Hello all,

As you are aware, the German community has voted in favor of a blackout of German Wikipedia. The blackout is set to take place on March 21st. We have been working closely with the German community to develop a strategy to best support the implementation of this decision. We are currently fine-tuning the text and design for the blackout to ensure the messaging is clear and accurate.

A number of other communities are in active discussions some of which appear to be expressing consensus in favor of a banner, a blackout, or a combination of the two. We want to ensure materials including, banners and blackouts are easily accessible and adaptable for use on all languages in the com

Those materials we are preparing will be ready in the next few days, but we’d like to take this opportunity to contextualize them by outlining our approach. Our materials aim to do the following:

- Avoid invoking party politics. - We want the campaign to be clearly and unequivocally about the Directive text, not about particular parties or candidates. We will also avoid linking to any campaigns that encourage the support or opposition of specific candidates

- Focus on the issues. - We will hone in on the particular articles in the Directive that are causing problems with the text, specifically Articles 11 and 13.

- Contain our own neutral material. We believe it's imperative to have airtight arguments and intentional framing. While other sites have great initiatives underway, we cannot ensure that external content will remain consistent with our message.

- Have a uniform call to action. Where we link to content, we will link to fixcopyright.wikimedia.org, which will when updated direct users to contact their MEPs through the European Parliament's website, We believe concerted action will have more effect than disperse, uncoordinated action between communities.

- Communicate in a concise, direct and factual style, so as to avoid confusing our message.

Please distribute this message to your communities as you see fit. We would like the communities voting in favor of an action to know that we are working on the tools and messaging to support their decision.

Feel free to contact myself if you have any questions about the implementation of on wiki community actions.

Many thanks!

Seddon