Access to knowledge is political

Why don’t birds fall from trees when they sleep? What do Germans vote for with their first and second vote? And why do we like to kiss? These and other questions from the natural sciences, from history, politics and philosophy are answered by programs such as Terra X, Planet Wissen and tagesschau. We co-finance all these information and knowledge programs through our license fee. Nevertheless, much of the content is not available to us for free re-use, distribution and editing, because broadcasters generally do not want to use free licenses such as Creative Commons.

In 2023, the shift towards free licenses in broadcasters and editorial offices is more apparent than usual. Behind this is a lot of persuasive work, which Wikimedia Deutschland has been doing together with the wiki community as part of the “Public Money – Public Good!” program, since 2018. At an annual round table, we bring together representatives from broadcasters, educational institutions, trade unions, politicians and journalists’ associations as well as from the Wikipedia community. Here, too, the aim was to reduce reservations about free licenses – such as the fear of losing control by releasing content for re-use. And it works. The broadcasters are increasingly seeing that the released content is actually being re-used. The 400 or so Terra X videos alone that also feature in many Wikipedia articles have been viewed almost 100 million times since they were made freely available.

In addition to the round table, there were also several Wikipedia workshops at the broadcasters in 2023. Editorial staff were able to clarify questions about CC licenses with people actively involved in Wikipedia, learn how to use Wikimedia projects and, for example, how to add media content to Wikimedia Commons.

5,762 advocacy groups were registered in the lobby register of the German Bundestag on 22 March 2023. Wikimedia Deutschland is one of them. The interests we represent? Those of people who value free access to knowledge and data is important, who believe that strengthening digital education is relevant and who are in favor of using free and open software. However, we are seeing that economic interests dominate political negotiation processes. This is hardly surprising, as over 40% of the organizations and individuals in the lobby register are representatives of the business community, whereas civil society perspectives and interests miss out.

In 2023, we actively tackled this deficit at a European and international level. We have brought together the voices of various dedicated civil society actors and organizations to incorporate them into the Global Digital Compact (GDC). With the GDC, the United Nations wants  to define global guidelines for an open, free and secure internet. Together, we analyzed the drafts and submitted recommendations to the Federal Foreign Office and the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport at the Internet Governance Forum Germany (IGF-D). At the European level, as a member of Wikimedia Europe, we again monitored and influenced the drafting of European legal proposals in 2023 where they directly affect Wikimedia projects – such as the Digital Services Act (DSA) – or affect free access to knowledge in general and freedom of expression on the internet.

Over the past year, we have seen very frequently that our arguments and expertise coupled with perseverance pay off. To give you one example: one of Wikimedia Deutschland’s political demands is that digital and education policy must be directed towards the common good. In 2023, we developed eight requirements for a digital policy geared towards the common good. Among other things, we call for the transparent disclosure of goals and the participation of different perspectives when developing a digital policy or legislation. Other goals include the protection of fundamental rights, openness in the use of results and improved access to digital services.

These requirements were the focus of a workshop on the Data Institute planned by the German government at the Digital Summit in Jena – an event where representatives of technology companies and the digital industry networked with politicians in previous years – without the participation of civil society groups. In an interactive format with participants from public administration, ministries and politics, the participants worked together on the question of how a digital policy project, in this case the planned Data Institute, can also become a project orientated towards the common good. For Aline Blankertz, Policy & Public Sector Adviser, this is an initial success. “The ministries responsible for the Data Institute, the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Economic Affairs, co-chaired the workshop, actively participated themselves and are incorporating the results into the continuing development of the Data Institute,” she reports.

It is certainly too early to speak of a new awareness in ministries and politics. But in addition to inviting us to contribute our perspective and knowledge at the Digital Summit, various ministries have actively sought out Wikimedia Deutschland’s expertise in 2023. Together with our partner organizations in the F5 alliance, we submitted a statement on the German Federal Government’s engagement strategy. The responsible department at the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth also wanted to find out more about digital volunteering: What makes it special? What forms of digital volunteering exist besides “being a Wikipedian”?

Last year, the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection invited us to provide expertise on the planned transformation of public procurement law. And what does public procurement law have to do with Wikipedia or Free Knowledge? We want to ensure that public sector contracts – for software or studies and statistics – are awarded preferentially if the results can be re-used under a free license. This also helps to ensure that more knowledge is freely available.

“We are of course pleased that more policymakers from political parties and ministries are broadening their horizons and asking for expertise from civil society. However, we are still a long way from structurally anchoring civil society involvement,” states Lilli Iliev, Head of the Policy and Public Sector team, explaining the situation in 2023.

The “National Education Platform”, now called “My Education Space”, is the German Federal Government’s largest digital education infrastructure project in recent years. It is intended to connect existing and newly emerging learning platforms and digital education programs. This would also mean that teachers and learners could easily search for and access educational materials and content that are stored in a learning management system of another federal state or institution. That is quite remarkable, considering the jungle-like federal structure of the German education system! This basic idea of a digital networking infrastructure corresponds to the idea of free access to knowledge that Wikimedia Deutschland represents.

Back in 2022, we looked at this huge project together with education and digital experts and published the critical concept study “Values and structures of the National Education Platform”.

“In 2023, we noticed from the response to our study from policymakers with a focus on education as well as researchers that many stakeholders have unanswered questions, share our criticism and would like the Ministry of Education and Research to be more open about the project and involve people with expertise as well as future users more closely,” says Heike Ekea Gleibs, Head of the Education Policy and Digital Cultural Heritage team.

Linked Open Data makes a decisive contribution to the connection of data and knowledge. Wikimedia Deutschland promotes this connection of open cultural data – and the interconnectedness of people with expertise who work with this data. Our aim is to build communities of practice. These communities include experts from cultural heritage institutions who want to open up their collections and make cultural data FAIR: findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. They include researchers in the humanities and cultural studies who are interested in this data, and volunteer experts. They can share their experiences in the communities and develop best practices to expand and maintain the Wikidata knowledge database, edit the free media archive Wikimedia Commons, or use Wikibase to create knowledge databases themselves and link them to other open data repositories.

In addition to providing advice for cultural heritage institutions and networking with experts from Wikimedia projects, Wikimedia Deutschland is also actively developing data partnerships. Researchers and institutions are supported from the initial consideration of how to model the existing cultural data through to uploading the data and documenting the project. The focus is on projects that represent marginalized positions, that want to open up and connect marginalized bodies of knowledge or critically question existing logics of knowledge production.