Wikipedia has been working to make its site even more accessible to users in emerging markets of the world. Their latest gig involves allowing anyone to access the site’s 25 million articles via SMS and/or USSD.
Funded by a $600,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, the new service will launch in the next few months, making the global knowledge more accessible than ever before. In order to access it, users will send a message to a predefined number (or type a USSD code on their phone), only to get an answer with content few minutes/seconds later.
The new effort joins another program Wikipedia launched in the second half of 2011 that allowed users to access the text version of the site for free. To make that happen, Wikimedia Foundation (which runs the Wikipedia site) has been partnering with carriers all around the world, most notably in Russia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa…
[Via: TheVerge]