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Stefan Krause, Germany, FAL, via Wikimedia Commons

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

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

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

Markus Trienke, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

JohnDarrochNZ, 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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Dimi Zagorski

{{CITATION NEEDED}} WHAT THE WIKIMEDIA ATTRIBUTION FRAMEWORK ASKS FROM AI

Example of what "essential attribution" could look like on mobile. Image: Wikimedia Attribution Framework. License: CC-BY-SA 4.0

Ask an AI assistant a factual question and the answer may well draw on Wikipedia, yet you don’t always see it. This is the case with many sources on the internet. Publishers, libraries and broadcasters face similar questions. As the EU debates how AI, transparency, author’s rights and sustainability fit together, a basic question deserves its share of attention: When AI systems, search engines and apps reuse content, can people see where it came from? Is it clear which part of the answer is a citation and which is edited or added? Can we guarantee that the source is not misrepresented?
This post explains the Wikimedia Attribution Framework, a practical, voluntary answer from the Wikimedia Foundation, and what Wikimedia would like AI companies to do with it.

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Thirty-one Wikimedians, eighteen countries, two days: what we did at the 11th Big Fat Brussels Meeting

Day Two of the 11th Big Fat Brussels Meeting, Communications Workshop. Author: Ioana Banach. License: CC-BY-SA

Every autumn, Wikimedia Europe brings together a group of Wikimedians who care about policy — volunteer advocates, staff, and people from like-minded organisations. Last week we held the eleventh edition of what we have always called, half-jokingly, the Big Fat Brussels Meeting. Thirty-one people from eighteen countries. Two days. Here’s a quick recap.

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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!

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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. 

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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.  

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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. 

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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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