“Don’t Blink”: Protecting the Wikimedia model, its people, and its values in March 2025

Image collage for the March 2025 issue of ‘Don’t Blink.’ Image by the Wikimedia Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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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Contemplating the future of free and open knowledge at South by Southwest (SXSW)

[Learn more about our Open House for an Open Future event or read co-host Creative Common’s recap]

From 7–15 March, experts, industry, and civil society gathered in Austin, Texas, for the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference to discuss issues at the cutting edge of technology and policy. Wikimedia Foundation staff and allies joined this year to share how Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects are vital to the future of technology, especially as artificial intelligence (AI) transforms the way people seek and share information online. 

We kicked off the weekend by co-hosting “Open House for an Open Future” with Creative Commons—the nonprofit organization responsible for developing and stewarding the open licenses that allow everyone to share Wikipedia content. The event invited participants to imagine the role of open culture in the future of technology and society. At an afternoon panel, Lane Becker from Wikimedia Enterprise joined Anna Tumadóttir, the CEO of Creative Commons, to talk about how Wikipedia can adapt to a “rapacious” rise in bot traffic driven by requests from popular AI systems. The Wikimedia projects, especially Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, are among the largest sources of AI and large language model (LLM) training data, and web scraping bots have increased automated requests for Wikimedia Commons content by 50% since January 2024. Answering the question of how to deal with this rise in content reuse is central to the future sustainability of an open knowledge ecosystem where anyone, anywhere, can access knowledge. 

On the schedule for the weekend were panels featuring several members of our Global Advocacy team as well. Rebecca Mackinnon (Vice President, Global Advocacy) joined a group of authors and journalists to imagine how fictional futures can inspire and inform work to strengthen truth and information integrity online. Discussing the success of Wikipedia, she pointed out that it is vital for communities to have rules, and to enforce those rules in order to protect their independence and thrive. However, narratives arguing that privately-owned websites should not be allowed to make rules about the user-generated content (UGC) that they host threaten to make it harder for communities like ours to effectively self-govern.  Fictional futures, like those created by the authors at this event, can help us to broaden our imaginations and think about what steps we might need to take to shift these narratives and protect community governance in the future.

Stan Adams (Lead Public Policy Specialist, North America) joined a panel hosted by FastCompany to discuss how we can protect digital rights and freedom online. Speaking about laws that encroach on people’s digital freedoms, he mentioned a trend of child safety laws that require age-gating certain content online. Laws like these often use technology that requires the collection of sensitive information, like details of government-issued IDs or facial scans, to prove a user’s age.  Not only does this create privacy risks for the user, but these types of checks can also potentially block adults who do not want to provide this information from accessing content they are already rightfully allowed to access. 

Wikimedians from affiliates and user groups across the country also got in on the fun, hosting a weekend-long “WikiHaus”: an open house that ran alongside the conference. The event included opportunities for people to have their portrait taken for Wikipedia or to attend lightning talks about subjects ranging from K-pop to classic arcade games with a Wikipedia twist.

SXSW presents a chance for industry and civil society to come together and imagine a better world for everyone. This includes exploring a new paradigm shift in how people seek out information, one that will have significant impacts on society and technology. In our positive vision of the internet, we imagine a future of free and open knowledge where commercial companies that rely on open content prioritize attribution and other contributions to the sustainability of those knowledge sources, and one where governments do not unduly restrict the freedom of communities to organize and self-govern on the internet. 

Learn more about our Open House for an Open Future event and read co-host Creative Common’s recap.

Providing input on the future of global internet governance

[Read our open letter about WSIS+20]

The Foundation, along with 113 civil society organizations and 57 individuals, recently signed an open letter weighing in on the process of gathering input for the 20-year review of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS +20). WSIS was a notable two-part summit, first held in 2003 in Geneva and then again in 2005 in Tunis, which laid out recommendations for global development online. WSIS+20 is a review of these recommendations with an eye to understanding what needs to be adapted for an ever-changing world.

These recommendations impact how the internet is governed, how resources are directed, and how we as a global society bridge the digital divide. It is vital that civil society be included in this round of review, and time is running out for a meaningful consultation before a draft outcome document of the review is presented for adoption in late 2025. Given the rapid changes in technology we see shaping the online landscape, it is even more important that this consultation reflects a human rights-based and people-centered approach, and that it responds to the broader global community’s concerns about transparency and meaningful stakeholder involvement.

For more details, read our open letter about WSIS+20. 

