In December last year, a group of Cape Town-based learners wrote an open letter to the four South African mobile operators, urging them to give their customers free mobile access to Wikipedia. According to the children, their school, Sinenjongo High School in Joe Slovo Park, doesn’t have a library so they walk long distances to the local library, where they have to queue to access the two online computers. The school has 25 computers but use of these is limited to an hour a week per learner. Internet cafés are too prohibitively expensive to be of any use to the students.

However, according to the letter, 90 percent of the learners have cellphones, although airtime is expensive for those who come from low-income households. The letter concludes: “Our education system needs help and having access to Wikipedia would make a very positive difference. Just think of the boost it will give us as students and to the whole education system of South Africa.”