Hola, Telefónica – Welcome to Wikimedia

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Today we’re excited to announce a new partnership with Telefónica, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world.  Telefónica will be working with the Wikimedia Foundation to increase the reach and accessibility of free knowledge for millions of their customers.  Through their mobile, IPtv, broadband, and other platforms they will soon begin to provide fast and innovative access to educational information from Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.
Telefónica has a particularly strong presence in Latin America, a part of the world experiencing an incredible rise in access to the internet, and a place where we hope to see considerable increases to our free knowledge materials.
Over the course of this three-year partnership we plan to jointly develop new approaches to sharing Wikimedia project information, particularly through Telefónica’s very large base of mobile subscribers. Telefónica has also expressed a strong interest in working with local chapters to support local outreach and education activities.  Last year they supported Wikimania in Buenos Aires.

Telefónica also runs a non-profit Foundation that supports non-business activities to promote education in Spanish and Portuguese languages and, with good faith efforts, will find ways to help us with the development of content in those languages (via our chapter activities, etc). Telefónica will also explore the development of offline readers for Wikimedia content to increase distribution.
I’m looking forward to sharing more developments about this partnership in the coming months.  Until then, we’re pleased to welcome Telefónica to the Wikimedia mission.
Viva el conocimiento libre!
Kul Wadhwa
Head of Business Development

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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Hi this james, thanks for sharing the useful information whenever i need any information about any thing i always been
search for Wikipedia thank you once again for runing such a non-profit charitable organization.

So much for net neutrality.

Hi, I just helped with a small amount because I’ve used wiki and I thought that this was fare. But I’ve read that Ford Fundation is coming in and so Telefonica; that means that the information inside wiki soon will be manipulated in their interest. How could you permit this?????? Mentals!

This is an awful move. The end does not justify the means. Having an awful company get some benefit from Wikipedia, and have people spending effort and time working on this while the Telefonica service to its own customers (who have no choice as in many cases there is no other company in their area) is terrible, is a total lack of respect.
By doing so, wikipedia is in some sense endorsing a company, which has a terrible reputation in most of the countries it is present.
You are giving a very bad example.

I really (!) hope that the technical solution that Telefonica develops with help from WM Foundation will be free and open source so that other parties and other telecommunication companies can use and study the solution as well … Especially since WM Foundation people is putting effort into helping Telefonica.
One way to promote free knowledge is to promote free software too.

”Telefónica has a particularly strong presence in Latin America, a part of the world experiencing an incredible rise in access to the internet, and a place where we hope to see considerable increases to our free knowledge materials.” Hi, here is Tom (user:everton137) from Wikimedia Brasil. I want express my real concerns about this partership. For short, I have to say that, besides it’s true telefónica has a strong presence in Latin America, this rise in access is painful for most of its users here in São Paulo state, Brazil. I’ve used telefónica brodband Internet access for 4 year (I… Read more »

Aqui no Brasil, Telefonica num é tão boa quanto tá escrito aí em cima não…

Nós brasileiros acreditamos que a Telefônica dara uma grande ajuda a Wikimedia. Todos nós percebemos o imenso salto nas telecomunicações que a empresa deu ao país, substituindo as ultra-ineficientes empresas estatais do passado. Eu levei mais de dois ano para comprar um telefone da Telesp e fora as inúmeros ligações de DDD que nunca fiz e que sempre religiosamente paguei, para não perder o meu telefone.

I think Telefónica is not that good in any Country. ─Spanish Guy (who left Telefónica).
And I agree about the libre software comment.

“Telefónica has a huge Latin American audience”. No, Telefónica has a huge Latin American number of problems. Every brazilian newspaper can show it easily. Security problems, call-center problems, consumers problems, every kind of problem that a company can have, they have in Brazil.
I’m afraid with this deal and I think that every brazilian user of Wikimedia projects feel the same.
Sad news.

Hello i am rautopia, I also agree with my fellow media Brazil, the phone is known for its monopoly and disrespect for its customers in Brazil, this partnership should be done if done very carefully … Sorry for my bad writing in English.

Ni! This is very strange. Telefónica has a well deserved bad reputation for bad consumer service and unethical behavior. In Brazil, they exploit a de facto monopoly, have outrageous prices, violate network neutrality, abuse their market dominance to harm smaller service providers, keep many cities without proper Internet access because they don’t want to make investments even thought their national profits are over the roof, and do everything in their powers to counter public broadband initiatives. Not to mention the Internet blackouts, plural, caused by precarious infrastructure, including last year leaving several hospitals, police stations and other essential public services… Read more »

We understand the concerns and we have always kept the in mind. Nothing changes on Wikipedia or the other projects. Telefonica, nor any other company has any influence on the content and management of the websites. Remember again: the community owns the projects and Telefonica is not going in to do anything to change the sites. Telefonica is providing more reach by the projects available through their own outlets and experimenting, with apps and functionality, in ways we can’t (primarily due to lack of resources). Look at it this way: we have the chance to influence other companies, organizations, etc.,… Read more »

Dear Kul, then, please, when we have Wikimedia related t-shirts, give us a choise of at least one version *without* telefónica symbol. Until today, I do not use Wikimania t-shirt at Brazilian streets because there is a symbol of this company, which is a shame for me and for everybody who depends on its Internet and other communication services. I wonder what kind of benefits telefónica will have with this partnership. My guess is using WMF brands (likely mainly Wikipedia) for its marketing purposes, instead of “promoting education in Spanish and Portuguese languages”. A company with a retrospect pointed by… Read more »

Dear Wikipedia editors, please, let’s improve telefónica articles at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telef%C3%B3nica (English)
http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telef%C3%B3nica (Portuguese)
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telef%C3%B3nica (Spanish)
I’ll try my best when I’ve time. A lot of information is missing.

I agree with the comments above, Im from Peru, I sincerely hope that Telefonica help to Wikimedia, I say this as an unsatisfied customer of telefonica and as a part of a LARGE comunity of unsatisfied customers.

I am from Argentina and here Telefonica is a very BAD company. In my country there ar a lot of a unstisfied customers. Search on internet the opinions of the people. Neves, in my life i habe seen this company do good things for people. If they do something they do for they own comviencie.
Sorry for my bad english
Alfonso from Argentina.

Telefonica has a bad reputation in Czech Republic too, although it is getting slowly better. I hope that deal at least brings a LOT of money to the foundation, because companies like this are literally EVIL.

We do understand all the criticism but any company of Telefonica’s size and scope is going to be in a similar position. There are many different business lines, departments, projects, etc., that we have not dealt with yet (or may never deal with) so various parts and/or divisions of the company don’t always define the whole, and vice versa. And we know there will be several challenges to work through. I think we’re all better off if we engage them and it gives them (and us) an opportunity to understand each another better. Of course they are a very large… Read more »

“And I do believe they have been sincere in expressing their desires to support the mission.”

Who are they? Can you give names? I understand if not.
I’m really still skeptical about “their” intentions and I think it’d be good for WMF if we could start a discussion (a new blog post pointing to a wiki page on meta?) for Wikimedia community give its opinion on such kind of partnership.
Regards,
Tom

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