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Senior Program Manager Anne Gomez leads the New Readers initiative, where she works on ways to better understand barriers that prevent people around the world from accessing information online. One of her areas of interest is offline access, as she works with the New Readers team to improve the way people who have limited or infrequent access to the Internet can access free and open knowledge.

Over the coming months, Anne will be interviewing people who work to remove access barriers for people across the world. In her first conversation for the Wikipedia Blog, Anne chats with Emmanuel Engelhart (aka “Kelson”), a developer who works on Kiwix, an open source software which allows users to download web content for offline reading. In the eleven years since being invented, a number of organizations have utilized it, including World Possible and Internet in a Box. Still, it’s perhaps best known for its distribution of entire copies of Wikipedia in areas of low bandwidth, like Cuba.

As we noted in a 2014 profile of Kiwix, the software “uses all of Wikipedia’s content through the Parsoid wiki parser to package articles into an open source .zim file that can be read by the special Kiwix browser. Since Kiwix was released in 2007, dozens of languages of Wikipedia have been made available as .zim files, as has other free content, such as Wikisource, Wiktionary and Wikivoyage.”

In addition to Wikimedia content, Kiwix now contains TED talks, the Stack Exchange websites, all of Project Gutenberg, and many YouTube educational channels. Anne and Emmanuel chatted about how video and smart phones are changing the offline landscape—and where Kiwix plans to go from here.

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Anne Gomez: A lot has changed in a decade. What can you do now that wasn’t possible when you started Kiwix?

Engelhart: A lot has changed, indeed. Around us, a lot more people now have broadband access, but 4 billions remain unconnected. At the same time, Internet censorship has increased. That’s not something we’d expected, and it forces us to constantly rethink offline access. On the Kiwix side, the technology has changed a lot and the project has become a lot stronger.

We now have a small and very motivated team of volunteers with a huge array of skills. Our budget, while still ridiculously low, has also increased and allows us to pay for services that are sorely needed to grow in scale.

Ten years ago, the dream was to create a technology to bring Wikipedia to people without Internet access. And we succeeded. But there still are too many folks out there who don’t know about the technology or can’t access it. Our next Big Dream, therefore, is to consolidate our solutions and be more efficient in bringing them to people who really need it.

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What’s been the biggest surprise for you over the years?

I don’t know if I have a “best surprise ever” to tell… but I’m often impressed by the ingenuity and the resilience of our users. I think in particular about these people who travel, often in really precarious conditions, from school to school to install Wikipedia offline.

Another really dominant feeling I have is my gratefulness to the volunteers who make the project so lively. For the past 10 years, and now more than ever, they have joined and done what needed to be done so that free knowledge is available to all.

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Smartphones have transformed the way people can access the internet, and recently you started building packaged apps for Wikimed. How has this changed the landscape and the way you view of offline access? How do you see these devices impacting the future of educational resources?

In general, I have mixed feelings about the smartphone/tablet ecosystem: On the one hand, it has done a lot to make computers and internet access more affordable to people. It has also allowed for new kinds of softwares and features. And that’s good.

On the other hand, most ecosystems are closed or proprietary, making software development pretty expensive. They also tend to treat users as consumers and encourage that mindset. I see it as a real issue, in particular for collaborative and participatory movements like Wikimedia.

Most of our audience at Kiwix does not own a computer at all, and probably never will; our priority therefore is to have a great mobile-friendly portfolio. That’s why we spent the last two years developing dedicated apps for Android. These package Kiwix with a topic-specific content (e.g. Medicine or Travel, but soon also History, Geography, or Movies). Wikimed has been a huge success, and showed us the way forward. The big learning for us has been that users search for easily actionable content rather than super powerful technologies. When it comes to offline, size of content does matter as you don’t want to download something you don’t need.

By bringing learning resources and tools at any time and to (almost) every corner, mobile devices have definitely helped people win a bit of freedom. That said, the software engineering challenges are still pretty big and a lot of resources are still needed to make sure this paradigm shift will benefit everyone.

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What hasn’t changed?

To be honest we really would love that a technology like Kiwix someday becomes obsolete. But unfortunately, this is not going to happen anytime soon. In some case, it might even become worse. We are concerned that censorship will soon become the #1 problem for those who want to access free knowledge.

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Video makes up over half of global bandwidth, and from the New Readers research we know that lots of people prefer to learn by video, but it’s expensive to store for offline. How are you thinking about video and other media?

I tend to think that the pedagogical value of videos are overrated. Being lazy myself, I might also prefer watching a video that using other means for learning. That does not mean this is the most appropriate way.

