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Benh LIEU SONG (Flickr), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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

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

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Stefan Krause, Germany, FAL, via Wikimedia Commons

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Dimi Zagorski

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!

Read More »Wikipedia & AI Competition: Biases, Mistakes, Omissions

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!

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

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.

Read More »Why Wikimedia Supports Secondary Publication Rights for Publicly Funded Research

Protecting and Empowering Children Online: A Wikimedia Perspective

Yoruba Wikipedia Children's Day Celebration Souvenir /cc-by-sa Agbalagba, via Wikimedia Commons

We understand the concern and are concerned ourselves. Lawmakers worldwide are rightly focused on the effects personal data collecting, algorithm-and-advertising-driven, content pushing platforms have on growing up. Protecting and empowering minors—both online and offline—requires ongoing effort, cooperation, and commitment from the entire society.

The EU has already enacted important legislation, including the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD), and the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA). These provide a solid framework for safeguarding children’s rights online, but of course could also be in need of updating. Currently several own-initiative reports by the European Parliament, Member States initiatives and the European Commission are considering options.

As such legislation is developed, we need to follow one guiding light: children’s rights and best interest. The challenge is clear: children deserve protection, and we have an obligation to protect them. Yet children also have other rights: to education, to privacy, and to freedom of expression. We must make sure all of these are protected.

Read More »Protecting and Empowering Children Online: A Wikimedia Perspective

Wikipedia’s Fight Against Election Disinformation: A New research paper looks into Community Governance

Screenshot of Wikipedia's "Recent Changes" feed.

As elections across the EU face growing threats from disinformation, Wikipedia stands out as a unique case study in how community-governed platforms work to safeguard information integrity. A new mapping report, part of the DEM-Debate project, explores Wikipedia’s policies and risk-mitigation strategies for combating election disinformation

Read More »Wikipedia’s Fight Against Election Disinformation: A New research paper looks into Community Governance

Prepped to the nines: Wikimedians gathered in Brussels to prepare for public policy advocacy challenges

Communications workshop. People sitting around a large table and looking at a presentation.
Communications workshop at Big Fat Brussels Meeting. Author: Camille Françoise. License: CC-BY 4.0 ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )

The first Big Fat Brussels Meeting, held in 2013, established a tradition for Wikimedians to congregate in Brussels for a two-day gathering on advocacy and policy issues. Last month, the ninth edition of the meeting took place, bringing together almost forty Wikimedia volunteers and staff. 

The basic goal was to prepare for the challenges in the legislative landscape that we expect in Europe, regardless of whether at the EU, national, or Council of Europe level. We discussed Issues that would affect our projects, like “How to protect children online without gathering user data?” and “Will artificial intelligence (AI) change the way copyright works?” 

Read More »Prepped to the nines: Wikimedians gathered in Brussels to prepare for public policy advocacy challenges

Open letter to protect Wikipedia and other public interest projects in the Global Digital Compact

Wikimedia Europe has signed an open letter, penned by the Wikimedia Foundaiton, that calls on UN Member States to protect Wikipedia and other public interest projects in the forthcoming Global Digital Compact. The Global Digital Compact initiative is a unique and pivotal opportunity to shape our digital world in a manner that advances the public interest and supports sustainable development for everyone, everywhere.  UN Member States have the chance to embrace a positive vision for the internet’s future that supports and empowers diverse communities everywhere to build and operate free and open knowledge projects. The Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, provide the world with the largest free and open, multilingual, intercultural, universally accessible repository of educational materials ever created. The volunteer-run Wikimedia projects have formed a community-led ecosystem that champions information integrity. They serve as digital public infrastructure for openly licensed, neutral, encyclopedic content in over 300 languages. Wikipedia’s experience of over two decades has taught us that the internet needs to be open, global, interoperable, and inclusive in order to serve all of humanity. To that end, three essential commitments should be included in the text of the Global Digital Compact:

We need a Digital Knowledge Act

"Towards progressing science further and faster". Author: Dasaptaerwin. License: Creative Commons CC0 1.0 (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en)

A digital knowledge act for europe

In December 2023 the Communia Association, which Wikimedia Europe is a member of, rolled out the idea of a Digital Knowledge Act at the European Union level. A EU regulation that makes the interests of knowledge institutions, such as libraries, universities and schools, a top priority. 

In the past five years we have seen the EU tackling various specific digital issues through legislation – content moderation through the Digital Services Act, market power through the Digital Markets Act, data sharing through the Data Act and the Data Governance Act. All these were necessary steps, we believe, they however treated institutions, such as libraries, archives, universities and schools, almost as an afterthought.  

Read More »We need a Digital Knowledge Act