“Don’t Blink”: Protecting the Wikimedia model, its people, and its values in May 2026

Welcome to “Don’t Blink”! Every month we share public policy 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 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: follow us on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and Bluesky; sign up for our quarterly newsletter or Wikimedia public policy mailing list; and visit our Meta-Wiki webpage.

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Championing digital public goods for an equitable digital future

Governments and international institutions recognize the crucial role that digital technologies play in supporting—or sometimes hindering—a better world for everyone both online and offline. From the local to the global level, countries are working to understand how new technologies can advance innovation, education, equity, economic prosperity, and more. However, these efforts often focus too narrowly on commercial technologies, ignoring or undervaluing the role and contributions of open technologies and resources. A change is materializing, however. 

Digital public goods (DPGs) are open-source software, datasets, AI models, and content, increasingly recognized for helping to advance global benchmarks like the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Because DPGs are open and accessible, they are important tools for driving an equitable digital future: they are low cost, which means a wide variety of countries can adopt them, and are constantly improved by passionate volunteer communities. DPGs are vital resources that should be considered in national, regional, and global plans seeking to improve people’s lives across the world and—as such—deserve support and protection. 

The Wikimedia Foundation joins the Digital Public Good Alliance (DPGA)
[Read our Foundation statement on DPGA membership]

The DPGA is a UN-endorsed organization that has set standards to recognize almost 250 DPGs, and promotes their development and adoption in order to solve global challenges such as the SDGs. The Wikimedia Foundation, as part of work championing public interest, open knowledge resources like Wikipedia and Wikipedia, has recently joined the DPGA as a member. 

The Foundation now joins organizations like the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), GitHub, United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), and the Inter-American Development Bank, as well as several national governments, to collaborate on objectives such as advancing open knowledge infrastructure and providing equitable and inclusive access to trusted knowledge online. 

As a part of our commitment, the Foundation will strengthen Wikimedia Cloud Services—a platform that hosts a number of volunteer-developed tools that are essential to editing the Wikimedia projects—as well as the core infrastructure for the Wikimedia projects. We will also continue to advocate the importance of open knowledge infrastructure in the global digital policy agenda. This means promoting, among other things: development that puts open source first; the responsible use of open data for public interest AI; and the role of DPGs in protecting information integrity. We are excited for the opportunity to continue our work in these areas as a part of a larger movement that recognizes the importance of DPGs in creating a more equitable digital future for us all.

Read our Foundation statement on DPGA membership.

Discussing how digital public goods can strengthen inclusivity at the ASEAN Disability Forum Dialogue 
[Learn more about and read the Global Disability Inclusion Report]

Rachel Judhistari (Lead Public Policy Specialist for Asia) joined a dialogue hosted by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Disability Forum to discuss how protecting and promoting digital public goods can lead to greater inclusivity across Southeast Asia. The dialogue was attended by representatives from the Indonesia National Planning Agency and several large international development funders for the region, who focused on the implementation of the Global Disability Inclusions Report. Produced in 2025, the report analyzes how global trends, including technological advances, affect the inclusion of people with disabilities and suggests pathways to drive inclusion across all aspects of life. In particular, it highlights how technology creates opportunities to overcome barriers to accessing information, communications, and participation, as well as creates job opportunities for the disabled community. It also recognizes that new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) may worsen existing inequalities online if left unaddressed.

Rachel’s presentation highlighted the importance of digital public goods to achieving inclusivity online, especially in relation to disabilities. Access to open knowledge is important for communities to be informed about their rights, to participate in education, skill-building, and work online, and to have access to information about funding and services. Rachel advocated treating knowledge and digital public goods as public infrastructure—by providing the robust protections and support that other essential services receive—in order to build inclusive prosperity in the Southeast Asian region.

Learn more about and read the Global Disability Inclusion Report.

Building the future of digital rights advocacy in the ESEAP region 

The Wikimedia volunteer community has always been essential to building and maintaining the Wikimedia projects, but this is not its only role. Wikimedians across the world gather regularly to learn new skills, discuss developments in technology and public policy, and inspire others with stories about how the projects make their world a better place.

