Wikimedia Europe

25 Years of Wikipedia

by Dimi Zagorski
March 23, 2026March 25, 2026

Poster at the celebration of Wikipedia's 25th in Brussels, Author: Luc Viatour, License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0, Source: Wikimedia Commons

On 18 March, Wikimedia Europe and Wikimedia Belgium brought together a room full of people who care deeply about one of the internet’s quirkiest and perhaps most surprising achievements: 25 years of Wikipedia. Think about what that actually means. A non-commercial, volunteer-built encyclopedia in hundreds of languages, freely available to anyone with an internet connection. No paywalls. No shareholders. No algorithm deciding what you should read next. Around 260,000 volunteers curate 65 million entries, viewed more than 15 billion times every month. We don’t have nearly enough of that kind of thing. A room full of communities The evening had the feel of a reunion — familiar faces from across the European digital policy and Wikimedia communities. A mini-exhibition taking guests through the history of Wikipedia. A Wikicheese station where volunteers photographed Belgian cheeses to improve culinary content on the internet. These things only happen when people have been genuinely building something together long enough that the work creates its own history. Annie Rauwerda Stand-up Wikipedian and Depths of Wikipedia creator Annie Rauwerda took the stage and did what she does best — making the audience laugh while quietly reminding everyone why Wikipedia and free knowledge is beautiful. Her show was a love letter to trivia, knowledge, facts and humans. You may watch an older version of her talk online. Here’s to the next 25. One accent was the conscious decision to celebrate being human. Wikipedia is a project of humans and dedicated to human knowledge. With everything that this entails – good and bad. In a world full of machine generated content, the Wikimedia movement wants to confirm its commitment to being community human of volunteers first and foremost. And since we are human, you will also bear with us that we will plug… Read More »25 Years of Wikipedia

THE DEM-Debate project came to an end: the final event

by Michele Failla
February 26, 2026March 26, 2026

adapted illustration by Jasmina El Bouamraoui and Karabo Poppy Moletsane for Wikipedia 20, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

On February 24, the DEM-Debate partners – Wikimedia Europe, the University of Amsterdam and Eurecat – Centre Tecnològic de Catalunya – gathered at the European Parliament in Brussels for the final event of the DEM-Debate project.

by Dimi Zagorski
February 19, 2026February 19, 2026

Jean Rogers, John Wayne & Ward Bond in Conflict - publicity still, 1936, author: unknown, license: none because public domain

Open your social media feed. Within thirty seconds you will likely have seen something engineered to provoke you — a post calibrated by an algorithm to raise your cortisol, confirm your suspicions about the “other side”, or send you spiralling into an outrage loop that keeps you scrolling. This is not a bug. It is the business model. Platforms built on advertising revenue seem to have discovered, empirically, that anger and anxiety are among the most reliable engines of engagement. So their algorithms are optimised for both.

Now open Wikipedia. You land on an article. At the top, perhaps, a small notice: “This article’s neutrality is disputed.” Or: “This article needs additional citations.” Or nothing at all — just the text, the citations, the talk page quietly humming in the background where a numerous strangers are negotiating the phrasing of a single contested sentence. This, too, is not an accident. It is the result of deeply intentional architectural choices — choices that point in precisely the opposite direction from the attention-advertising economy.

by Michele Failla
December 23, 2025December 23, 2025

Craiyon, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The latest deliverable of the DEM-Debate project authored by the University of Amsterdam explores how the new EU legal framework on election disinformation applies to Wikipedia. The legal analysis evaluates, through critical lenses, the impact of the new rules on the functioning of community-governed platforms in addressing disinformation related to the 2024 European Parliament elections, drawing some preliminary conclusions on how to inform policy making: Wikipedia editorial rules together with its patrolling system are good examples from which future legislation on election disinformation can draw inspiration.

by Dimi Zagorski
December 11, 2025December 11, 2025

An omnibus of the Compagnie générale des omnibus. Scanned by Claude Shoshany, Collection personnelle, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1376037

On 19 November 2025, the European Commission unveiled its Digital Omnibus package — a pair of legislative proposals aimed at simplifying the EU’s digital regulatory framework. The first one is focused specifically on AI, while the second covers data protection and re-use of open data.

The Commission frames these changes as efforts to streamline complex EU rules. However, civil society groups, many MEPs, and even some Member States argue that they fundamentally alter the EU’s digital rulebook by weakening longstanding data protection principles.

The Wikimedia movement is made up of its organisations, projects and users. They all depend on robust privacy protections, open knowledge sharing, and solid intermediary liability protections. At the same time, the Wikimedia Foundation, as a service provider, also spends considerable resources on sometimes very complex compliance work in the EU.

