Wikimedia Foundation/Legal/Update to banner and logo policies

Translate this page

This page documents the Wikimedia Foundation Legal department's initiative to review and make recommendations on updates to policies and procedures governing decisions to run project banners or make temporary logo changes.

The initiative is primarily concerned with actions that commemorate, advocate for, or comment on events or positions that are “external” to the Wikimedia movement. External topics are ones that are not confined to Wikimedia projects and spaces, in contrast to “internal” topics that are specifically about the Wikimedia projects.

Examples of internal topics that may lead to a special banner or temporary logo change include project content milestones, photo contests, and community events (such as conferences and edit-a-thons). Examples of external topics include current events in the news, proposed legislation, and non-Wikimedia events and anniversaries.

Purpose and goals

This initiative seeks to establish global policies and procedures to ensure that individual projects are applying a shared movement-wide set of values, expectations, and processes when making decisions about running banners and temporarily changing logos. These policies will be informed by community practices on projects, primarily aiming to encode existing community expectations about when and how to comment on external events, and the process for doing so.

Currently, each Wikimedia project has autonomy in determining when to run banners (or other special notices and pages, including blackouts) or temporarily change logos. While this autonomy is generally valued, decisions involving Wikimedia’s shared brands have broader implications. These decisions may require documentation and potentially Wikimedia Foundation involvement.

Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia brands are a shared resource that represent our movement and values to the world. The meaning of these brands is built from the accumulation of all community (and Foundation) decisions. Decisions to associate Wikipedia with an external cause or position are particularly impactful, and affect the entirety of the Wikimedia movement. For that reason, it is crucial that these decisions are aligned with a common set of movement-wide values.

Additionally, there may be legal considerations to running banners or changing logos in order to take a position on an external topic. Under United States law, the Wikimedia Foundation has obligations to track and report activity that relates to particular legislation (“lobbying”), and is prohibited from supporting or opposing political candidates (“political campaign activity”). Therefore, it is essential to ensure that project community decisions about banners and logos do not violate these legal restrictions.

This initiative is being led by Chuck Roslof, Principal Legal Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation, with support from others in the Advancement, Communications, and Legal departments.

Timeline and overview

This initiative will have three phases:

Phase 1: December 2024 – February 2025
- Collecting examples of past community discussions about banners and logo changes (including examples when the proposed project actions were not approved)
- Community submission of examples
Phase 2: March – April 2025
- Internal review of phase 1 discovery
- Community discussion around findings and possible recommendations
Phase 3: April – July 2025
- Foundation adoption and rollout of finalized recommendations

Phase 1: Collecting precedents (Research and discovery)

In order to develop policy proposals, we need to know how communities have previously made decisions about running banners or temporarily changing project logos. There is a brief list of some significant examples on the Project-wide protests page, but having more examples, from as many different projects as possible, will improve the resulting policies. If you know of an example, please add it to the table below, mention it on the initiative's talk page, or email it to croslof wikimedia.org.

Topic (with link to discussion)	Project	Approved (locally)	Start Date	End Date
Media law in Italy	Italian Wikipedia	Yes	October 4, 2011	October 6, 2011
Copyright law in the United States (SOPA)	English Wikipedia	Yes	January 18, 2012	January 18, 2012
Internet censorship law in Russia	Russian Wikipedia	Yes	July 10, 2012	July 10, 2012
Cybercrime law in the Philippines	Tagalog Wikipedia	No
Freedom of Panorama in the European Union	Multiple Wikipedias	Yes	2015	2015
Block of Wikipedia in Turkey	Italian Wikipedia	Yes	May 1, 2017	May 31, 2017
Copyright law in Australia	English Wikipedia	Yes	May 22, 2017	June 19, 2017
Upload filter campaign: Thanks, but no thanks	German Wikipedia	No	May 2, 2018	May 4, 2018
Copyright in the European Union 1	Multiple Wikipedias	Yes	June 29, 2018	July 4, 2018
European Election	Multiple Wikipedias	Yes	May 23, 2019	May 26, 2019
Copyright in the European Union 2	Multiple Wikipedias	Yes	March 21, 2019	March 25, 2019
Public money, public good	German Wikipedia	No	April 20, 2020	April 30, 2020
Black Lives Matter	English Wikipedia	No	June 2020
Russian invasion of Ukraine	Ukrainian Wikipedia	Yes	2022	ongoing
Russian invasion of Ukraine	Georgian Wikipedia	Yes	March 6, 2022	???
Israel–Hamas war	Arabic Wikipedia	Yes	December 23, 2023	January 19, 2025
Defamation law in Ukraine	Ukrainian Wikipedia	Yes	October 1, 2012	October 2, 2012
Anti-protest laws in Ukraine	Ukrainian Wikipedia	Yes	January 21, 2014	January 21, 2014
Russian invasion of Ukraine	Ukrainian Wikisource	Yes	March 2, 2022	???
Detention of Bassel Khartabil	Multiple Wikipedias	No

Relevant existing policies and procedures

The policies and procedures listed below are relevant to this initiative. Not all of them will necessarily require updates, and new policies may need to be written, but they provide an outline of the existing structures and guidelines.