That said, there are lots of legitimate use for video, and in general we try to stay away from editorial discussions: we only want to focus on building the best technology. And the ZIM format that Kiwix relies on is anyway content-agnostic: this means that you can use it to store whatever content you like. We are actually already distributing dozens of offline files with videos embedded in them.

But of course the reader needs to be able to display efficiently these videos. So far, Kiwix does it but it could be better… This is something we have been working on and will keep on working on in the near future. Hopefully our effort on this will be over next year when we release a new version of Kiwix for Windows/Linux.

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Kiwix supports more than just Wikipedia—how do you think about what content packs to include?

We always search any content which is free (as in free speech). Most of the time, ideas come as feature requests from our users/partners.

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Kiwix is foundational to a number of other offline educational projects (IiaB, RACHEL, etc.). How do you balance supporting end users and reusers?

We try to support both as much as we can, but we consider integration projects like the ones you mention, as well as those of other deployment partners, to be the key to accessing a broader audience. They are therefore privileged because of the scaling effect they give us in terms of distribution.

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What resources exist for people who want to know more?

We are a software project, so most of the activity is visible on our code forge (Github) at:

• http://code.kiwix.org
• http://code.openzim.org

Few people have faced the dangerous consequences of unresolved conflict as personally as Ingrid Betancourt did in 2002, when the then-presidential candidate was kidnapped by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) for six years. She now encourages others to protect free knowledge and credible sources as an advocate for peace.

Betancourt recently told the Wikimedia Foundation that she believes that “values are important in the spreading of free knowledge. … Fake news is dangerous. Spinning the news is very dangerous. You can distort information to obtain a result.” One of the biggest threats to trustworthy information starts with how people evaluate sources (read how Wikipedians do it). Some may focus on content created with a profit motive, others point to government-controlled propaganda, while others say the problem starts with fake news (the subject of a recent discussion at Yale University attended by members of the Wikimedia legal team).

With so many different aspects to focus on (or neglect), misinformation threatens to delay all kinds of efforts to strengthen trustworthy knowledge across political and social divides.

Thinking about misinformation in two ways: content and access

As part of the Wikimedia 2030 strategy process, researchers at Lutman and Associates and Dot Connector Studio assessed over one hundred reports, articles, and studies to review how misinformation threatens the future of free knowledge. The assessments include dozens of powerful examples of how misinformation can have far-reaching and devastating consequences.

The researchers had a big task set out for them, so they divided and conquered the broad scope of misinformation trends by splitting the matter into two categories: first, a “content” category which focuses on trends that affect sources used by Wikimedians to develop reliable information and an “access” category, which refers to “how and whether Wikipedia users are able to use the platform.” Their framework allows for the comparison of different sources (technology, government/politics, and commerce) which fuel disruption of verifiable source usage and access to trustworthy information.

Consider how the sources of reliable information (in this framework, that’s the content category) is influenced by misinformation that is created and/or shared by governments and political groups, for example:

“This spread of misinformation online is occurring despite recent growth in the number of organizations dedicated to fact-checking: world-wide, at least 114 “dedicated fact-checking teams” are working in 47 countries.

 

Looking into the future, what’s safe to expect? First, global freedom of expression will wax and wane depending on national and international political developments. Less clear is whether global trends toward autocracy will continue—or whether free societies will have a resurgence, grappling successfully with pressures on the press and academy, and the politicization of facts as merely individual biased perspectives.

Second, we can expect that politically motivated disinformation and misinformation campaigns will always be with us. Indeed, the phenomenon of “fake news,” misinformation, or “alternative facts” can be traced to some of the earliest recorded history, with examples dating back to ancient times.

The Wikimedia movement will need to remain nimble and editors become well-versed in the always-morphing means by which information can be misleading or falsified. It will be helpful to keep abreast of techniques developed and used by journalists and researchers when verifying information, such as those described in the Verification Handbook, available in several languages.

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While they were tasked to inform the Wikimedia community about the prospects for future trustworthy knowledge, the researchers’ insights may also provide materials and insights for discussions held by other professionals challenged with misinformation and falsified materials, including researchers and academics, journalists, policy-makers and thinkers.

For Betancourt, ensuring “equality among human beings” requires us to talk to people we disagree with. While it may appear to be a counter-intuitive method, finding common ground is an essential part of establishing the guidelines of trustworthy knowledge-sharing in politically toxic environments. In her experience as a real-life hostage, “not talking or refusing to communicate… was a worse attitude than communicating.”

How can the Wikipedia community combat misinformation and censorship in the decades to come? The researchers offered their own suggestions, and we invite you to join us to discuss the challenges posed by this and other research.

Margarita Noriega, Strategy Consultant, Communications
Wikimedia Foundation

Chart by Blanca Flores/Wikimedia Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0.