With all this in mind it is needless to say that these proposals raise significant questions for Wikimedia. We can identify both positive and negative changes in the published texts.

by Dimi Zagorski
November 13, 2025November 13, 2025

November 13, 2025 Dear Presdent Macron,Dear Chancellor Merz,Dear President von der Leyen, Europe is at a crossroads. The Summit on European Digital Sovereignty marks an important milestone for the EU and its member states in aligning on a shared strategy for achieving real and lasting European digital sovereignty. As the EU pursues the goal of digital sovereignty, we urge you to harness open source — that is, technology that is free to use, inspect, adapt, and share — as a key enabler of this strategy. Europe cannot buy sovereignty off a shelf, it has to build it. In an age of geopolitical volatility and rapid innovation Europe must play to its strengths, including world-leading researchers and a rich history of open source development. It faces a choice: use these strengths to carve out its distinct place in the global AI ecosystem or settle for copying the playbooks of already dominant actors. At their heart, closed systems create dependency, open systems create capacity. Investment into the full open source AI stack, from AI models to data and software tooling, is a strategic lever. If digital sovereignty means creating a Europe that is resilient and benefits from choice, security, and self-determination, then open source is a critical force multiplier that enables Europe to do more with less. Open source AI, and open source technology more broadly, is not just a strategic asset benefiting governments, businesses, and people. If underpinned by a clear commitment to values that are at the heart of the European project — including cultural diversity, fundamental rights, environmental sustainability, and people’s privacy and security — open source can help embed these into the technologies that will shape our future. We, the undersigned, represent a diverse coalition of organisations across industry, the open source community,… Read More »Open letter: Harnessing open source AI to advance digital sovereignty

Wikipedia & AI Competition: Biases, Mistakes, Omissions

by Dimi Zagorski
November 11, 2025November 11, 2025

A model to predict pixel colour values, based on an original photograph. The work illustrates a popular type of machine learning model: the decision tree. Decision trees work by splitting the data into ever smaller segments. It shows that models are simplifications of reality, but can still be useful. Authors: Rens Dimmendaal and David Clode, License: CC-BY, Source: BBC, Better Images of AI

Competition is a good thing. Wikipedia’s free licences explicitly welcome it. We have seen other platforms and encyclopaedias appear in the past, and we will see more in the future.

The latest batch of competition that wants to harness AI technology to generate better compendiums of knowledge. These projects criticise things like gaps in coverage, reliable or alleged political biases.Let’s have a look at what’s out there and discuss some of the aspects!

by Dimi Zagorski
October 30, 2025October 30, 2025

These are the data centres used by the Wikimedia Foundation, in which it has colocation space and where it operates its server clusters.

The recent AWS outage served as yet another reminder of how much of the modern internet depends on a handful of cloud providers. When the service experienced widespread disruptions in October 2025, countless websites and applications went dark. The cascading failures illustrated a drawback of the cloud-dependent infrastructure.

Luckily, Wikipedia and its sister projects hummed along without interruption. It is a little known fact that the Wikimedia Foundation runs its own servers in several places around the world. This has some advantages, but also poses specific challenges. Let’s take a look!

by Dimi Zagorski
October 23, 2025October 24, 2025

Main Library of the University of Vienna. Reading hall. Author: Hubertl. License: CC-BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons

Through its flagship research programme, Horizon Europe, the European Union will spend 95.5 billion euro on science and research until 2027. Yet, the results of this research in many cases will not be accessible to Europeans – academics, regular citizens or even Wikipedians.

In he most extreme cases European taxpayers will have paid for the research institution, for the actual research, but the research institutions and the researchers will still need to pay expensive licenses for academic journals for access. And even then, the public won’t be able to make use of this knowledge.

by Dimi Zagorski
October 17, 2025October 24, 2025

Yoruba Wikipedia Children's Day Celebration Souvenir /cc-by-sa Agbalagba, via Wikimedia Commons

We understand the concern and are concerned ourselves. Lawmakers worldwide are rightly focused on the effects personal data collecting, algorithm-and-advertising-driven, content pushing platforms have on growing up. Protecting and empowering minors—both online and offline—requires ongoing effort, cooperation, and commitment from the entire society.

The EU has already enacted important legislation, including the Digital Services Act (DSA), the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD), and the Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA). These provide a solid framework for safeguarding children’s rights online, but of course could also be in need of updating. Currently several own-initiative reports by the European Parliament, Member States initiatives and the European Commission are considering options.

As such legislation is developed, we need to follow one guiding light: children’s rights and best interest. The challenge is clear: children deserve protection, and we have an obligation to protect them. Yet children also have other rights: to education, to privacy, and to freedom of expression. We must make sure all of these are protected.

Michael S Adler, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Sergey Pesterev / Wikimedia Commons

Markus Trienke, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from Greenbelt, MD, USA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

JohnDarrochNZ, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Benh LIEU SONG (Flickr), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Stefan Krause, Germany, FAL, via Wikimedia Commons

25 Years of Wikipedia

THE DEM-Debate project came to an end: the final event

The Architecture conflict vs. the architecture of collaboration

DEM-Debate project: the Critical Legal Analysis

WMEU on the Digital Omnibus & the Russmedia Decision

Open letter: Harnessing open source AI to advance digital sovereignty

Wikipedia & AI Competition: Biases, Mistakes, Omissions

Wikipedia Is Running On Its Own Metal: The Power and Limits of Self-Hosted Infrastructure

Why Wikimedia Supports Secondary Publication Rights for Publicly Funded Research

Protecting and Empowering Children Online: A Wikimedia Perspective