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Wikimedia Europe

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Stefan Krause, Germany, FAL, via Wikimedia Commons

Michael S Adler, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Sergey Pesterev / Wikimedia Commons

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from Greenbelt, MD, USA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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We are Wikimedians working on EU policy to foster
free knowledge, access to information and freedom of expression.

ABOUT US
KNOWLEDGE EQUITY
FUTURE OF DEMOCRACY LAB

Deepfake laws across Europe: what do they look like and what do they mean for Wikipedia

AI generated image of Pope Francis wearing a puffy winter jacket.

Deepfakes are understood as realistic images, audio and video of real people that are generated or manipulated with AI. They can be used for parody, satire or to express valid social criticism. But they can be harmful in the cases of fraud, economic damages, disinformation and non-consensual intimate imagery. Lawmakers in several EU countries (Belgium, Denmark and Cyprus) are trying to answer with new rights over a person’s likeness and voice, usually placed in copyright or neighbouring-rights law. For the Wikimedia projects, which host and reuse media under free licences and also document public events and debates (including deepfake incidents themselves), the details of these laws matter. So let’s take a closer look! Belgium: a new neighbouring right over image and voice In September 2026 the Belgian Federal Chamber published a bill amending the Code of Economic Law with regard to deepfakes. It would insert a new Article creating a neighbouring right. What it does The exceptions. There is no infringement where the person has consented, or where the deepfake is used for parody, satire or social criticism, provided a fair balance is struck with freedom of expression and the use does not disproportionately harm the person’s honour or reputation. Our first reading: some reassurances, but incomplete. The parody and satire exceptions are welcome, and the court-ordered enforcement model is narrower than a duty to filter. But several points could affect Wikimedia projects: Denmark: copyright as the vehicle The Danish Ministry of Culture’s bill amends the Copyright Act in two ways. A new section protects any person against the making available of realistic digitally generated imitations of their personal characteristics (appearance, voice) without consent. Another new section gives performing artists a similar protection against imitations of their performances. Protection would run for the person’s lifetime… Read More »Deepfake laws across Europe: what do they look like and what do they mean for Wikipedia

Turning Open Knowledge Into Public-Interest AI-Infrastructure: The Wikidata Embedding Project

Wikidata Embedding Project Logo, Philippe Saade, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

As generative AI tools become the default way many people search for information, the question of where that information comes from matters more than ever. Wikimedia Deutschland’s Wikidata Embedding Project offers a concrete answer: it turns Wikidata’s vast, community-verified knowledge base into something small AI systems and humans can use to enable searches by meaning, not just by keyword. It demonstrates what public-interest AI infrastructure can and should look like.  What it does The project applies vector-based semantic search to Wikipedia and its sister platforms’ existing data, covering nearly 120 million entries. Until now, Wikidata’s machine-readable data could only be accessed through keyword searches and specialised SPARQL queries — powerful, but difficult for smaller AI applications working with natural language and hard to learn for ordinary users. The new vector database changes that, and it also adds support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the emerging standard that lets AI systems communicate directly with external data sources. In practice, this means a query like “scientist” no longer returns just a keyword match — it surfaces related concepts such as nuclear scientists or Bell Labs researchers, translations, and linked images, giving AI systems the kind of contextual grounding that reduces hallucination and improves traceability. Built openly, with partners Wikimedia Deutschland developed the project in Berlin with Jina.AI and DataStax, and released it as a freely accessible public tool. It launched as a fully open and trasnparent alternative to the closed and intransparent datasets that power most commercial AI systems, giving developers a transparent, verifiable foundation to build on instead. It’s a working demonstration of what public-interest AI infrastructure can look like: multilingual, open, transparent and community-governed — proof that trustworthy AI doesn’t have to mean closed-off AI. How to get involved Developers can start building with… Read More »Turning Open Knowledge Into Public-Interest AI-Infrastructure: The Wikidata Embedding Project

Editorial: Europe should protect children online. It shouldn’t have to check everyone reading an encyclopedia

Waddie96, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

To buy a bottle of wine or a pack of cigarettes in Europe, you show an ID. That makes sense: these products carry real, well-documented risks to minors, and a quick glance at a card is enough to stop the sale. Now imagine that same threshold applied to anyone opening a browser to look up Kandinsky, or the article about Ithaca. Exactly this is the direction many lawmakers are heading to.   Over the last three years, a global wave of laws has settled on one dominant tool to deliver that protection: mandatory age verification for online platforms. The UK’s Online Safety Act opened this door in 2023. Australia has since banned under-16s from social media outright. France passed the first EU-based law, just to have it sent back by the Constitutional Court for fundamental right issues, although it did exclude online educational resources. Laws in Spain, Austria, Greece and Italy, just to list a few, are in the making. And of course, after an expert panel report,, everyone is expecting a move from the European Commission.  Nobody really disputes that children need protection online.The instinct behind restricting access to some online spaces is understandable and sometimes correct. But such a tool should be used on the highest-risk corners of the internet, not to be applied too broadly. Consider what age verification actually means. Even with the most sophisticated and privacy preserving systems a platform that doesn’t collect user data will know more about you than before. Even if it doesn’t want to. And it would mean that you, regardless of age, can’t just directly access that article about Ithaca. It is an additional barrier to access to knowledge. This is why the purpose and risk of an online space need to matter when lawmakers design… Read More »Editorial: Europe should protect children online. It shouldn’t have to check everyone reading an encyclopedia

How the Wikipedia model can help improve platform regulation: Recommendations for future policy-making from the DEM-DEBATE Project

Giulia Forsythe (gforsythe), CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

The DEM-Debate project spent almost two years investigating how Wikipedia addressed disinformation during the 2024 European elections through legal and computational analyses. This final report, produced by researchers from the University of Amsterdam and Eurecat – Centre Tecnològic de Catalunya, delivers two sets of recommendations: one specifically targeting the upcoming revision of the Digital Services Act (DSA), and one drawing on Wikipedia’s governance model as a blueprint for the broader online information ecosystem. These recommendations are aimed to inform future regulation on platform regulation to strengthen the resilience of the information ecosystem.

