<
https://boingboing.net/2026/01/27/wikiflix-is-like-netflix-for-public-domain-films-with-no-ads-no-logins-and-no-data-harvesting.html>
"What if Netflix only carried movies from the first half of the 20th century,
charged nothing, and didn't track your every click? That's WikiFlix, a project
from Wikipedia's volunteer community that streams over 4,000 public domain
films through a slick, modern interface.
The catalog pulls from Wikimedia Commons, the Internet Archive, and YouTube.
You'll find 1922's
Nosferatu, 1927's
Metropolis, and 1946's
It's A
Wonderful Life alongside live-action films from India, Japan, Portugal, and
Spain, plus Soviet-era animation. The database updates hourly from Wikidata, so
the collection keeps growing as more films fall out of copyright.
The interface looks like a modern streaming service, but without the dark
patterns. No algorithms pushing content. No surveillance tracking. No ads.
Since all the films are in the public domain, WikiFlix can run without logins,
fees, or data harvesting. The same volunteers who build Wikipedia maintain it,
and the project lives on Wikimedia's Toolforge infrastructure.
The community maintains a blacklist to filter out historical propaganda films —
"perfectly fine in an educational context," they note, but WikiFlix is focused
on entertainment. The only limit on what can be added is U.S. copyright law.
Any film that is in the public domain and has fallen out of copyright can be
hosted without consulting or obtaining rights from anyone."
https://wikiflix.toolforge.org/
Via Joyce Donahue.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
