Public policy affects free knowledge on Wikimedia and beyond

To write and edit a Wikipedia article, Wikipedians need privacy and anonymity to speak their mind so that they can feel safe writing about possibly controversial topics and telling the facts. They need to find public domain or freely licensed media to illustrate articles without the fear of violating copyright. They need fast and affordable access to Wikipedia so that they can spend time improving articles. They need assurance that their Wikipedia community of editors will have full editorial control without interference from the Wikimedia Foundation. To accomplish that, they need the Wikimedia Foundation to remain a neutral host that cannot be forced to delete or alter what people write by governments or other third parties.

For an article to be freely shared all over the world, Wikipedia readers need to have fast and reliable access to all of Wikipedia. This means that Wikipedia articles should never be censored by internet service providers. The Wikimedia Foundation should also be able to challenge takedown requests by third parties. And Wikipedia readers need to have privacy when reading Wikipedia articles, so that they can feel safe to feed their intellectual curiosity.  

Once a Wikipedia article becomes available online, it can be made richer by others' contributions and reuses. Free licenses allow others to build on existing articles where copyright law would not normally allow it. For example, free content like Wikipedia articles can be translated into new languages, shared, and reused by anyone far beyond the Wikimedia projects, without restrictive limitations.

Wikipedia is never finished. To reach our goal of collecting the sum of all knowledge, Wikipedians must be an inclusive and diverse community. Diversity in this community requires unfettered access to Wikipedia, in all countries around the globe. Although many people have access to the Wikimedia projects, there are many more who are still not able to join our projects today. We need to break down barriers to accessing and creating knowledge.

Access to reliable sources is critical to documenting and sharing knowledge. When researching for a Wikipedia article, Wikipedians need access to books, articles, and other resources. They also need uncensored and reliable information to write a neutral Wikipedia article. If researching online, Wikipedians' reading habits need to be private, so that they can research without the fear that their browsing history will later be misinterpreted or used against them.