Dear free knowledge supporters,
We have exciting news. Today, the Wikimedia Foundation, in partnership with Wikimedia UK, issued an open letter calling on the UK Government to exempt Wikipedia and other public interest projects from the Online Safety Bill (UK OSB).
We would be grateful if you could help us spread the word with your channels by using these resources: * Open letter [1] * Social media toolkit [2] * Blog post to learn more [3]
More about the UK Online Safety Bill: The UK Online Safety Bill, as it’s currently drafted, would require significant changes to how Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects operate. Last month, we shared details of the threats in this blog post [4] and have written in the past about our broader UK OSB concerns [5].
In December 2022, Wikimedia UK and the Wikimedia Foundation began outreach to British regulators to educate them on how our projects work and how the Online Safety Bill would threaten them. Over the last several months, we ramped up our advocacy efforts as the bill was debated in the House of Lords. We successfully convinced key Lords and Baronesses to support our proposed amendments and built public and media attention, but the UK Government has resisted making the necessary changes.
Our best chance of protecting Wikipedia is to persuade the UK Government to exempt public interest projects from the OSB, so we’ve written this open letter and formed a coalition of signatories. The list is a testament to the network of allies that WMUK has established over years of promoting free knowledge in the UK. If the government fails to act, our last chance to push this exemption to protect Wikipedia is with Parliament during the Bill’s “Report Stage” voting, starting on 6 July.
Please consider using the social media toolkit to spread the word with your channels about our open letter.
If you have questions or thoughts, respond to this email!
@Lucy, please hop in if there's something I've missed or something you would like to share from WMUK's perspective.
In solidarity, Ziski
---- [1] https://wikimedia.org.uk/2023/06/online-safety-bill-open-letter/ [2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kTQSQU8VPhq-_AHg95ZYcL19Vdqrqf1m2U5X7Q0_... [3] https://medium.com/freely-sharing-the-sum-of-all-knowledge/protect-the-futur... [4] https://diff.wikimedia.org/2023/05/11/good-intentions-bad-effects-wikimedia-... [5] https://medium.com/wikimedia-policy/deep-dive-the-united-kingdoms-online-saf...