With 3 billion monthly pageviews, Wikipedia Mobile drives open access

Karthik Nadar, an avid Wikipedia editor from Mumbai, fires up the official Android app of the free, crowdsourced encyclopaedia on his slick, new smartphone whenever he needs to refer to it. Though the app doesn’t support editing, he finds it an efficient way to access Wikipedia on the move. Srikanth Ramakrishnan, another prolific editor, from Coimbatore, uses the browser and 2G connection on his basic Java phone to look up Wikipedia. Long and frequent power cuts prevail in his town and the mobile phone is sometimes the only means to access the Internet. Mohammed Shahin spends most of his day on the move and finds using the Wikipedia iOS app convenient. The fifth most visited website on the Internet reached three billion monthly pageviews on mobile devices at the end of January owing to the burgeoning tribe of mobile users such as Nadar, Ramakrishnan and Shahin. The statistics released by the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organisation that runs Wikipedia and sister projects, show that the number of mobile pageviews went up by 83 percent on all Wikipedias put together from over a period of one year starting from January 2012. The growth of non-mobile visits was globally 19 percent for the same period. In India, mobile pageviews went up by 57 percent compared with a 20 percent increase from non-mobile devices. What does this growth mean for Wikipedia readers and contributors, especially those living in countries where mobile access is growing and is often the only way to access the Internet for a major chunk of the population? Pushing the envelope with a freely accessible website such as Wikipedia means reaching more people and more demographies in more locations, which in turn is another step towards democratising access to knowledge and information.

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