Welcome to “Don’t Blink”! Every month we share developments from around the world that shape people’s ability to participate in the free knowledge movement. In case you blinked last month, here are the most important public policy advocacy topics that have kept the Wikimedia Foundation busy.

The Global Advocacy team works to advocate laws and government policies that protect the volunteer community-led Wikimedia model, Wikimedia’s people, and the Wikimedia movement’s core values. To learn more about us and the work we do with the rest of the Foundation, visit our Meta-Wiki webpage, follow us on LinkedIn or on X (formerly Twitter), and sign up to our quarterly newsletter or Wikimedia public policy mailing list.

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Protecting the Wikimedia model
(Work related to access to knowledge and freedom of expression)

Wikipedia officially recognized as a digital public good (DPG) by the Digital Public Good Alliance (DPGA) and added to its DPG Registry
[Read our announcement and explore Wikipedia’s entry in the DPG Registry]

Wikipedia has officially been recognized as a digital public good (DPG) by the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA), a multistakeholder initiative that maintains a Registry of Digital Public Goods: open source-software, data, AI models, standards, and content created for the public interest. The DPGA is endorsed by the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General in support of open source technologies that contribute to the advancement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).This recognition of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia hosted by the nonprofit organization the Wikimedia Foundation, highlights its unique role in advancing global access to a free and open source of trusted knowledge in the public interest.

In 2024 Foundation staff along with Wikipedia volunteers from around the world participated in the UN General Assembly’s Summit for the Future and the drafting of the Global Digital Compact—the UN’s blueprint for global governance of digital technology and artificial intelligence.

In an open letter in early 2024, the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia affiliates called on UN Member States to:

• Protect and empower communities to govern online public interest projects.
• Promote and protect digital public goods by supporting a robust digital commons from which everyone, everywhere, can benefit.
• Build and deploy Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to support and empower, not replace, people who create content and make decisions in the public interest.

The recognition of Wikipedia as a digital public good strengthens these advocacy efforts and affirms Wikipedia’s role in the broader global movement for an internet that protects and promotes community-led spaces. The Foundation will continue working with the UN and other international institutions, governments, and civil society partners to ensure that digital public goods like Wikipedia are protected, supported, and accessible to all.

Read our announcement and explore Wikipedia’s entry in the DPG Registry.

Wikimedia User Group Nigeria hosts Public Domain Day event
[Read more about the event on Wikimedia User Group Nigeria’s LinkedIn webpage]

Wikimedia User Group Nigeria recently hosted an event to celebrate Public Domain Day, an annual occasion marking the expiration of copyright on many cultural works. When copyright expires on a work, it enters the public domain, meaning anyone is free to access, share, or build upon it. The public domain is an important source for much of the content on Wikipedia, and new additions to the public domain open up cultural and historical resources that enrich everyone’s understanding of our shared past.

This year, Wikimedia User Group Nigeria gathered policymakers, creatives, academics, and advocates to discuss the cultural commons and new opportunities in the public domain space. The event included a presentation from Tonye Clinton Jaja (former Chairman of the Governing Board of the Nigerian Copyright Commission) and Brigitte Vézina (Director of Policy and Open Culture at Creative Commons), who has spearheaded their Towards a Recommendation on Open Cultural Heritage (TAROCH) Coalition. The coalition, which the Foundation and several Wikimedia affiliates have joined, seeks to encourage UNESCO Member States to draft and adopt a recommendation promoting open solutions to enhance cultural heritage in the public domain and make cultural heritage accessible to all.

Celebrations like these reflect the importance of access to cultural heritage, and provide an opportunity to promote a more fair and equitable access to cultural heritage for everyone.

Read more about the event on Wikimedia User Group Nigeria’s LinkedIn webpage.

Contributing to the United Nation (UN) Special Rapporteur’s call for submissions on “Freedom of Expression and Elections in the Digital Age”
[Read our submission on Wikimedia Commons]

The Foundation responded this January to a call for submissions from the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression on the topic of “Freedom of Expression and Elections in the Digital Age.” The Special Rapporteur will use these submissions to draft a thematic report that analyzes the opportunities, threats, and challenges to freedom of expression in an electoral context and provides recommendations for governments, regulatory bodies, companies, media organizations, and civil society based on the results.

