Wikipedia Zero: Orange mobile partnership in Africa comes to an end

On March 11, 2016, the Wikimedia Foundation's Technical Partner Manager, Daniel D. Foy, removed Orange from the list of mobile partnerships on the Wikimedia Foundation wiki, marking the apparent end of a longstanding partnership between Orange and the WMF that began in April 2009.

The 2009 strategic mobile and web partnership with Orange was the first of its kind. Predating Wikipedia Zero (launched in 2012), it took a different form from more recent mobile partnerships. Under the terms of the three-year deal, Orange paid the Wikimedia Foundation for the right to use Wikimedia brands and trademarks in showcasing the content. Users were able to access Wikimedia content from Orange's own portals, and targeted marketing was presented alongside the content.

The 2009 deal, serving European markets, was followed in 2012 by another Orange partnership focused on the Middle East and Africa (MEA). This no longer involved a monetary arrangement between WMF and Orange. Most recently, it provided free Wikipedia access to mobile users in eight African countries with a combined population of around 225 million: Botswana, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Madagascar, Niger, Tunisia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Following the removal of the Orange partnerships, Botswana, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Niger, and the Democratic Republic of Congo no longer appear on the mobile partnerships page, while Kenya still has Airtel and Safaricom listed, and Tunisia still has Tunisie Telecom.

Wikimedia Foundation Partner Manager Adele Vrana told the Signpost:

Our contract with Orange expired last year upon completion of a 3 year term. We had several short term extensions while discussing a switch to our updated legal template. We decided to let the latest extension expire on March 11th as we continued our discussions, allowing more time to reach mutually agreeable terms. The conversations with Orange are ongoing and we look forward to future collaboration.

Orange, for its part, announced last month that it had signed a strategic partnership with Google "to bring the best of mobile internet across its full African and Middle Eastern (Orange MEA) footprint". The partnership will provide access to "a range of best-in-class online services including, but not limited to, popular content covering fashion, sport and music, as well as everyday tools such as Google Search™, YouTube™ and Google Maps™. [...] Important information will be made accessible, for example, finding answers to questions instantly through Google Search or the ability to locate the nearest health clinic using Google Maps."

The evolution of privacy loss in Wikipedia

Last week's WMF research showcase focused on the evolution of privacy loss in Wikipedia, as investigated in a research project by Marian-Andrei Rizoiu, Lexing Xie, Tiberio Caetano and Manuel Cebrian.

The project, based on a dataset spanning 13 years of Wikipedia editing, incorporating 188,805,088 edits by 117,523 different users, concluded that:

The digital traces left behind by the users in the online environment reveal more about them than they might like. As our recent WSDM'16 paper shows, machine learning algorithms can be used to uncover hidden links between a user's past activity and her private traits – like gender, education level or religious views –, even for retired users. [...]

As an online system evolves over time, new digital traces of individual behavior may uncover previously hidden statistical links between an individual's past actions and her private traits [...] the prediction accuracy for almost all private traits consistently improves over time. Surprisingly, the prediction performance for users who stopped editing after a given time still improves. The activities performed by new users seem to have contributed more to this effect than additional activities from existing (but still active) users. Insights from this work should help users, system designers, and policy makers understand and make long-term design choices in online content creation systems.

A video of the research showcase is available on YouTube. The full paper and a short summary of the study are also available online.