In Angola, Wikimedia uses free full-traffic traffic.

The Wikimedia Foundation and Facebook, through charitable initiatives, provide free access to their sites in poor countries, without charging for cellular traffic. Inhabitants of African Angola have found useful use of such a gift - and now they exchange pirate films, series, music, anime and games , hiding them in Wikipedia articles. The country has very expensive mobile traffic, so Wikimedia for poor Africans has become the national peer-to-peer file sharing network.

Free access to Facebook is provided through the Facebook Free Basics program, and to Wikipedia - as part of the Wikipedia Zero initiative with the support of 82 telecom operators in 64 countries, including Russia.


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In 2014, the Wikimedia Foundation signed an agreement with the Angolan operator Unitel to launch a free Wikipedia Zero service in the country. Since then, subscribers have been charged to all Wikimedia sites, including the Wikimedia Commons image and video databases.

Mobile traffic in the Unitel network costs about $ 2.50 for 50 megabytes with an average salary in the country of $ 36 per month, so the Wikimedia initiative came at an opportune moment.

Now Angolans upload large media files to Wikimedia Commons and publish them on the pages of the Portuguese Wikipedia, sometimes changing the extension of films to JPEG or PDF. Links to new files are placed in the closed Wikimedia Angola community on Facebook.



Wikipedia editors are aware of the problem, but cannot cope with filtering large amounts of garbage. “I report on the possible abuse of Wikimedia and Wikimedia Zero projects with copyright infringement, ” one of them writes on the forum. - I'm not sure that users do this maliciously, but they received a warning and still continue to upload files. I don’t think, of course, that because of this, the Wikimedia Zero project needs to be closed, but you can think of some measures to prevent them from downloading large files, or, for example, publish warnings in the local language that they can and cannot do".

In discussing the problem, some people express the opinion that from Angolan IP-addresses it is necessary to prohibit the editing of Wikipedia altogether, and leave only read access. But such a measure is clearly discriminatory and does not find support from the majority.

In general, the inhabitants of poor countries life itself makes them show creativity. In Cuba, the "paquete" flash drives with a mini-copy of the Internet are distributed (the most important sites that are opened by the browser, as in the usual Internet). In Paraguay, one programmer found a way to tunnel all Internet traffic through the free Facebook Free Basics service, using a vulnerability in Facebook Messenger .

The technical solution to the problem with Angola has not yet been invented. The Wikimidia Foundation has, in fact, taken a waiting position. He does not transfer money to the Unitel operator, so he does not incur financial costs. Perhaps the problem will be resolved by itself when the Internet becomes cheaper in the country.

In addition, hiding on the Internet and noticing traces, Angolans are developing skills that may be useful to them in the future when organizing underground resistance movements, given that the country has been under an authoritarian regime of one person for 35 years.