Global Reach/Private sector

Private sector partnerships

Private companies and organizations around the world invest heavily in their corporate social responsibility (CSR). Education comes across as one of the most relevant sectors where CSR efforts exist, particularly in the Global South. We believe there are great opportunities for us to partner with mission and values aligned companies, where we can jointly work in bringing Wikimedia projects to more and more people in the world.

What are we currently exploring:

• Wikipedia App Preloads - The Wikimedia Foundation will pilot partnerships with handset manufacturers and Wikipedia Zero partners to place Wikipedia apps on smartphones and tablets. This will test new approaches for expanding Wikipedia awareness and usage, particularly among mobile-first internet users.

• SMS/Messaging - During the past 2 years, we have received a considerable number of requests from prospective partners interested in working with us on this. We have decided to work on an assessment to better understand the potential and challenges to these partnerships. We successfully partnered with Airtel and The Praekelt Foundation to build and test this capability for a 3-month pilot in Kenya starting in 2014. The Wikipedia via Text pilot was created to make Wikipedia content available to anyone with a mobile phone, including the most basic ‘dumb’ phones that could only handle calls and text messages. This was presented as a limited-promotion free public beta to conduct integration, load testing, and also to gauge public interest. After identifying and fixing initial bugs, the test identified key areas of improvement and saw a significant public interest which includes 80,000 unique users in 2 months, which even increased after the official end of the pilot to 100,000 uniques with only word of mouth for discovery of the service.