Protecting the Wikimedia model, its people, and its values in April 2026 – Diff

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, X (formerly Twitter), and Bluesky; and, sign up for our quarterly newsletter or Wikimedia public policy mailing list.

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Imagining knowledge as critical digital infrastructure

We live in an age where knowledge has become increasingly profitable. As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies become more advanced and widely-adopted, the information used to train these tools provides significant value to the companies who develop them. However, this value is frequently not making its way back to the people who create, compile, or update the information in question and, worse, can even harm those seeking to share open knowledge online.

Organizations like the Wikimedia Foundation that host free and open knowledge in the public interest are facing a complicated dilemma: We are committed to providing open knowledge resources from which everyone, everywhere, can benefit, but the new online landscape threatens the sustainability of these very resources. In order to meet our goals of offering the “essential infrastructure” for free and open knowledge, the Foundation has taken steps to provide commercial content reusers like AI companies with access to the Wikimedia projects in a way that gives back to the platforms. We do this through the work of Wikimedia Enterprise. However, many smaller platforms do not have the bargaining power and/or resources to build such solutions. Furthermore, financial support is only one piece of this dilemma.

The concept of knowledge as critical digital infrastructure is important. Like water, power, internet access, and other resources that the world depends upon, we believe knowledge projects should receive protections and investment to ensure their sustainability in the face of a changing online landscape. While questions remain about what exactly this would look like, one aspect is perfectly clear: maintaining knowledge projects has never been more important, and governments and technology companies need to acknowledge this if their investments in AI are to pay off and remain sustainable in the long term.

Call to action for a resilient future: Hosting dialogues with the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF)
[Read our blog post about the initiative with OKF, also available in Spanish and Portuguese]

In April 2026, we announced a joint initiative with the OKF to explore treating open knowledge as critical digital infrastructure. The goal of the initiative is to expand the concept of essential services beyond strictly physical services to include the digital knowledge commons: the shared, publicly accessible systems that allow information to be freely and openly created and distributed. This distinction is not theoretical: recognition as a public service brings with it attention, investment, and strong governance, approaches needed to address the challenges facing the open knowledge ecosystem.

At the moment, the world is losing knowledge and cultural assets on many fronts: physical destruction caused by climate and political crises, crucial knowledge and data held by governments and public research bodies slipping through the cracks as newer technologies are implemented widely. With the rapid adoption of AI and easy access to its synthetic output, limits on training data raise questions about biases and representation gaps in the knowledge.

As a first step, the Foundation and the OKF hosted a meeting to identify a list of priorities as well as examples of how treating knowledge as a critical asset can protect it. These include: prioritizing open knowledge by default in publicly-funded settings; protecting open platforms like the Wikimedia projects; and ensuring that national strategies around digital infrastructure include open knowledge. We will continue building on these ideas in an upcoming position paper and dialogues during June and July. This fundamental shift requires cooperation and input from those in the open knowledge ecosystem, so we welcome feedback from those who share our vision of an online information environment that is supported and flourishing.

Read our blog post about the initiative with OKF, also available in Spanish and Portuguese.

Building shared principles for an open internet in Latin America
[Read our blog post about the workshop, also available in Spanish and Portuguese]

Last fall, the Foundation co-hosted a workshop with the Centro de Estudios en Libertad de Expresión (CELE) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to explore the future of digital rights in Latin America. The workshop was a part of CELE’s annual “Towards a Free Internet” gathering. We have now published the results of that workshop in a blog, which outlines a vision for a “digital utopia” where access to knowledge is a human right and the internet is a digital public interest project that we all contribute to together.

The workshop discussion explored whether our current understanding of human rights, security, and freedom online are expansive enough to address modern issues raised by new technologies or increased political pressure on platforms. Participants suggested that in order to address these issues, people working on digital rights need to expand their collaboration with social movements, journalists, digital workers, tech company employees and others to find a shared vision and common strategic ground. The workshop also produced a list of shared principles to focus on moving forward, including participatory, or community, governance and growing regional autonomy through strategic development and investment.

Will continue exploring these ideas about how the internet can serve the public interest, and how to create the digital future that best serves Latin America.

Read our blog post about the workshop we hosted, also available in Spanish and Portuguese.