Looking back at a year of standing up for Wikimedia volunteers’ digital rights

[Read about our litigation strategy in our Diff blog post]

Last month, we published a blog post that explains the litigation that the Foundation engaged in around the world during 2024. This litigation aims to protect Wikimedia projects and volunteers as well as advocate policies that support digital rights and free knowledge. We shared some defensive legal victories—including several wins in which we were able to keep our users’ information private despite legal demands. The litigation team noted that there has been a slight increase in lawsuits against the Foundation, especially cases seeking to restrict speech on the projects and/or to gain user information. We are committed to protecting our contributors everywhere so they can continue to share their knowledge with the world. 

The review blog post also highlighted some impact litigation we have undertaken in the past year. This is a type of litigation where we share our view on important cases for the future of the internet, often filing what is called “friend-of-the-court” or amicus briefs. For example, ​​in May 2024, the Foundation cosigned an amicus brief with Wikimedia France that asked the French Constitutional Council to invalidate certain articles of a new law aiming to “secure and regulate digital space” (SREN), arguing that they were unconstitutionally broad. The Constitutional Council returned with their decision soon after, where they invalidated several parts of SREN, including a “digital outrage or offense” provision to which we had objected. This is an important victory, which brings clarity at the constitutional level to a law that could impact how our community works to improve Wikipedia. We also filed amicus briefs in several cases before national supreme courts concerning intermediary liability protections, which allow platforms to host and moderate user generated content without legal liability. These laws are essential for the collaborative and neutral nature of platforms like Wikipedia, and we made this point in landmark cases in both the United States and Mexico. 

Litigation is a resource-intensive endeavor for the Foundation, but ensuring the future of free knowledge is certainly worth it. Read more about our litigation strategy in our Diff blog post.

Supporting online knowledge ecosystems through information integrity

The Global Advocacy team joined several important conversations about protecting information integrity in March. Yale’s Digital Ethics Center hosted its inaugural Summit on State AI Legislation, where Costanza Sciubba Caniglia (Anti-Disinformation Strategy Lead) moderated a panel of state lawmakers discussing learned lessons from AI in Elections. There, Costanza shared how contributors to the Wikimedia projects work to preserve truth online and promote information integrity, and how Wikipedia supports the online ecosystem with reliable information. Panelists throughout the day pointed out that Wikipedia is an important example of how open models benefit everyone, and play a vital role in supporting developing technology like artificial intelligence (AI). Others reported that legislation directed at platforms often inadvertently harms open source and open commons. This is a trend we are particularly worried about, and is the reason why we are developing a public policy tool called the “Wikipedia Test”: If a law or regulation would have a negative impact on Wikipedia, it likely would also impact many other public interest projects.

We are also pleased to announce that Costanza has joined the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council (GFC) on Information Integrity, an advisory network that focuses on worldwide solutions for information integrity. The GFCs are a series of networks that convene 700+ experts from academia, business, government, civil society and international organizations, with the purpose of identifying and disseminating transformative ideas with the potential for positive global impact. The Foundation is an important voice in the GFC on Information Integrity because it represents public interest, community-led platforms, which will play a crucial role in the future of information online.

In Brazil, we cosponsored an event with InternetLab called “Public Interest Journalism and Open Knowledge: Transforming Information into Democracy.” The event gathered journalists, researchers, civil society, and digital platforms to discuss how to support and bring together public interest journalism and open knowledge. Organized alongside the conference “Big Tech and Journalism in the Global South,” the event featured participatory activities facilitated by speakers with notable expertise in journalism, open knowledge, and digital rights. This included Wikimedians from Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay, and also Amalia Toledo (Lead Public Policy Specialist, Latin America and the Caribbean), who highlighted the link between Wikimedia’s mission and journalism.  

A vital part of preserving information integrity online is ensuring there is a healthy online information ecosystem to support knowledge sharing projects like Wikipedia. Both journalism and research are central to the work of Wikipedia volunteers, and help them to make sure information on the project remains reliably neutral, verifiable, and notable. InternetLab will soon publish outcomes from this event with a focus on: public policy recommendations for supporting public interest journalism through open knowledge; practical guides for journalists to integrate open data while respecting copyright; and, sustainability strategies for independent media in the Global South.

Check out the latest edition of the Global Advocacy quarterly newsletter! 

The sixth issue of our Global Advocacy newsletter dives deep into the litigation work done by the Foundation, with a foreword by Stephen LaPorte, our General Counsel. It provides insights and wraps up several recent conferences attended by the Global Advocacy team, including Rightscon, the World Economic Forum, and SXSW. Finally, it takes the time to celebrate Wikipedia being designated as a digital public good! Read more in the newsletter, subscribe to its quarterly updates, and join our mailing list for future editions!  

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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!