Our submission focused on the role that Wikimedia projects play in providing trustworthy information during elections, and described some of the measures that the Foundation has taken to support this vital work while respecting the autonomy and procedures of the volunteer communities who work on the projects every day. This support includes the development of an Anti-Disinformation Repository, and tools to help researchers from civil society and academia to research information integrity on the projects. We also explained how the Wikimedia projects are an example of digital public goods (DPGs)—which include open-source software, data, AI models, standards, and content created for the public interest—and why it is important to promote and protect DPGs that support their users’ freedom of expression and promote accuracy as a core value.

Finally, the submission provided recommendations for how the UN and Member States can improve protections for community-led, public interest projects against threats to privacy and freedom of expression. These include being alert to threats that free and open knowledge communities face from powerful actors seeking to control political outcomes and upholding commitments in the UN’s recent Global Digital Compact agreement to protect DPGs.

Read our submission on Wikimedia Commons.

Protecting Wikimedia’s values
(Work related to human rights and countering disinformation)

Wikimedia Foundation is featured in Responsible Tech Community Report
[Visit All Tech is Human to download the Responsible Tech Community Report] 

Costanza Sciubba Caniglia (Anti-Disinformation Strategy Lead) was recently interviewed on behalf of the Foundation in the Responsible Tech Community Report put out by All Tech is Human. All Tech is Human brings together a large, multistakeholder network working in policy, technology, and academia to coordinate around pressing issues at the intersection of technology and society. Their Responsible Tech Community Report profiles leaders who represent communities working to tackle these issues, and also represent “an invaluable hub of collective intelligence and a powerful network of individuals and organizations that has a direct corollary to stakeholders desperately looking for insight and expertise.”

In the profile, Costanza shared the urgent need for “more individuals and communities ready to speak up about knowledge accessibility and community-led content creation and curation models,” and explained how Wikimedia regional groups, affiliates, and volunteers collaborate to promote and defend information integrity on the projects. She also described a vision of a strong tech future that empowers individuals and communities, especially vulnerable ones, to access and share their ideas online without fear of retribution.

Visit All Tech is Human to download the Responsible Tech Community Report.

Discussing information integrity at the Wikimedia+Libraries International Convention (WikiLibCon) 2025
[Watch a recording of our keynote address]

WikiLibCon 2025 took place in Mexico City from 15 to 17 January and gathered Wikimedians, librarians, library workers, and information professionals to share insights, create community, and promote cooperative projects at the intersection of the Wikimedia projects and libraries. The theme of the conference was disinformation, and Costanza Sciubba Caniglia attended with several other Wikimedia staff to discuss the work on information integrity that the Foundation is doing. 

At the start of the conference, Costanza gave a keynote address, explaining how disinformation spreads and how the Wikimedia projects interact with the information ecosystem and support trustworthy information online. She also led an interactive workshop with Nathan Forrester (Senior Trust and Safety Disinformation Specialist) about how Wikipedia can serve as an antidote to disinformation, and another session with Brisa Ceccon (Senior Regional Partnerships Manager, Latin America and the Caribbean) about how the Foundation forms partnerships with allies to achieve our advocacy goals in multistakeholder forums like the UN. Some of those allies, like the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) also held sessions sharing further insights from our work together on multilateral agreements like the Global Digital Compact, which includes support for information integrity.

Other sessions co-organized by the Foundation discussed WikiProject COVID-19, the Wikimedia Library, and the work that the Wikimedia Research team is doing on disinformation and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Wikimedia affiliates like Wikimedia Ukraine and Wikimedia Georgia shared the work they have been doing in partnership with local libraries.

Watch a recording of our keynote address.

Sharing the Foundation’s experience complying with the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) at the European Rights & Risks Virtual Forum
[Learn more about the Foundation’s DSA compliance and read our first DSA audit report]

Ricky Gaines (Human Rights Policy & Advocacy Lead) recently delivered the opening remarks at a virtual workshop cohosted by the Global Network Initiative (GNI) and the Digital Trust & Safety Partnership. The workshop gathered stakeholders from across civil society and online platforms to discuss recent documents relating to their systemic risk assessment and mitigation plans, as well as their first audits, published by platforms to comply with the DSA. As a reminder, the DSA imposes different obligations based on the number of active users in the EU, with additional requirements for platforms with over 45 million users, called Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs). These requirements include the publication of annual risk assessment reports—which list systemic risks in the EU and whether those risks are being effectively mitigated—and independent audits focused on overall compliance with the DSA. 

This workshop focused on reviewing these recent publications from VLOPs and gathering civil society’s initial reaction to those reports. In his remarks, Ricky discussed the unique challenges of producing a risk assessment report for Wikipedia, the only nonprofit platform designated as a VLOP. He also highlighted the “positive with comments” result of the Foundation’s first independent audit, standing in stark contrast to the “negative” result received by every other VLOP, and shared the Foundation’s initial plans to address the audit’s findings.

