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

Image collage for the May 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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Discussing why freedom of expression is vital for a healthy information ecosystem
[Watch our panel discussion during the UN World Press Freedom Day celebration]

World Press Freedom Day observes the importance of freedom of the press and of free expression as fundamental rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights worldwide. During the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) celebration for World Press Freedom Day, members of the Global Advocacy team joined several conversations to discuss the role that Wikimedia projects play in a technological landscape rapidly changing with the development of AI.

Rebecca MacKinnon (Vice President of Global Advocacy) spoke at a high-level kick-off session on “Information as a Public Good in the Age of AI.” During that conversation, Rebecca explained that we can only ensure information integrity if public policies protect freedom of expression and privacy—online as well as offline. Even in times of new technologies, fundamental rights must be promoted and protected. She also talked about the impact of AI on Wikipedia, from overwhelming scraping bot traffic to the rise of AI-generated disinformation. Rebecca made the point that to ensure information integrity, it is more important now than ever to protect the rights of people who produce trustworthy information: journalists, researchers, and members of community-led open-source platforms like Wikipedia.  

Speaking at a side event at World Press Freedom Day about Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs), Rebecca shared more about the threats platforms like Wikipedia face, and explained how powerful people often use expensive lawsuits to force smaller entities and platforms to suppress factual information. Using Wikipedia as an example, she highlighted recent SLAPP efforts against the Foundation, including a case in Portugal where the person bringing the lawsuit sought to force the Foundation to turn over personal data about Wikimedians who worked on the article in dispute. To combat abuses like this, she suggested UN Member States adopt the privacy protections for anonymous public participation in the Council of Europe’s Recommendation on countering SLAPPs.

Watch the panel discussion where Rebecca participated on UNESCO’s YouTube channel. You can read more about the Foundation’s litigation efforts, including SLAPP lawsuits, on Diff. 

Collaborating with UNESCO to promote public interest AI
[Read our blog post on Medium to find out about the AI for Good Summit 2025, and learn more about the Foundation’s AI Strategy on our website and on Meta-Wiki]

Amalia Toledo (Lead Policy Specialist for Latin America and the Caribbean) spoke about AI and information integrity at another World Press Freedom Day celebration side event, which was organized by UNESCO and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Amalia discussed why the Foundation’s approach to AI can serve as an example of how this technology can be developed to support the public good. One crucial aspect of this approach, she highlighted, is a focus on keeping people at the center of technological development. The Foundation does so by creating tools that help the people who volunteer their time to curate and expand the Wikimedia projects do their work more efficiently. Amalia also shared how our commitments to transparency, community governance, multilingualism, and equity ensure we remain dedicated to the public interest while adapting any new technologies.

Later in the month, UNESCO held a dialogue on the topic of AI governance with representatives from the governments of Malaysia and Indonesia. Co-hosted by Engage Media, participants also included government officials, think-tank, journalists, digital rights groups, and legal aid groups in the region. During this discussion on responsible use of AI and how AI governance can support its positive uses in the public interest, Rachel Judhistari (Lead Public Policy Specialist for Asia) presented the Foundation’s new AI Strategy. Wikimedia’s approach was lauded as a leading example of how open, community-driven approaches can shape AI for the common good. Discussions like these—alongside UNESCO tools like the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and UNESCO AI Readiness Assessment—are critical to the future of equitable AI development and governance in Southeast Asia—and elsewhere in the globe.

Members of the Global Advocacy team continue to show up in these important conversations about AI, including during several events being held throughout June and July. We published a blog post highlighting where we are headed, which includes the AI for Good Global Summit 2025, in order to discuss how AI technologies can support global goals and solve global challenges.

Read our blog post on Medium to find out about the AI for Good Summit 2025, and learn more about the Foundation’s AI Strategy on our website and on Meta-Wiki.

Celebrating the launch of the Coalition on Digital Impact (CODI)
[Watch Rebecca’s fireside chat on YouTube and learn more about the Coalition on Digital Impact]

Members of the Global Advocacy team recently attended the launch of the Coalition on Digital Impact, a group empowering communities to access and navigate the internet in their native languages. The launch, which coincided with Universal Acceptance Day 2025, focused on how to break barriers to digital access through more multilingualism online. Rebecca MacKinnon spoke at a fireside chat and discussed how the Wikimedia projects advance online multilingualism as a digital public good. Rebecca gave examples of how Wikimedia empowers communities to share their knowledge online in their own language. She highlighted a recently announced collaboration between Rising Voices and five Wikimedia affiliates, which will host a series of Language Digital Activism workshops to help members from five language communities experiment with new digital tools and strategies. The launch of the Coalition on Digital Impact is an important moment to recognize how multilingualism online can contribute to a thriving and truly global internet that supports everyone’s ability to access information online.

Watch Rebecca’s fireside chat on YouTube and learn more about the Coalition on Digital Impact.

