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!
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!
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.
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.
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
What happens when students are told for years that “Wikipedia does not count as a source” only to then be handed generative AI tools without question? The result is confusion and a missed opportunity to critically shape our digital futures.
Author: Sophia Longwe, Project Manager Policy, Wikimedia Deutschland
At the thirdUNESCO Global Forum on the Ethics of AIin Bangkok, Sophia Longwe from Wikimedia Deutschland had the opportunity to speak on the panel “AI for Youth, AI by Youth.” Speakers were from Bangladesh, Namibia, Mexico, Japan, the United Kingdom or Germany, and it was clear to everyone that AI is already transforming how we learn, work, and participate in society. And yet, young people are rarely invited to shape how these technologies are governed. Here is her report.
SLAPPs are “strategic lawsuits against public participation”: legal cases brought to the courts in order to threaten and/or silence journalists, activists, and academics, including Wikipedia volunteer contributors. This legal phenomenon risks causing a chilling effect, which may be particularly acute in the case of those people who contribute voluntarily to Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects.
First day of WMEU General Assembly in Prague 2024, Richard Sekerak (WMCZ), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
As the EU rolls out the Digital Services Act (DSA), a pivotal moment unfolds for the future of online governance. While the regulation offers promising frameworks to enhance accountability and curb online harms, its implementation also reveals pressing risks. Over-moderation by platforms can undermine freedom of expression, legal uncertainties threaten community-led initiatives, and fragmented enforcement across Member States risks weakening the resilience of the EU’s information ecosystem. At the same time, the dominance and secrecy of proprietary platforms further complicate oversight and fairness.
Yet, there is a powerful counterbalance: community-led models like Wikipedia. Such alternative business models demonstrate a transparent, participatory approach to content moderation that prioritises reliability, verifiability, and pluralism.
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.
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.
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