Learn more about the Foundation’s DSA compliance and read our first DSA audit report.

Protecting Wikimedia’s people
(Work related to privacy and countering surveillance)

Submitting Wikimedia Research’s white paper about “Research and Privacy on Wikipedia” to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) 
[Read our comment to the NTIA]

In December of 2024, the NTIA published a request for comments about how to draft “Ethical Guidelines for Research Using Pervasive Data.” Pervasive data is data gathered about people through the use of online services, including text, images, videos, purchase data, and/or biometric data. This type of data can provide vital insights about the impact of technology on society and about human behavior at a societal scale more generally. However, research on this data is not without potential risks to the privacy rights of data subjects—in this case, the contributors and users of online platforms. Recognizing these risks, the NTIA requested input on what type of ethical guidelines could be developed to ensure that this type of research is conducted in a way that respects the privacy rights of data subjects.

In response to the request, we submitted a recently developed white paper from the Wikimedia Research team, which provides recommendations to help researchers better understand and navigate the ethical and privacy implications of conducting research on Wikipedia. As a large platform where discussions and content edits are open and available to the public, Wikipedia is a perfect example of the type of online platform that is valuable to researchers looking for these types of large-scale insights about behavior and societies. On average, every year researchers use or refer to Wikipedia in more than 130,000 articles and publish a minimum of roughly 500 articles about Wikipedia itself. The white paper discusses key questions around user privacy that ethical researchers might face in utilizing Wikipedia data, and offers recommendations both for researchers and Wikimedians to center privacy in their work. 

We hope these recommendations can be instructive to the NTIA as they consider developing their own guidelines, and we appreciate the attention that the agency is paying to ethical considerations around privacy and research.

Read our comment to the NTIA.

Announcements

Wikimedians will promote cultural preservation and knowledge diversity at RightsCon 2025
[Read our blog post to preview our RightsCon sessions]

From 24–27 February, the Global Advocacy team and Wikimedians from around the world will participate in RightsCon, an annual conference hosted by Access Now that brings together academics, technologists, activists, and artists to tackle pressing issues at the intersection of human rights and technology. This year marks an expanded presence for Wikimedians at the conference. There are five sessions on the schedule that bring together Foundation staff, Wikimedia affiliates, and allies to discuss challenges, share best practices, and foster collaboration around their free knowledge work. 

This will also be the first year that we host a booth at RightsCon’s Community Village. The booth will provide a space for attendees to learn about the work of affiliates and to provide feedback on a policy analysis tool we are developing called the Wikipedia Test.

The full list of sessions related to the Wikimedia projects includes:

• Intersectionality and sustainability in journalism: Experiences from the Global South – hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation and InternetLab
  
• Africa knowledge initiative: Revolutionizing access to African indigenous languages – hosted by the Africa Knowledge Initiative
  
• From countering to building: Finding the keys to promote information integrity online – hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, the Freedom Online Coalition, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands
  
• Understanding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ experiences using Wikipedia on the continent of Australia – hosted by Wikimedia Australia and Macquarie University

• How do we use Wikimedia and open-source technology to preserve cultural heritage in crisis? – hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia UK, Wikimedia Georgia, Wikimedia Poland, Wikimedia Sverige, and Wikimedia Ukraine 

If you are headed to Taiwan or will be joining RightsCon virtually, we look forward to seeing you! And stay tuned for more updates once the conference has concluded.

Read our blog post with a full preview of our RightsCon sessions.

Help the Legal department gather examples of discussions about banners and logos
[Read Legal’s blog post about the initiative and/or contribute on the initiative’s Talk page]

The Legal department has begun an initiative to review and make recommendations for updates to the policies and procedures governing decisions to run project banners or make temporary logo changes. The first phase of this initiative is research on prior actions and discussions. In order to establish the foundations for a productive policy discussion, the Legal department must first 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. This includes banners related to topics like a development reported on in the news or a legislative or regulatory proposal, but not banners promoting internal topics like community events and photography contests.

Read Legal’s blog post about the initiative and/or contribute on the initiative’s Talk page.

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Follow us on LinkedIn or on X (formerly Twitter), visit our Meta-Wiki webpage, sign up for our quarterly newsletter to receive updates, and join our Wikipedia policy mailing list. We hope to see you there!