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)