The Legal department at the Wikimedia Foundation has begun an initiative to review and make recommendations on updates to policies and procedures governing decisions to run project banners or make temporary logo changes. The initiative focuses on making sure that project community decisions to run a banner or temporarily change their logo in response to an “external” topic—for example, in response to a development reported on in the news or to address a legislative or regulatory proposal—are made based on criteria and values that the global Wikimedia community shares.
Why we’re doing this
The Foundation has started this initiative as part of its role as a steward of the Wikimedia brands, which you can learn about in our February 2023 Brand Stewardship Report.
When a project community decides to run a banner or change a project logo in order to take a position on an “external” topic, they are associating the brand of that project—usually Wikipedia—with that position. Because the Wikimedia brands are a shared movement resource, these decisions have an effect on the rest of the Wikimedia movement.
In addition, there are legal considerations to some types of positions. For instance, the Foundation is required under United States law to track and report activities that concern particular legislative or regulatory proposals—what is called lobbying. The Foundation is also prohibited from supporting or opposing political candidates—that is, from carrying out political campaign activity.
This initiative’s goals in updating policies and procedures are to help the Foundation ensure banners and logo changes comply with these legal restrictions, and to define a more robust framework for individual projects to align their decisions with shared movement expectations.
Of course, in order for the new or revised policies and procedures to represent “shared movement expectations,” they must be understood by the project communities and discussed with volunteers and affiliates.
The first phase of the initiative is research. In order to establish the foundations for a productive policy discussion, we first want to understand both the present and historical state of how project communities make and have made decisions about banners and logo changes to address “external” topics. Because these changes are by nature ephemeral, it is difficult to build a comprehensive list of why and when they have happened. That is particularly true when proposed actions did not receive consensus approval.
How you can help
We are asking for your help in collecting examples. If you know of times when a project has discussed these sorts of banners and logo changes, please let us know at the initiative’s Meta-Wiki page.
We will use the examples you share and others we find to inform proposed policy changes, which we plan to draft and publish for community discussion toward the end of March 2025. Having more examples will improve our research and enable us to better craft policies and procedures that both follow community precedent and match community expectations.
Thank you in advance for any help you can provide in our research! If you have any questions about this initiative, please leave a comment on the initiative’s Talk page or email me, Chuck Roslof, directly at croslof@wikimedia.org.
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