February 06, 2012
Agreement between Orange and Wikipedia: free access in Africa
In these days access to Wikipedia contents is becoming freer in Africa, thanks to an agreement with no precedent that has been established between Wikimedia Foundation and France Telecom-Orange, one of the main African mobile communication company. According to the agreement all African and Middle East users have free access to the online encyclopaedia, thus there is no connection expense to surf Wikipedia pages.

lettera27 celebrates the piece of news together with all African and non-African partners: we long believe that mobile technologies, the most widespread technological pieces of equipment in Africa, and Wikipedia are basic resources to focus on in order to boost knowledge spreading in Africa and on Africa. For this reason mobile technologies are the main issues of Mobile A2K - Mobile Access to Knowledge and WikiAfrica projects.

“Wikipedia represents an important service, a public good – thus we want people to be able to access them freely, whichever device they use”. These are the reasons why given by Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation executive director. “Through this collaboration with Orange, Wikipedia will be available for millions of people, who did not have this chance before”.

This is a great step that, beside spreading and boosting Wikipedia use for users with limited access to resources and information, confirms the importance of the right for free access to information. Such goal might be an example for other world areas to establish this kind of agreements.

Orange is Telecom France mobile department and is one of the main company in the world mobile communication market, with more than 102.000 employees only in France. There are 221 million customers and among them 162 millions use mobile communication services. In October 2009 France Telecom-Orange and Wikimedia Foundation have taken part into the Mobile A2K meeting that was planned by lettera27 at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center.