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Wikimedia Europe

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JohnDarrochNZ, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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

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

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

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

Stefan Krause, Germany, FAL, via Wikimedia Commons

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

We are Wikimedians working on EU policy to foster
free knowledge, access to information and freedom of expression.

Cyber resilience Act – it’s a wrap!

We finally have a deal on the Cyber Resilience Act.

It is a EU regulation thought up to make internet-connected products safer. With other words, it tackles the IT security and software maintenance of your smart toaster and AI-powered fridge. The tool originally chosen is to create obligations to manufacturers and/or vendors. We were involved in these negotiations because the newly proposed obligations could have seriously messed up the free & open software ecosystem. 

Perhaps not intended, but the initial proposal and some of the interim versions didn’t clearly protect free software and would have risked that individual, volunteer contributors of code to free software projects are liable and have to comply with the same stringent obligations as large companies. 

Read More »Cyber resilience Act – it’s a wrap!

Protecting youth online: Wikimedia Foundation publishes its first Child Rights Impact Assessment

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Originally posted on 17 January 2024 by Richard Gaines on Diff.

The Wikimedia Foundation has published an independent assessment to understand the impacts, risks, and opportunities posed to children who access and participate in Wikimedia projects.

Read More »Protecting youth online: Wikimedia Foundation publishes its first Child Rights Impact Assessment

European Media Freedom Act: some reflections from Wikimedia Europe

The European Media Freedom Act is a proposal for regulation put forward by the EU Commission in September 2022 aiming at safeguarding media freedom and pluralism in Europe. For Wikimedia it is relevant, because, on the one hand, it wants to regulate how online platforms moderate content by media service providers and, on the other, it introduces some general rules of media law, including the protection of journalists.

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Wikipedia will be harmed by France’s proposed SREN bill: Legislators should avoid unintended consequences

Written by Jan Gerlach, Director of Public Policy at the Wikimedia Foundation; Phil Bradley-Schmieg, Lead Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation; and, Michele Failla, Senior EU Policy Specialist at Wikimedia Europe

(Wikimédia France, the French national Wikimedia chapter, has also published a blog post on the SREN bill)

The French legislature is currently working on a bill that aims at securing and regulating digital space (widely known by its acronym, SREN). As currently drafted, the bill not only threatens Wikipedia’s community-led model of decentralized collaboration and decision-making, it also contradicts the EU’s data protection rules and its new content moderation law, the Digital Services Act (DSA). For these reasons, the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Europe call on French lawmakers to amend the SREN bill in order to make sure that public interest projects like Wikipedia are protected and can continue to flourish.

Read More »Wikipedia will be harmed by France’s proposed SREN bill: Legislators should avoid unintended consequences

Eight requirements: Making digital policy serve the public interest

What do the European AI Act, the European Commission’s Data Strategy, the proposed US Digital Platform Commission Act and the German Digital Strategy have in common? They all name the public interest as a key objective. For good reasons, it is increasingly en vogue for digital policy to be designed as to foster the common good and serve the public interest. But what should public-interest digital policy look like? Wikimedia Deutschland has developed eight requirements against which digital policy projects must be measured if they are to serve the public interest. Transparency and effective participation are needed. Fundamental rights must be protected and damage to the community must be prevented. Digital policy should mitigate inequality, its outcomes must be open and accessible, and it must be collaboratively managed and renewed.

Europe Needs Digital Public Spaces That Are Independently Moderated and Hosted

Since the advent of online platforms, which allow users to openly share content, the structure of the public sphere has been transformed. Until just a few decades ago, we were used to the fact that a significant part of public discourse would take place in publicly-owned and publicly-controlled spaces, be it town squares, parks, city halls, cultural establishments or public broadcasters. In the digital world, what we think of as public spaces are actually mostly private, for-profit, and/or data-guzzling platforms and services. The only very large online platform that is not-for-profit and is maintained by a thriving community of users is Wikipedia. This gives people on the internet agency and empowers them. We believe that the huge dominance of the for-profit, data driven model is a main reason for the greater vulnerability that our societies are experiencing in terms of polarisation, disinformation, and hate. We are confident that using versatile and diverse models of operation of online services and their underlying infrastructure will make society more resilient. It will make democratic, inclusive societies a harder target. For these reasons, we want a significant part of the online public discourse to take place on public or not-for-profit platforms, services, and infrastructure. To achieve the above objective, we suggest three areas of action. 1. Institutional Support Ensure funding for a network of publicly-owned and operated platforms that can host digital cultural heritage and public debates. Regardless of whether we are speaking of a regional museum, a small municipality, or public school, whenever these institutions and communities want to run a project online or share information, they rely on a few dominant, data-monetising services, even for the most basic action of hosting content. European digital hosting infrastructure for public service and cultural institutions is important for sovereignty and… Read More »Europe Needs Digital Public Spaces That Are Independently Moderated and Hosted

Who Should be Liable for Free Software? 

The EU’s new software liability framework is coming and FOSS developers should care

Amidst the legislative discussions around AI and cybersecurity, the EU is trying to figure out the right liability framework for software, including free software. Wikimedia shares the view that companies shouldn’t get a free pass for their services just because they open sourced their code. At the same time, we don’t want to see coders, who share their work with the public and peers in order to learn, tinker or to improve a free project, worry about liability too much. They need clear and effective safeguards.

Read More »Who Should be Liable for Free Software?