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!
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.
After nearly three years of advocacy by the Polish Wikimedia community and open knowledge activists, the Polish government has committed to restoring free and open licensing for its digital content. This marks a significant step toward greater transparency and public access to information in Poland.
Committee on Culture and Means of Transmission CC BY-SA 3.0 PL, Adrian Grycuk, via Wikimedia Commons
The Road to Openness
Until August 2022, all content published on the Gov.PL portal—including text, images, and multimedia from government ministries and agencies—was available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 3.0 PL) license. This allowed for widespread reuse, including within Wikimedia projects. However, without public explanation, in 2022 the government abruptly switched to a restrictive license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 PL), preventing reuse on Wikimedia platforms and limiting the openness of government information.
In response, civil society organizations in Poland, including Wikimedians, began advocating for the return to free licensing. Wikimedia Europe engaged directly by submitting Freedom of Information Act requests to the Chancellery of the Prime Minister and the Ministry of Digital Affairs, seeking clarity on the reasons behind the change and urging a policy reversal.
The debate about the proposed Data Act is in full swing. The lead rapporteur for the Data Act, Pilar del Castillo Vera (EPP ES) in the Industry Committee, has published her draft report with proposed amendments. Other MEPs have until 28 October to propose their own changes. While there is some hope that amendments will effectively limit the sui generis database right (SGDR), the provisions for Internet of Things (IoT) data sharing that cement the factual data holders’ strong position currently remain largely unquestioned.
Today, the European Commission has leaked its proposal for a “Data Act”, a piece of legislation that is supposed to include a revision of the Database Directive and the sui generis rightfor the creators of databases (SGR) it establishes.
The European Commission wants more European data (public, private and personal) to be shared for the purposes of innovation, research and business. It also wants to avoid a system where only a few large platforms control all the data. It thus wants to create mechanisms and tools to get there. That’s commendable! What the Commission proposes in the Data Governance Act (DGA), though, is at times very unclear.
Here is a breakdown of the European Commission proposals by sector, peppered with our take on some relevant aspects and support for some European Parliament and Council amendments.
Public Sector Data
DGA creates a mechanism for re-using protected public sector data (e.g. because of privacy rules, statistical confidentiality or IP) . Public sector bodies are to establish secure environments where data can be mined within the institution. Anonymised data could be provided through outside of the institution, if the re-use can’t happen within its infrastructure.
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