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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 these rules. Something the French Constitutional Court seems to agree with. 

Wikimedia takes child protection seriously: alongside regular DSA risk-assessment and mitigation obligations, the Wikimedia Foundation has published a Child Rights Impact Assessment, scans the projects for known child sexual abuse material, and works with a global volunteer community that decides on and enforces policies. Wikimedia Europe invests in child safety training for the volunteer editors. Protecting children is not a box we tick reluctantly; it is part of our human rights commitments.

Structurally, Wikipedia and its sister projects lack features that make other platforms genuinely high-risk for children: there is no algorithm pushing people to keep scrolling, no advertising or data-monetisation model, no private messaging between users. Content is transparently, publicly moderated by a volunteer community. That doesn’t make them risk-free, but it is a fundamentally different model from commercial social media feeds. It is lower risk. There are other such spaces online, beyond Wikimedia. They deserve to be easily accessible.