Wikipedia Just Got SLAPPed

Wikipedia just took a hit in Portugal, and not the “someone vandalised the page on cheese to say it smells of feet” kind.

A Portuguese court ordered the platform to delete content from a businessman’s page and hand over the personal data of the volunteer editors who dared to type it. The Wikimedia Foundation complied. For the first time in Europe, the open encyclopaedia of the internet has been forced to betray its own contributors.

Cue the question: is this the beginning of the end for Wikipedia as we know it?

From SLAPP to Collapse

This wasn’t just a lawsuit, it was a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation). Translation: “I don’t like what you wrote, so I’ll bury you in legal fees until you stop.” And it worked!

The precedent is clear: anonymity on Wikipedia isn’t sacred anymore. Your edits about “Notable Portuguese businessmen” could one day earn you a subpoena. The world’s biggest collective knowledge project just blinked, and the EU now has a roadmap for how to strong-arm the open web.

The Death of Anonymity (or, VPN Sales About to Go Parabolic)

The internet once promised a mask. You could be a quiet civil servant by day, and by night a chaotic agent of dissent in Second Life, role-playing as a six-foot rabbit preaching about starting a digital cult.

Now? The mask is slipping. Governments and courts are treating your online behaviour with the same scrutiny as your bank account. VPNs aren’t just about streaming The Office from another region anymore, they’re fast becoming the entry-level dark web. Today you’re browsing incognito, tomorrow you’re comparing deepfake memes with strangers in neon-lit chatrooms.

What Comes Next

• Wikipedia editors silenced - fewer people willing to contribute.

• SLAPP suits emboldened - wealthy individuals can rewrite their own history.

• Governments watching - every post, comment, and emoji potentially part of your permanent record.

It’s 1984 meets Minecraft, except instead of building utopias, we’re dismantling the foundations of free knowledge one court order at a time.

Wikipedia just got SLAPPed, and in the EU at least, it may not get back up. The bigger question is what happens when the next layer of anonymity, VPNs, private browsers, encrypted chats, gets peeled away. Will we all be forced into a sanitised, state-approved internet where every edit or meme is filed in triplicate?

Remember when we all mocked China for their draconian “cyber security” laws? yeah can’t do that anymore.

Just as the was the case with the Berlin wall, the great EU firewall might just pop up overnight, fencing us off from our favourite place that now resides in the forbidden zone.