Wikimedia Forum

Hello everyone,

My name is Phil - I work in the Wikimedia Foundation’s Legal department, and I’m here to provide two updates on our legal challenge to the UK Online Safety Act’s "categorisation rules". Those rules are written so broadly that Wikipedia could be lumped in as a "Category 1 service". This would subject it to extra duties under the Act that could seriously impact the privacy, safety and empowerment of the Wikipedia community, and our collective ability to sustain the Wikimedia projects. For background on the OSA and our legal challenge, see here (Diff), or a more detailed post here (Medium).

First, an administrative note: the High Court has agreed to expedite our case, and set a two-day trial next month: July 22-23. We expect the hearings to be public, and can be observed in person at the beautiful Royal Courts of Justice in London.

Second: the Foundation will be joined in this case by a Wikipedian, as joint claimant. User:Zzuuzz, a longterm UK-based user, will play a pivotal role in articulating the human rights implications of this case, including for your rights to privacy, safety, free speech, and association.

I hope you’ll join us in expressing deep appreciation to User:Zzuuzz for volunteering to take this extraordinary step, and standing up for the Wikimedia movement worldwide. This might be legal history in the making: our early searches haven’t turned up any legal precedent of a website’s host and its users proactively joining forces to bring a legal challenge.

We’ll aim to provide further updates on Meta, and we’ll watch discussions for a few days in case there are questions we can usefully answer. As this is a critical moment in active litigation, we apologise for not commenting as freely as we’d like. Best regards,

PBradley-WMF (talk) 08:10, 26 June 2025 (UTC) Reply

Hi all! I’m pleased to report that the court hearing this week went well.

The judge was switched on, and very engaged with the issues we were raising. He seems to understand why Wikipedia is so important, how it works (in general terms), and why it’s not like the UK OSA’s classical targets (e.g. social media platforms). We think he saw how this law’s flawed design can have some very unfortunate - and unintended - consequences. However, he also seemed to be a strong believer that English courts should offer the government significant leeway when making technical policy decisions. Unsurprisingly, that’s also the government’s central argument - that courts should not hold it accountable for "imperfect" decisions.

We therefore do not know how the judge will rule. Timing-wise, the judge indicated that we shouldn't expect a ruling before the end of July; August is more likely.

We'll provide a further update once we have news, but in the interim, we wanted to once again offer our tremendous appreciation to user:Zzuuzz , and to the external legal team in this case. Both were essential to putting in what was a passionate and well-argued plea for rational, rights-respecting regulation. PBradley-WMF (talk) 17:43, 24 July 2025 (UTC) Reply

Why does the Government think Wikipedia should be in Category 1? There really are not any "forwarding or sharing" features as the law defines them, at all. Recommendation features exist for new editors; everyone else has to go to a specific page to get them if they want them. It would be far easier to just disable those features for people in the UK than struggle through a Category 1 classification. 2603:800C:1200:596A:831C:A3FA:2D50:44FD 01:30, 31 July 2025 (UTC) Reply

It's complicated. For example, one of the definitions[1] is concerned with "content that is generated directly on the service by a user of the service, or uploaded to or shared on the service by a user of the service" (e.g., posts something in the comments section on a news website) that could "be encountered by another user", even if it's not technically "forwarded or shared" (or even encountered) by anyone.

Another definition, of "user",[2] could be interpreted (or not!) as saying that editors/contributors to the wikis are not "users", but all readers are – the opposite of how we think about who a User: is. It's also possible that, since editors see themselves as volunteering for "the project" ("Wikipedia" or "Commons") rather than "the organization" ("Wikimedia Foundation, Inc."), someone would classify them the other way.

Even if they clear up these vaguenesses, how are we supposed to track how many people are actually reading Wikipedia, without violating their privacy? Is my laptop plus my phone "two users"? Is the shared laptop at school, used by six students a day, "one user"? Is someone who clears cookies every day "30 users"?

AIUI the usual thing for legislators to do is to decide whether they want to include Wikipedia, and if they don't, then they write a clear statement in the law saying "BTW, Wikipedia is exempt" (e.g., that the law applies only to services hosted by for-profit entities). And if they do intend for Wikipedia to be covered, then it would be nice to have them say so directly. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:26, 31 July 2025 (UTC) Reply

We have said that there is a risk that (for instance, but without limitation) the inherent ability to embed images (or other content; maybe even user-generated templates) into Wiki pages may be deemed "forwarding or sharing functionality". We discussed how, for example, an uploaded image of the Baltimore bridge collision had been reused across various Wiki pages, including as a Picture of the Day on the front page. PBradley-WMF (talk) 08:07, 27 August 2025 (UTC) Reply

RULING IS OUT: Hi everyone. Unfortunately, the High Court of Justice has dismissed the Wikimedia Foundation's challenge to the UK's Online Safety Act (OSA) Categorisation Regulations. While the decision does not provide the immediate legal protections for Wikipedia that we hoped for, the Court’s ruling emphasized the responsibility of Ofcom and the UK government to ensure Wikipedia is protected as the OSA is implemented.

The judge recognized the "significant value" of Wikipedia, its safety for users, as well as the damages that wrongly-assigned OSA categorisations and duties could have on the human rights of Wikipedia's volunteer contributors. The Court stressed that this ruling "does not give Ofcom and the Secretary of State a green light to implement a regime that would significantly impede Wikipedia's operations", and indicated they could face legal repercussions if they fail to protect Wikipedia and the rights of its users. In order to achieve that outcome, he suggested that Ofcom may need to find a particularly flexible interpretation of the rules in question, or that the rules themselves may need amendment in Parliament.

