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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Supporting open knowledge and resources in an evolving digital landscape
Society has long benefited from individuals and communities willing to share their work in the public interest. Open resources and infrastructure have been essential in advancing technology and science, along with preserving culture and knowledge. Open protocols allowed the early internet to develop, open science has contributed to advancements in medicine and space exploration, and open knowledge projects like the Wikimedia projects provide platforms for people around the world to share their knowledge and learn from each other.
Now, with artificial intelligence (AI) changing the digital landscape, open source resources that have sustained themselves for decades—and because they serve as the backbone of knowledge on the internet, have become crucial training datasets for modern AI technologies—are facing new challenges. Massive web scraping increases infrastructure burdens while new “zero-click” browsing patterns mean fewer people are discovering how to contribute to open resources directly. With world leaders debating how to adapt and direct AI’s impact on society, open source communities must be included in those discussions to help build a sustainable future for these vital digital goods and infrastructure.
Representing Wikimedia at the United Nations’ Open Source Week
[Read more about our edit-a-thon during Open Source Week]
The 2026 United Nations (UN) Open Source Week brought together UN specialized agencies, Member States, civil society organizations, technology developers, and open source communities to collaborate on both public policy and practical solutions for global challenges. Participants worked together to identify how open source technologies and projects can directly support the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and the implementation of the Global Digital Compact.
The Foundation joined several events throughout the week, starting with the second-ever UN “edit-a-thon.” A collaboration between the Foundation, Wikimedia NYC, the UN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies (ODET), and the UN Office of Information and Communications Technology (OICT), the edit-a-thon gathered volunteers at the UN headquarters in New York, United States (US), to improve articles on Wikipedia related to the UN and open source. Seasoned editors and curious newcomers were able to use on-site UN archives, reports, datasets, and credible news sources to add over 60 new articles and 120 new citations.
The Foundation also participated in panels and discussions throughout the week, including a reception hosted by the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) where our new membership was announced. Tajh Taylor (Special Advisor to the Chief Product and Technology Officer) spoke at the gathering, sharing how openness can foster innovation and the important role the Wikimedia projects play in the broader information ecosystem. With the UN taking a greater interest in how open source models can help reach global goals, events like this present a key opportunity for Wikimedians to share lessons from the volunteer communities and offer recommendations on how to address the new demands resulting from recent technological developments.
Read more about edit-a-thon during the UN Open Source Week.
Wikimedia Europe submits response to European Commission consultation on copyright law review
[Read the submission]
In 2019, the European Union (EU) adopted the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSM Directive), a comprehensive update to copyright law meant to modernize and harmonize rules across the bloc. Now, in 2026, as required by the CDSM Directive, the European Commission has been conducting a review of the 2019 rules and invited feedback about modernizing certain aspects in the face of new developments, specifically AI.
In their submission, Wikimedia Europe (WMEU) provided general feedback about the framing of the consultation as well as the specific suggestions to improve provisions related to copyright exceptions. WMEU first noted that the Commission’s consultation was largely framed around the issues faced by intellectual property rightsholders in the new, extractive AI market, and urged the Commission to go further in their investigation by recognizing the unique challenges that this market poses to open source projects and infrastructure.
The submission also highlighted a number of specific changes that could be made to strengthen the CDSM Directive. These spanned from adding requirements for reciprocity—or “giving back”—to exceptions for text and data mining, and from strengthening safeguards for public domain materials to standardizing exceptions to make it easier to perform and share public interest research across borders.
Read WMEU’s submission.
Thinking “Beyond the License” at the Global Data Festival
[Read reflections from the event by Winnie Kabintie]
The Global Data Festival 2026 was hosted in Nairobi, Kenya, and brought together policymakers, researchers, technologists, journalists, and civil society leaders to discuss emerging technologies and the future of data governance. Winnie Kabintie (Executive Director and cofounder of the Wikimedia Kenya User Group) joined the event to share her perspective on the rise of AI as a Wikimedian, journalist, communications specialist, and community leader. In a panel organized by the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA), “Beyond the License: Reciprocal Governance for Digital Public Goods and the Data Commons,” Winnie and experts in open source examined the question of how open knowledge can remain sustainable while traffic from web scraping bots is at an all-time high.
In her reflections from the event, Winnie discusses several challenges to open knowledge in the current AI ecosystem, and highlights this moment, when global conversations about data governance and AI are taking center stage, as an important opportunity for African voices from all sectors to help shape their digital future.
Read Winnie’s reflections from the event.
Representing the Wikimedia model at key regional conferences
The Wikimedia projects are global in scope, and public policy decisions at the subnational, national, and regional level all have the potential to impact the operations of the projects. This is why it is important to engage at varying levels with governments across the world to explain the Wikimedia model, and advocate laws that support—or at the very least do not harm—the core aspects of the model that have proven effective for more than 25 years: community-led governance, transparent content moderation, and participatory rule-making. In June 2026, the Foundation and members of the community attended regional events to share how policymakers and regulators can better protect Wikipedia and public interest projects like it.