The evolving landscape of child safety online

Our  world is grappling with the implications of children growing up with access to the internet. Policymakers, parents, and even minors themselves have raised concerns about how constant internet access impacts children’s socialization, mental health, and skills development, and exposes them to the risk of becoming victims of crimes online. As a result, many governments are attempting to address these issues through laws like social media bans for users under certain ages or age verification requirements that restrict what minors are allowed to see online. These laws may be written with good intentions, but they can create unanticipated consequences for privacy, security, and the exercise of human rights like freedom of expression and access to reliable information. Moving forward, the world must prioritize what changes can be most constructive to child safety online, not what most stirs our emotions and fears. As those who can best explain how the internet affects their lives, today’s youth, the people with the most at stake, must be involved in these discussions from their start, not as an afterthought.

Asking the question: Do age verification laws mean the end of the anonymous internet?
[Read our blog post about the Wikimedia Foundation and the Yale Law School’s Information Society Project (Yale ISP) joint event]

This April, the Yale ISP project hosted a workshop called “The End of the Anonymous Internet?,” which explored the implications that new regulations, particularly child safety initiatives like age verification and age gating have on privacy online.

Stan Adams (Lead Public Policy Specialist for North America) joined technical, legal, and policy experts from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Yale Privacy Lab. The panelists discussed measures like age verification and the move to digital identification (ID), and how these can impact privacy rights. They also examined what compliance could look like for platforms such as the Wikimedia projects, which have strong commitments to data minimization and decentralized governance. In addition, other panels explored how the loss of anonymity online facilitates government attempts to identify and retaliate against those who disagree with it, and other chilling effects, including people self-censoring their online speech out of fear of retribution.

In a world where violations of privacy are normalized, from physical and digital surveillance to mass data collection and monetization by data brokers and technology companies, crucial questions emerge: Will age verification and digital ID in the name of safety and security be the next invasive step in the slow erosion of fundamental rights? What else will we lose, considering that so much of the internet we love today was built on the protections of anonymity and pseudonymity?

Read our blog post about the Wikimedia Foundation and the Yale ISP joint event.

The online information ecosystem: We’re all in this together!

The Wikimedia projects have always had an important relationship with journalism. From the very start, the concepts of “verifiability” and “no original research” were built into the principles of contributing to Wikipedia, requiring that volunteers cite facts contained in reliable, published sources. In the 25 years since Wikipedia was founded, over seven million articles have been written based on these principles, including over 30 million citations to verifiable sources in the English language version of the encyclopedia alone.

Open knowledge platforms and news media organizations face numerous similar challenges, and that is more evident now than ever. For instance, we share many of the same threats and issues created by AI systems, including additional expenses caused by their web scraping for training data as well as a lack of attribution for the information they used for their synthetic output, which leads to fewer visits to our websites, subscriptions, and donations. Beyond financial concerns, any organization providing knowledge—either for-profit or not-for-profit—faces increasing pressure from those who would seek to prevent reliable information from being accessed and shared widely.

At this crucial time, we must work together to solve these existential threats, collaborating to come up with solutions that work for open knowledge organizations and journalism alike, and help to maintain the beneficial digital ecosystem that has brought accurate and verifiable information to so many people around the world for so long.

Making connections at the International Journalism Festival (IJF)
[Watch a video of our panel, “Wikipedia under siege: How to future-proof the internet’s last best place”]

This year marked the first time that the Wikimedia Foundation joined the IFJ, which offered us valuable opportunities to connect with others who shared our goals of providing the world with accurate and verifiable information, and addressing the most critical the issues of shifting technological and political landscapes.

Anusha Alikhan (Chief Communications Officer) and Raju Narisetti (member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees) spoke on a panel about the future sustainability of Wikipedia, sharing how the Foundation is working to adapt to the huge technological shifts that are affecting how people discover Wikimedia projects’ content. They highlighted the close relationship between the projects and journalism, since Wikimedians rely on published, reliable sources to cite facts that they include on the projects, and journalists benefit in turn from a thriving knowledge commons that can be freely and openly accessed online.

Throughout the conference, we were also able to find many common advocacy goals with other attendees from the journalism community. Beyond adapting to AI, these include protecting Wikimedians and journalists who face pressure from governments or organizations that use the legal system, intimidation, and threats of various kinds, including violence, to silence truthful information. In addition, we connected over our defense of information integrity online, an important shared value that will require our combined forces to sustain in the long term, in an aperitivo overlooking the Umbrian hills that we co-hosted with other organizations working to protect trustworthy information: Maldita, Pagella Politica, and Indicator.

Watch a video of our panel, “Wikipedia under siege: How to future-proof the internet’s last best place.”

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

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