madisen

Wikimedia’s contribution to a free and healthy Internet is not limited to its knowledge output — it also counts as a civic, democratic space.

How can people trust apps and interactions they don’t quite understand? Trust is not the value implied here, but faith. And our faith in the organisations owning and managing these technologies dips a little bit every time we hear of the next cyber hack or when datasets are exploited, with little accountability and integrity in action.

Stewards of the information commons – and in particular organizations manag -ing open licensing frameworks and content-sharing platforms – are among those stakeholders who should face the challenge of mitigating risks and harms associ -ated with and caused by the open sharing of content as an information commons. These stakeholders need to... See more

openness is about more than access to and use of assets. It is about how we build and maintain our communities. The second challenge, then, and one that is just as important, is to re-examine how we create a community in the digital world .

Why do we care about openness? The reasons I hear given for being open can be grouped into three categories:

• openness and transparency support accountability – it enables us to delve inside the workings of an organisation or a piece of code to understand it better, detect where things are going wrong, and do something about it;


• openness removes

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the Wikimedia Enterprise initiative, which launched in 2021. It offers paid, enterprise-grade APIs suitable for building commercial solutions on top of Wikipedia content. And Google is one of its first customers (the second is the Internet Archive).

A lot of what’s built the World Wide Web in the open information infrastructure that we understand is just actually embedded in a few laws that basically make it so it can be user originated content that can be then hosted on other companies’ websites without having them have liability. As long as, “Hey, we’re in copyright infringement,” if they... See more

What is at stake is the design of a new content production and distribution ecosystem that will shape the entire digital environment and our societies. As has been the case in the past, a strong actor committed to the values of openness and free knowledge has a chance to tip the balance away from closed ecosystems controlled by commercial... See more