SLAPPs are “strategic lawsuits against public participation”: legal cases brought to the courts in order to threaten and/or silence journalists, activists, and academics, including Wikipedia volunteer contributors. This legal phenomenon risks causing a chilling effect, which may be particularly acute in the case of those people who contribute voluntarily to Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects.
First day of WMEU General Assembly in Prague 2024, Richard Sekerak (WMCZ), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
As the EU rolls out the Digital Services Act (DSA), a pivotal moment unfolds for the future of online governance. While the regulation offers promising frameworks to enhance accountability and curb online harms, its implementation also reveals pressing risks. Over-moderation by platforms can undermine freedom of expression, legal uncertainties threaten community-led initiatives, and fragmented enforcement across Member States risks weakening the resilience of the EU’s information ecosystem. At the same time, the dominance and secrecy of proprietary platforms further complicate oversight and fairness.
Yet, there is a powerful counterbalance: community-led models like Wikipedia. Such alternative business models demonstrate a transparent, participatory approach to content moderation that prioritises reliability, verifiability, and pluralism.
Democracy is one of the fundamental values of the EU and today, as never before, it needs to be preserved and nurtured. Wikimedia Europe welcomes the European Commission’s initiative to adopt a European Democracy Shield to uphold the Union’s founding values.
We are convinced that Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects have a great role to play in the everyday efforts to nurture European democracy and to make the digital information ecosystem more resilient. We explained how in our submission to the public consultation launched by the European Commission.
After nearly three years of advocacy by the Polish Wikimedia community and open knowledge activists, the Polish government has committed to restoring free and open licensing for its digital content. This marks a significant step toward greater transparency and public access to information in Poland.
Committee on Culture and Means of Transmission CC BY-SA 3.0 PL, Adrian Grycuk, via Wikimedia Commons
The Road to Openness
Until August 2022, all content published on the Gov.PL portal—including text, images, and multimedia from government ministries and agencies—was available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 3.0 PL) license. This allowed for widespread reuse, including within Wikimedia projects. However, without public explanation, in 2022 the government abruptly switched to a restrictive license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 PL), preventing reuse on Wikimedia platforms and limiting the openness of government information.
In response, civil society organizations in Poland, including Wikimedians, began advocating for the return to free licensing. Wikimedia Europe engaged directly by submitting Freedom of Information Act requests to the Chancellery of the Prime Minister and the Ministry of Digital Affairs, seeking clarity on the reasons behind the change and urging a policy reversal.
Wikipedia has a significant impact on our everyday lives. The largest free knowledge platform on the internet, we regularly rely on its accessible, up-to-date information to form our opinions, even on critical events such as elections. While most of the research has focused on how large, commercial platforms address disinformation, less attention has been given to platforms non-profit, community-led platforms such as Wikipedia. The DEM-Debate project aims to fill this gap by exploring whether, and how, the fact-checking and moderation practices used by Wikipedia during the 2024 European Parliament election have enhanced the reliability of the information ecosystem. It also seeks to determine if these practices can be transferred to other online contexts, fostering an environment that nurtures a more democratic debate.
Wikimedia Europe is keen to share that Wikipedia has been recognised as a digital public good. It is an important recognition for community-led free knowledge projects, which will help our advocacy efforts. In these troublesome times for the information ecosystem, it is of utmost importance defending free knowledge and access to information through the safeguard of alternative platform models, like distributed and community-led online encyclopedias, that proved their resilience.
This post was originally published on the Wikimedia Foundation website and can be accessed here.
An increasing number of volunteers became the target of SLAPPs, particularly due to the widespread reach of Wikipedia. In the last ten years, more than a half of the reported SLAPP cases involving Wikipedians have taken place in Europe.
The report “Open Movement’s Common(s) Causes” maps the current threats and opportunities facing the open movement, based on the ongoing work of the organisations behind the Common(s) Cause event, which took place in Katowice, Poland; as a pre-conference event for Wikimania 2024 on 6 August, 2024. The meeting was organised by Creative Commons, Open Knowledge Foundation, Open Future, and Wikimedia Europe in collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation. The goal of the meeting was to create links between different advocacy efforts so that a shared advocacy strategy for the Knowledge Commons can be created. One of the calls that jumped out for us was a call for defining new open principles – principles that could clarify what openness means in the context of today’s digital space and ensure its pro-public, democratic potential. Formulating such principles could help against several challenges, e.g. open washing. Another clear call is the one confirming the assumptions behind the Common(s) Cause project: it is the call for a shared advocacy agenda, which could help ensure that Knowledge Commons are treated and sustained as critical digital infrastructures. The event gathered over 55 participants from 20 countries, most of whom travelled to Katowice to attend the Wikimania conference. The majority of attendees were from open advocacy communities. The event not only enabled the organizers to build stronger working ties with one another, but with the many other organisations who were represented at the event. Participants acknowledged that the power of the open movement is only as strong as the bonds of the people working to advance an open, equitable agenda, and collective impact can only be achieved through individuals from different organisations working closely together. The report identifies a few common causes that can be found at the intersection of open movement organisations’… Read More »Report on opportunities and threats for openness in a new technological era
Author: Aline Blankertz, Policy and Public Sector Advisor, Wikimedia Deutschland
We all use online platforms, from Google Search to WhatsApp to Microsoft Office. It is about time that users also get a say in how they work. In reality, we are far from this. But the direction is clear: platform councils can make decisions according to democratic principles.
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