If the ruling stands, the first categorization decisions from Ofcom are expected this summer. The Foundation will continue to seek solutions to protect Wikipedia and the rights of its users as the OSA continues to be implemented. PBradley-WMF (talk) 10:02, 11 August 2025 (UTC) Reply

This BBC summary of the judicial review mentions and quotes PBradley. Salient points about refusal to exempt Wikipedia from OSA Categorization:

• Due to the large number of users accessing Wikipedia, it would be Category 1, i.e. like a huge social media website and "have to verify the identity of its contributors".
• As WhatamIdoing said, OSA's definition of users is ambiguous. Are "users" our editors/contributors OR readers?! Proposed work-around, in BBC voice, no attribution: "The only way it could avoid being classed as Category 1 would be to cut the number of people in the UK who could access the online encyclopaedia by about three-quarters, or disable key functions on the site."

OFCOM has its hands full, as it is levying daily fines on websites (wholly domiciled in other countries) for not complying with UK ID reqs. 4chan (which is not non-profit but operates without profit) was one of the first to be fined. Also, in Feb 2025, OFCOM ordered Apple to disable privacy encryption for UK only. OFCOM extended that to Apple users globally. The US government objected to its citizens' data being revealed to UK under OSA. On 19 Aug, OFCOM backed down for (some?) countries; UK user privacy status is unknown.--FeralOink (talk) 23:56, 26 August 2025 (UTC) Reply

@FeralOink My understanding is that Ofcom is not involved with the Apple matter (and that it's not an Online Safety Act matter); and that it is instead the UK Home Office that (reportedly) issued Apple with a Technical Capability Notice, using powers in the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. See also the requirements that a UK TCN can impose.

Confusion is understandable, because there has been talk of OSA powers also in theory being usable to "backdoor" private messaging apps, for child safety purposes (whereas the IPA 2016 is more about UK national security/crime-fighting).

Interestingly enough, one of our lawyers (Raphael Hogarth) is also representing Apple in the dispute you mentioned. Small world... PBradley-WMF (talk) 08:02, 27 August 2025 (UTC) Reply

Commons has a huge problem with the upload of selfies. Most of these selfies are used on user pages where new users publish their CV or similar. To reduce this I want to discuss if we can make a global policy that every Wiki has to show a warning during user page creation explaining that we are not a social media platform. GPSLeo (talk) 14:47, 5 August 2025 (UTC) Reply

GPSLeo that's an excellent idea. The first step in enforcing rules is a warning about what Commons is not, i.e. a social media platform. In 2013, I hesitantly uploaded my photo Wiki Women in Red, didn't label it correctly, and it was promptly deleted. The volume is much greater now. Selfies as well as photos of editors' amateur watercolors, low quality pics of editor body parts, test versions of logos for editors' personal business ventures, etc. but all unused on any Wiki mainspace, (usage or lack thereof is indicated on EVERY Commons file page), not even Ogrebot galleries. It is very difficult to get those images deleted. Maybe discuss an additional warning that Commons is not a photo upload and sharing site (SmugMug, imgur) as well as the not social media advisory?--FeralOink (talk) 00:22, 27 August 2025 (UTC) Reply

The Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) is a one-year pilot of a group of Wikimedia Foundation staff and community members that advise the Wikimedia Foundation on its technical direction and provide input on the long-term product and technical priorities for the Wikimedia movement.

Following recent community reactions surrounding two initiatives, the trial of AI-generated article summaries, which subsequently led to the RFC surrounding AI features by the WMF and the concerns surrounding Tone Check, members of the Product and Technology Advisory Council came together to form two working groups to brainstorm ways to improve how the Foundation conducts and communicates experiments and product development and how it engages with the community surrounding updates regarding its product development.

As a result of the brainstorming, we came up with a set of proposals of experiments the Wikimedia Foundation can conduct to increase transparency, trust, and lead to more constructive engagement between the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia communities. We would like to community provide feedback on the proposals at the talk page. This feedback phase will last until August 22, following which (provided there are no objections) we will forward the proposals to the Wikimedia Foundation Product and Technology Department who will subsequently look into ways of implementing and incorporating these recommended experiments. -- Sohom (talk) 18:01, 6 August 2025 (UTC) Reply

Hello all. We are taking community suggestions for improvements to the default message MediaWiki:Globalvanishrequest-pretext/qqz. Please let us know any concepts or ideas you would like to have included in this messaging for users contemplating the process. Thank you! — xaosflux ^Talk 20:27, 14 August 2025 (UTC) Reply

• Concepts that must be maintained are that (1) Vanishing is not secret; (2) Vanishing does not remove contributions (3) vanishing is a non-reversible workflow. — xaosflux ^Talk 20:27, 14 August 2025 (UTC) Reply
• Some notes in : phab:T401869 — xaosflux ^Talk 20:30, 14 August 2025 (UTC) Reply
• From a very quick first glance, I feel like I'm not a fan of the "Account deletion is done by" wording. Unless I'm mistaken, account vanishing is not account deletion at all (the user's global accounts are retained within MediaWiki); so I'm worried that this current wording might be slightly - if unintentionally - disingenuous.
  Ditto for "changing your account name [...] so others cannot recognize your contributions" - it's not impossible to recognize the contributions of a vanished user (given that account vanishes are publicly logged), so I feel like this might make non-recognizability seem like more of a certainty than it actually is.
  (Maybe something like "Your account name is changed to make it so that others cannot easily recognize your contributions." [or "...so that others are less easily able to recognize your contributions."] might work in that sentence's place to address these concerns somewhat?)
  Best, ‍—‍a smart kitten _[meow] 10:36, 1 September 2025 (UTC) Reply
• That it can be reversed if the vanishing should not have happened in the first place. Also, given renames are logged, can that be used to resolve the issues at Commons? Leaderboard (talk) 11:43, 1 September 2025 (UTC) Reply

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