In advocacy and public policy spaces, Wikimedians are particularly well suited to advocate the conditions that allow the projects to not only exist, but flourish, and to push back on new legal and regulatory developments that threaten the Wikimedia model. This is why the Foundation often spends time at community gatherings, working directly with Wikimedians to build their advocacy-related capacity and skills, so that they can more effectively advocate laws and regulations that best support their communities and themselves.

Highlighting the role of women and youth at the ESEAP Conference 2026
[Learn more about this year’s Conference and read notes from the sessions]

At the East, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific (ESEAP) Conference 2026, Wikimedians from the region gathered in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, to participate in discussions, workshops, and meetups connected to the theme: “New Era of ESEAP: Pioneer the Future Together!” Rachel Judhistari joined the conference in the Women and Youth track to speak with emerging leaders in the ESEAP region about their role in building a better digital future. 

Vanj Padilla (founder of Shared Knowledge Asia Pacific [SKAP]) and Rachel presented a session sharing feminist perspectives on developing uses of AI and regulation related to these technologies. They highlighted some of the risks created by AI, including how automated decision-making (ADM) can lead to heightened risks for women in contrast to men. Rachel and Vanj also discussed opportunities for women to use their knowledge and experience to shape the future of AI through their existing work on Wikimedia projects, which serve as a large source of the data used to train AI models. 

Rachel also presented in two other sessions, which focused on building advocacy capacity in the volunteer community. The first was a practical workshop for young Wikimedians to learn advocacy skills, including how to narratively frame a public policy argument and how to advocate digital rights in a way that is aligned with the Wikimedia movement’s larger goals. This session gave youth participants hands-on experience as well as a roadmap for how to engage in policy debates at national, regional, and global levels. The second session was a casual discussion with affiliates who were interested in submitting grant applications to the Foundation on topics related to global advocacy. 

The connections made at these conferences are vital in making sure that Wikimedians, particularly women and youth, are well-resourced to do the kind of locally-informed advocacy that solidifies the Wikimedia movement’s public interest role in the region.

Learn more about this year’s ESEAP Conference and read notes from the sessions on the conference program webpage.

Shaping the future of global AI Governance

The rapid development and AI technologies and their widespread adoption have created new risks and opportunities for the world—which demand equally new innovations in internet governance. Governments at the local, national, and regional level are racing to lead the conversation and provide answers to the question of what that governance should look like.

One key forum guiding these conversations is the United Nations, which has been working on these issues at the international level through the development of frameworks like the Global Digital Compact. The Foundation, as the steward of several open source projects that serve as one of the primary data training sources for AI, has contributed to shaping this global response. We engaged heavily with the process of drafting the Compact, calling for AI development that supports people rather than replace them, and internet regulation that protects community-led governance mechanisms like those on the Wikimedia projects. Now that the Compact has been approved, the hard work of making sure these principles are upheld in its implementation begins.

Contributing to the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance
[Read our submission to the consultation]

The Foundation recently submitted a response to a consultation run by the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance, which highlighted the crucial role of openness and digital public goods in AI development and governance. The Global Dialogue was created as one of the outcomes of the Global Digital Compact, serving as a way for UN Member States and other interested parties to have transparent and inclusive discussions about future international cooperation and best practices around AI. This includes convenings set to take place in 2026 and 2027. 

In our submission, we shared our beliefs about what would make for a successful Global Dialogue. This includes continued recognition that digital public goods (DPGs) are foundational building blocks for a more inclusive AI ecosystem—as first seen in the Compact. We emphasized how DPGs like Wikipedia and Wikidata are essential to the development of AI systems, and discussed the challenges that AI scraping presents to the sustainability of these and other resources. We call for the Global Dialogue to address the structural imbalances in AI models and tools by creating additional norms concerning responsible reuse and attribution, targeted support for the technical infrastructure and volunteer contributor communities behind open knowledge projects, and integration of DPGs into national and regional AI strategies. 

We will continue to provide input to the Global Dialogue as it develops, representing an important community of digital public goods and public interest projects that are often left out of public policy discussions about AI and other emerging technologies.

Read our submission to the consultation.

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