Read More »How the Wikipedia model can help improve platform regulation: Recommendations for future policy-making from the DEM-DEBATE Project

25 Years of Wikipedia

Poster at the celebration of Wikipedia's 25th in Brussels, Author: Luc Viatour, License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0, Source: Wikimedia Commons

On 18 March, Wikimedia Europe and Wikimedia Belgium brought together a room full of people who care deeply about one of the internet’s quirkiest and perhaps most surprising achievements: 25 years of Wikipedia. Think about what that actually means. A non-commercial, volunteer-built encyclopedia in hundreds of languages, freely available to anyone with an internet connection. No paywalls. No shareholders. No algorithm deciding what you should read next. Around 260,000 volunteers curate 65 million entries, viewed more than 15 billion times every month. We don’t have nearly enough of that kind of thing. A room full of communities The evening had the feel of a reunion — familiar faces from across the European digital policy and Wikimedia communities. A mini-exhibition taking guests through the history of Wikipedia. A Wikicheese station where volunteers photographed Belgian cheeses to improve culinary content on the internet. These things only happen when people have been genuinely building something together long enough that the work creates its own history. Annie Rauwerda Stand-up Wikipedian and Depths of Wikipedia creator Annie Rauwerda took the stage and did what she does best — making the audience laugh while quietly reminding everyone why Wikipedia and free knowledge is beautiful. Her show was a love letter to trivia, knowledge, facts and humans. You may watch an older version of her talk online. Here’s to the next 25. One accent was the conscious decision to celebrate being human. Wikipedia is a project of humans and dedicated to human knowledge. With everything that this entails – good and bad. In a world full of machine generated content, the Wikimedia movement wants to confirm its commitment to being community human of volunteers first and foremost. And since we are human, you will also bear with us that we will plug… Read More »25 Years of Wikipedia

THE DEM-Debate project came to an end: the final event

adapted illustration by Jasmina El Bouamraoui and Karabo Poppy Moletsane for Wikipedia 20, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

On February 24, the DEM-Debate partners – Wikimedia Europe, the University of Amsterdam and Eurecat – Centre Tecnològic de Catalunya – gathered at the European Parliament in Brussels for the final event of the DEM-Debate project. 

Read More »THE DEM-Debate project came to an end: the final event

The Architecture conflict vs. the architecture of collaboration

Jean Rogers, John Wayne & Ward Bond in Conflict - publicity still, 1936, author: unknown, license: none because public domain

Open your social media feed. Within thirty seconds you will likely have seen something engineered to provoke you — a post calibrated by an algorithm to raise your cortisol, confirm your suspicions about the “other side”, or send you spiralling into an outrage loop that keeps you scrolling. This is not a bug. It is the business model. Platforms built on advertising revenue seem to have discovered, empirically, that anger and anxiety are among the most reliable engines of engagement. So their algorithms are optimised for both.

Now open Wikipedia. You land on an article. At the top, perhaps, a small notice: “This article’s neutrality is disputed.” Or: “This article needs additional citations.” Or nothing at all — just the text, the citations, the talk page quietly humming in the background where a numerous strangers are negotiating the phrasing of a single contested sentence. This, too, is not an accident. It is the result of deeply intentional architectural choices — choices that point in precisely the opposite direction from the attention-advertising economy.

Read More »The Architecture conflict vs. the architecture of collaboration

DEM-Debate project: the Critical Legal Analysis

Craiyon, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The latest deliverable of the DEM-Debate project authored by the University of Amsterdam explores how the new EU legal framework on election disinformation applies to Wikipedia. The legal analysis evaluates, through critical lenses, the impact of the new rules on the functioning of community-governed platforms in addressing disinformation related to the 2024 European Parliament elections, drawing some preliminary conclusions on how to inform policy making: Wikipedia editorial rules together with its patrolling system are good examples from which future legislation on election disinformation can draw inspiration.

Read More »DEM-Debate project: the Critical Legal Analysis

WMEU on the Digital Omnibus & the Russmedia Decision

An omnibus of the Compagnie générale des omnibus. Scanned by Claude Shoshany, Collection personnelle, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1376037

On 19 November 2025, the European Commission unveiled its Digital Omnibus package — a pair of legislative proposals aimed at simplifying the EU’s digital regulatory framework. The first one is focused specifically on AI, while the second covers data protection and re-use of open data.   

The Commission frames these changes as efforts to streamline complex EU rules. However, civil society groups, many MEPs, and even some Member States argue that they fundamentally alter the EU’s digital rulebook by weakening longstanding data protection principles. 

The Wikimedia movement is made up of its organisations, projects and users. They all depend on robust privacy protections, open knowledge sharing, and solid intermediary liability protections. At the same time, the Wikimedia Foundation, as a service provider, also spends considerable resources on sometimes very complex compliance work in the EU.

With all this in mind it is needless to say that these proposals raise significant questions for Wikimedia. We can identify both positive and negative changes in the published texts. 

Read More »WMEU on the Digital Omnibus & the Russmedia Decision