Public Policy Team

Wikimedia Europe's Public Policy team is direct successor of the infamous Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EU. It unites the voice of European Wikimedia affiliates and communities so they can have a clear and coherent position on major legislative and political changes affecting the vision, mission and values of the Wikimedia movement.

Read more about our history.

In 2026 our main areas of engagement are:

• Child protection & age verification: Explaining how the Wikimedia communities and the Wikimedia Foundation are working together to protect children on the projects and participating in the discussions about which online platforms should preform mandatory age verification. Our position is that age verification would act as an additional barrier to accessing knowledge and should therefore only be mandated for the highest risk platforms.
• Content moderation: A large part of our work is to follow up on all the legislative conversations and proposals that touch upon how content moderation is performed, by users and by service providers. The main framework for this is the Digital Services Act. Here we are supporting the Wikimedia Foundation, including by providing input to the various guidelines the European Commission is issuing.
• AI: We are currently part of a lot of discussions and consultation related to AI and our projects. This includes copyright, attribution and citations, usage of tools for content moderation and generation, usage of Wikimedia content for training, infrastructure and the economics of the knowledge ecosystem. Our challenge for 2025 is to pull all these loose threads in a coherent strategy and message.
• Simplification vs. Deregulation: We participate in the debates on the EU on how to streamline the various EU rulebooks. This includes data governance, data protection, reporting mechanism, liability regimes.
• Protecting Our Users: Wikimedia users need to be protected. Their ability to edit is being regularly risked by unwise legal proposals, such as an obligation to use real names online. Another risky factor is our users being taken to court based on various laws, such as content moderation and data protection rules. We look at this aspect whenever we are working on these files.
• Geoblocking: The European Union is expected to revamp its geoblocking rules. We are part of the deliberations taking the position that geoblocking is often a hurdle to accessing and verifying sources, which are essential for citations on the projects.