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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

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

Sergey Pesterev / 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

Stefan Krause, Germany, FAL, via Wikimedia Commons

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Wikimedia

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

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

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

European Democracy Shield: we shared our views with the Commission 

George E. Koronaios, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Democracy is one of the fundamental values of the EU and today, as never before, it needs to be preserved and nurtured. Wikimedia Europe welcomes the European Commission’s initiative to adopt a European Democracy Shield to uphold the Union’s founding values.

We are convinced that Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects have a great role to play in the everyday efforts to nurture European democracy and to make the digital information ecosystem more resilient. We explained how in our submission to the public consultation launched by the European Commission. 

Read More »European Democracy Shield: we shared our views with the Commission 

Building an Enabling Environment for DEMocratic Debate. THE DEM-Debate project

Black and white adaptations of the Wikipedia 20 symbols by Karabo Poppy Moletsane and Jasmina El Bouamraoui, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Black and white adaptations of the Wikipedia 20 symbols by Karabo Poppy Moletsane and Jasmina El Bouamraoui, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Wikipedia has a significant impact on our everyday lives. The largest free knowledge platform on the internet, we regularly rely on its accessible, up-to-date information to form our opinions, even on critical events such as elections.
While most of the research has focused on how large, commercial platforms address disinformation, less attention has been given to platforms non-profit, community-led platforms such as Wikipedia.
The DEM-Debate project aims to fill this gap by exploring whether, and how, the fact-checking and moderation practices used by Wikipedia during the 2024 European Parliament election have enhanced the reliability of the information ecosystem. It also seeks to determine if these practices can be transferred to other online contexts, fostering an environment that nurtures a more democratic debate.

Read More »Building an Enabling Environment for DEMocratic Debate. THE DEM-Debate project

Report on opportunities and threats for openness in a new technological era

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The report “Open Movement’s Common(s) Causes” maps the current threats and opportunities facing the open movement, based on the ongoing work of the organisations behind the Common(s) Cause event, which took place in Katowice, Poland; as a pre-conference event for Wikimania 2024 on 6 August, 2024. The meeting was organised by Creative Commons, Open Knowledge Foundation, Open Future, and Wikimedia Europe in collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation. The goal of the meeting was to create links between different advocacy efforts so that a shared advocacy strategy for the Knowledge Commons can be created. One of the calls that jumped out for us was a call for defining new open principles – principles that could clarify what openness means in the context of today’s digital space and ensure its pro-public, democratic potential. Formulating such principles could help against several challenges, e.g. open washing. Another clear call is the one confirming the assumptions behind the Common(s) Cause project: it is the call for a shared advocacy agenda, which could help ensure that Knowledge Commons are treated and sustained as critical digital infrastructures. The event gathered over 55 participants from 20 countries, most of whom travelled to Katowice to attend the Wikimania conference. The majority of attendees were from open advocacy communities. The event not only enabled the organizers to build stronger working ties with one another, but with the many other organisations who were represented at the event.  Participants acknowledged that the power of the open movement is only as strong as the bonds of the people working to advance an open, equitable agenda, and collective impact can only be achieved through individuals from different organisations working closely together. The report identifies a few common causes that can be found at the intersection of open movement organisations’… Read More »Report on opportunities and threats for openness in a new technological era

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

Wikimedia Europe Partners for Research into Wikipedia’s Practices on Information on Elections

Panel debate in the European Parliament
DEM-Debate Kick-Off Panel. Author: Camille Françoise: License: CC-BY 4.0 ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )

1.1 million— the number of times the 2024 European Parliament election article on English Wikipedia has been viewed from May to June 2024. With another 37 language versions and additional millions of views globally, this page exemplifies Wikipedia’s role in informing the public about major political events. Yet, Wikipedia’s impact extends far beyond that. As a widely used repository of knowledge, its content is frequently cited by other media outlets, amplifying its reach and embedding its information within broader public discourse. This means that any inaccuracies or disinformation on Wikipedia could have significant consequences on the public discourse, especially when it comes to sensitive issues like elections.

Read More »Wikimedia Europe Partners for Research into Wikipedia’s Practices on Information on Elections

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:

Wikimania 2024: call for submissions open!

Wikimania Singapore 2023 - Opening reception by Pedro J Pacheco under CC BY SA 4.0 source: Wikimedia Commons

The great celebration of everything Wikimedia will take place in Katowice, Poland, August 7-10 . Wikimedia Europe was asked to curate the track on Legal and Advocacy, which we are happy to support. As Wikimania 2024 gathers under the topic of the Collaboration of Open, we present under your consideration some ideas on how to align with this message.

You can submit a session proposal for Wikimania 2024 here.

Food for thought

In this time of global conflict, disinformation and digital authoritarianism, the Wikimedia movement offers a model for decentralised, grassroots governance of free knowledge. Our movement empowers communities to exercise their right to access knowledge, and to advance other fundamental human rights. The Wikimedia model offers inspiration on how to create connections between people of various backgrounds, cultures and beliefs. 

Read More »Wikimania 2024: call for submissions open!