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Dimi Zagorski

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

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 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.

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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

Open letter: Harnessing open source AI to advance digital sovereignty

November 13, 2025 Dear Presdent Macron,Dear Chancellor Merz,Dear President von der Leyen, Europe is at a crossroads. The Summit on European Digital Sovereignty marks an important milestone for the EU and its member states in aligning on a shared strategy for achieving real and lasting European digital sovereignty. As the EU pursues the goal of digital sovereignty, we urge you to harness open source — that is, technology that is free to use, inspect, adapt, and share — as a key enabler of this strategy.  Europe cannot buy sovereignty off a shelf, it has to build it. In an age of geopolitical volatility and rapid innovation Europe must play to its strengths, including world-leading researchers and a rich history of open source development. It faces a choice: use these strengths to carve out its distinct place in the global AI ecosystem or settle for copying the playbooks of already dominant actors.  At their heart, closed systems create dependency, open systems create capacity. Investment into the full open source AI stack, from AI models to data and software tooling, is a strategic lever. If digital sovereignty means creating a Europe that is resilient and benefits from choice, security, and self-determination, then open source is a critical force multiplier that enables Europe to do more with less.  Open source AI, and open source technology more broadly, is not just a strategic asset benefiting governments, businesses, and people. If underpinned by a clear commitment to values that are at the heart of the European project — including cultural diversity, fundamental rights, environmental sustainability, and people’s privacy and security — open source can help embed these into the technologies that will shape our future.  We, the undersigned, represent a diverse coalition of organisations across industry, the open source community,… Read More »Open letter: Harnessing open source AI to advance digital sovereignty

Wikipedia & AI Competition: Biases, Mistakes, Omissions

A model to predict pixel colour values, based on an original photograph. The work illustrates a popular type of machine learning model: the decision tree. Decision trees work by splitting the data into ever smaller segments. It shows that models are simplifications of reality, but can still be useful. Authors: Rens Dimmendaal and David Clode, License: CC-BY, Source: BBC, Better Images of AI

Competition is a good thing. Wikipedia’s free licences explicitly welcome it. We have seen other platforms and encyclopaedias appear in the past, and we will see more in the future. 

The latest batch of competition that wants to harness AI technology to generate better compendiums of knowledge. These projects criticise things like gaps in coverage, reliable or alleged political biases. Let’s have a look at what’s out there and discuss some of the aspects!

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Wikipedia Is Running On Its Own Metal: The Power and Limits of Self-Hosted Infrastructure

These are the data centres used by the Wikimedia Foundation, in which it has colocation space and where it operates its server clusters.

The recent AWS outage served as yet another reminder of how much of the modern internet depends on a handful of cloud providers. When the service experienced widespread disruptions in October 2025, countless websites and applications went dark. The cascading failures illustrated a drawback of the cloud-dependent infrastructure.

Luckily, Wikipedia and its sister projects hummed along without interruption. It is a little known fact that the Wikimedia Foundation runs its own servers in several places around the world. This has some advantages, but also poses specific challenges. Let’s take a look!

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Why Wikimedia Supports Secondary Publication Rights for Publicly Funded Research

Main Library of the University of Vienna. Reading hall. Author: Hubertl. License: CC-BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons

Through its flagship research programme, Horizon Europe, the European Union will spend 95.5 billion euro on science and research until 2027. Yet, the results of this research in many cases will not be accessible to Europeans – academics, regular citizens or even Wikipedians.

In he most extreme cases European taxpayers will have paid for the research institution, for the actual research, but the research institutions and the researchers will still need to pay expensive licenses for academic journals for access. And even then, the public won’t be able to make use of this knowledge.

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