Challenging the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act Categorization requirements
[Read about our legal challenge on Diff and on Medium]

In May 2025, the Foundation announced that it is filing a legal challenge to the lawfulness of a new element of the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) that determines what duties a website has under the law. This comes after years of the Foundation sharing our concerns with UK policymakers—concerns that remain unaddressed.

 This element of the law would designate certain services as “Category 1” services and would impose the most burdensome requirements on platforms that receive that designation. These requirements, aimed at holding the riskiest commercial and social media platforms accountable for harmful or abusive content, could interfere with how the Wikimedia projects work, and potentially even compromise the safety of Wikimedia volunteer editors. This includes a requirement that the Foundation offer to verify users’ identities, and block all unverified users from fixing or removing content that UK users post on Wikipedia. This would break Wikipedia’s collaborative editing model and threaten the privacy of everyone who contributes to the projects globally. 

For these reasons, we have acted to legally challenge the OSA’s overly broad criteria for deciding how a service is sorted into Category 1, standing up for Wikimedians and public interest projects everywhere. Since announcing the challenge, the High Court has agreed to expedite the challenge, and set a date for a two day-trial this upcoming 22–23 July. A long-term UK-based Wikimedian, User:Zzuuzz, has also been added as a joint claimant in the case and will play a pivotal role in articulating its human rights implications, including the rights to privacy, safety, free speech, and association. It is extremely rare—if not unheard of—for a website user to join the website’s host in bringing a legal challenge, and we thank User:Zzuuzz for volunteering to take this extraordinary step. 
Read about our legal challenge on Diff and on Medium. 

Spotlighting the Wikimedia community’s advocacy across the globe
[Check out Wikimedia Brasil’s copyright campaign and joint statement about local internet governance, as well as Wikimedia Europe’s submission on the European Democracy Shield]

Wikimedians are often in the best position to identify local public policies that may have an impact on how people in their country or region access and contribute to the Wikimedia projects. Many Wikimedia affiliates and user groups track important laws related to digital rights, access to knowledge, and the internet in general, and advocate policies that protect public interest platforms like the projects. Wikimedians from across the world were busy last month, sharing lessons from their work and advocating a better internet for everyone, everywhere.

Wikimedia Brasil published a summary of their #ConhecimentoÉDireito (#KnowledgeIsDirect in English) campaign, which aims to modernize Brazilian copyright law so as to better protect freedom of expression. The campaign launched last February by the Coalizão Direitos na Rede, a group that brings together academic and civil society organizations to defend digital rights. Wikimedia Brazil explained the work that went into various stages of the campaign, from the initial fact-finding to creating the materials that helped get the word out through print media and podcasts. For example, an ebook promoted free culture and the use of Creative Commons, and detailed a collaboration between the Wikimedia chapter, InternetLab, and the Secretariat of Culture of the State of Espírito Santo in Brazil that led to 4000 images being added to Wikimedia Commons. Comprehensively reviewing  the work that has gone into influencing copyright law and practices in Brazil is an excellent example of how other Wikimedia affiliates can share and learn from each other’s successes.

Read the full Diff blog post (in Portuguese) for more insights.

On the topic of internet governance more generally, Wikimedia Brazil and the Foundation also released a statement supporting the local multistakeholder internet governance model, which is guided by the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br). This model, internationally recognized for its achievements, is threatened by changes in two new bills that could significantly alter the CGI.br’s oversight powers. Our statement calls for a robust, comprehensive, and participatory discussion in the Brazilian National Congress to ensure that important perspectives, such as those of Wikimedians and other online communities, are represented in determining the future of internet governance in the country.

Read the full statement (in Portuguese) on Diff.

Wikimedians from across the East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific region came together in the Philippines for the annual ESEAP Strategy Summit. The Summit covered many topics, among them the advocacy work of regional affiliates and user groups. Rachel Judhistari led two sessions about public policy advocacy. The first explored the landscape of advocacy in ESEAP and beyond Rachel, alongside Wikimedia Australia, Wikimedia Indonesia, the Wikimedia Community User Group Malaysia and Shared Knowledge Asia Pacific (SKAP), presented global and regional policy trends, like those around child safety regulations. Rachel also led a session to help develop action plans for advocacy in the region, with a focus on explaining the Wikimedia model and sharing tactics and resources for advocacy.

Learn more about the ESEAP Strategy Summit on Meta-Wiki. 

Finally, Wikimedia Europe (WMEU) drafted a submission to the European Commission’s call for evidence about an initiative called the European Democracy Shield. This initiative would, in the Commission’s own words, “address the most severe risks to democracy in the EU.” In their submission, WMEU highlighted how protecting the Wikimedia projects and volunteer communities would help this effort to strengthen democracy in the EU, and offered suggestions for high-impact actions that could be taken under the initiative. These include: recognising and promoting the Wikimedia projects’ role in the safeguarding information integrity and strengthening digital and media literacy skills; helping to counter false information by increasing access to public broadcasting materials; and, protecting anonymity online by crafting safeguards for user identity and data in strategic lawsuits meant to silence people sharing truthful information online (i.e., SLAPPs).

Find the submission on Wikimedia Commons.

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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!