The Internet Still Works: Wikipedia Defends Its Editors

Section 230 helps make it possible for online communities to host user speech: from restaurant reviews, to fan fiction, to collaborative encyclopedias. But recent debates about the law often overlook how it works in practice. To mark its 30th anniversary, EFF is interviewing leaders of online platforms about how they handle complaints, moderate content, and protect their users’ ability to speak and share information. 

A decade ago, Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, received 304 requests to alter or remove content over a two-year period, not including copyright complaints. In 2024 alone, it received 664 such takedown requests. Only four were granted. As complaints over user speech have grown, Wikimedia has expanded its legal team to defend the volunteer editors who write and maintain the encyclopedia. 

Jacob Rogers is Associate General Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation. He leads the team that deals with legal complaints against Wikimedia content and its editors. Rogers also works to preserve the legal protections, including Section 230, that make a community-governed encyclopedia possible. 

Joe Mullin: What kind of content do you think would be most in danger if Section 230 was weakened? 

Jacob Rogers: When you're writing about a living person, if you get it wrong and it hurts their reputation, they will have a legal claim. So that is always a concentrated area of risk. It’s good to be careful, but  I think if there was a looser liability regime, people could get to be too careful—so careful they couldn’t write important public information. 

Current events and political history would also be in danger. Writing about images of Muhammad has been a flashpoint in different countries, because depictions are religiously sensitive and controversial in some contexts. There are different approaches to this in different languages. You might not think that writing about the history of art in your country 500 years ago would get you into trouble—but it could, if you’re in a particular country, and it’s a flash point. 

Writing about history and culture matters to people. And it can matter to governments, to religions, to movements, in a way that can cause people problems. That’s part of why protecting pseudonymity and their ability to work on these topics is so important. 

If you had to describe to a Wikipedia user what Section 230 does, how would you explain it to them? 

If there was nothing—no legal protection at all—I think we would not be able to run the website. There would be too many legal claims, and the potential damages of those claims could bankrupt the company. 

Section 230 protects the Wikimedia Foundation, and it allows us to defer to community editorial processes. We can let the user community make those editorial decisions, and figure things out as a group—like how to write biographies of living persons, and what sources are reliable. Wikipedia wouldn’t work if it had centralized decision making. 

What does a typical complaint look like, and how does the complaint process look? 

In some cases, someone is accused of a serious crime and there’s a debate about the sources. People accused of certain types of wrongdoing, or scams. There are debates about peoples’ politics, where someone is accused of being “far-right” or “far-left.” 

The first step is community dispute resolution. On the top page of every article on Wikipedia there’s a button at the top that translates to “talk.” If you click it, that gives you space to discuss how to write the article. When editors get into a fight about what to write, they should stop and discuss it with each other first. 

If page editors can’t resolve a dispute, third-party editors can come in, or ask for a broader discussion. If that doesn’t work, or there’s harassment, we have Wikipedia volunteer administrators, elected by their communities, who can intervene. They can ban people temporarily, to cool off. When necessary, they can ban users permanently. In serious cases, arbitration committees make final decisions. 

And these community dispute processes we’ve discussed are run by volunteers, no Wikimedia Foundation employees are involved? Where does Section 230 come into play?

That’s right. Section 230 helps us, because it lets disputes go through that community process. Sometimes someone’s edits get reversed, and they write an angry letter to the legal department. If we were liable for that, we would have the risk of expensive litigation every time so