journals."
>If you see dangerous information please feel free to edit it out
But how would I know if it's dangerous? I'm not a doctor. Your comment encapsulates the problem. You are asking me, a non-trained person, to make medical judgments on behalf of others.
When Google chooses Wikipedia pages to be the top result for medical queries, instead of peer-reviewed information then that is an enormous barrier to entry.
> There have also been several recent studies that say Wikipedia's medical information is unreliable and dangerous.
Nobody is going to use Wikipedia to diagnose diseases. But suppose I live in a country with a cholera problem and search for 'chronic diarrhea' on the web. Wikipedia will be able to point me to a few probable causes, and will give me some primary hints about what I'm supposed to do.
If there isn't a doctor nearby to tell me this, and there isn't a public library with a medical encyclopedia nearby, and I can't afford a PC with internet access, how else am I supposed to find out?
Similarly, I may happen to trust Wikipedia itself, but the tactics it is using are very abusable to keep a for-profit's inferior loss-leader product on top.
Suppose an NGO decided to provide expensive vaccines to children in Africa for free and enlisted the help of a local delivery company to ensure the vaccines reach as many people as possible, would you accuse them of trying to out-compete drug companies?
Why is Wikipedia different from this? They too are trying to provide an essential service (information) to people who could not afford it under normal circumstances. They are doing so without expectations of profit. Their tactics are in no way similar to those of Microsoft, purely because they are not competing in a market economy.