Providing practical alternatives to strict platform regulation at the Digital Rights Asia-Pacific Assembly
[Learn more about DRAPAC]
Each year, DRAPAC convenes policymakers, civil society, industry and technical communities from across the Asia-Pacific region to collaborate on human rights-respecting approaches to digital governance. This year, the conference focused on how to address online harms while still maintaining safeguards for important rights like freedom of expression and access to reliable information.
Rachel Judhistari (Lead Public Policy Specialist for Asia) joined DRAPAC to discuss how the Wikimedia model and its core aspects can provide alternatives to strict regulations that require top-down control from online platforms. Rachel explained how such narrow regulations can harm collaborative, public interest projects like Wikipedia. She also proposed how policymakers can evaluate potential harm to public interest platforms by using Wikipedia as a benchmark.
The conference also served as an opportunity to build relationships with other civil society and industry actors across the region, and to start designing practical solutions for a rights-respecting, inclusive, and resilient digital future for the Asia-Pacific region.
Learn more about DRAPAC.
Reflecting on another successful Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum (DRIF)
[Read reflections on Diff from Wikimedia volunteers who attended]
The Foundation has sponsored the Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum (DRIF) for four years in a row, a conference organized by Paradigm Initiative that focuses on digital rights and internet governance in Africa. Held this year in Abidjan, Côte D’Ivoire, the conference brought together over 3500 delegates from more than 70 countries, including a strong contingent from the Wikimedia volunteer communities in Africa.
Felix Nartey (Senior Partnerships Manager, Sub-Saharan Africa) spoke with the Wikimedians in attendance to reflect on how forums like DRIF can serve as a platform for sharing Wikimedia’s perspective on important public policy topics and as a springboard for greater collaboration within the region.
In their reflections, Wikimedians highlighted how they built connections with educational institutions, libraries, and digital rights advocates by hosting panels and engaging in conversations, and also inspired new people to participate in the Wikimedia volunteer community. Several attendees described their growing understanding of the importance of Wikimedians’ voices in policy discussions, both to share their learnings about leading a digital public good and to explain the impact that policy decisions can have on their work. Felix closed the recap by recounting an anecdote from his post-conference work in Ghana, where he brought together Wikimedians with six civil society organizations that had attended DRIF in order to continue the cooperative work that began in Côte D’Ivoire.
Read reflections on Diff from Wikimedia volunteers who attended.
The importance of anonymous speech online
The Wikimedia model has protected anonymous and pseudonymous speech from its very beginning. These protections allow Wikimedians to contribute their knowledge on our projects even when doing so from territories where freedom of speech is restricted or on topics which could lead to political backlash or create unsafe conditions for them. For these reasons, volunteer contributors do not need to create an account or share an email address to edit. If they wish, they can choose to contribute under a pseudonym that links their account activity together. In 2024, the Foundation added additional privacy protections for logged out users: edits are now attributed to temporary account numbers, generated on the platforms and that last 90 days, instead of continuing previous practice of tying edits to IP addresses. Across the world, debate on online anonymity and pseudonymity is escalating, so their protection is as important as ever.
Sharing takeaways from the Yale Law School Information Society Project Workshop on the “End of the Anonymous Internet?”
[Read our blog post for more details of the discussions]
In April 2026, the Yale Law School’s Information Society Project (Yale ISP) hosted a workshop as a part of a long-standing partnership with the Foundation. The event included several presentations and panel discussions on the topic of online anonymity, including recent developments in US law that may challenge this important protection for free speech. Rossella Gabriele (Fellow-in-Residence, Yale ISP) and Stan Adams (Lead Public Policy Specialist for North America) published a recap of the discussions at the event and the connections that can be drawn between these seemingly separate legal changes.
The first panel at the workshop focused on the recent uptick in proposals for child online safety laws that require platforms to verify their users’ age. Though approaches vary based on who should conduct the verification and what methods to use, these requirements alone can potentially threaten users’ privacy and safety, besides cause them to self-censor lawful speech out of fear of retaliation. The trend of online identification was further highlighted in the second panel, which focused on the rise of digital identification (ID) systems such as mobile drivers’ licenses, and that also raised concerns for user privacy and freedom of expression.
Finally, the remaining two panels drew connections between the increased demand and availability of identifiable participation online to new executive instruments in the US, which expand definitions of federal crimes in order to classify speech that is critical of the country, its economic system, government, and certain religions, to name a few, as being akin to violence. Panelists raised grave concerns about how these rules may cause citizens to censor lawful disagreement, explained why companies and nonprofit organizations might avoid challenging them legally, and presented potential legal options to protect free speech and privacy online.
Read our blog post for more details of the discussions.
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“Don’t Blink” is for you! Please take our one-minute survey to help meet your needs and interests in our monthly public policy advocacy recap. Thank you for reading, month after month, about how the open knowledge movement is shaping discussions and decisions about our shared digital future!
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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!
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