I am a Wikipedian, a contributor of free content to Wikipedia. (I contribute in Chinese, in German, and in some other languages too.) I read the Wikimedia Foundation blog kindly submitted here by an early Wikipedian and read all the comments here posted before mine before writing this reply. In the last two weeks, I've renewed acquaintance with quite a few local Wikipedians at two Wikipedia Edit-a-Thons that occurred in my town.

I see the Wikimedia Foundation has a rationale for its suit based partly on United States law. It writes, "Our aim in filing this suit is to end this mass surveillance program in order to protect the rights of our users around the world." Because I edit Wikipedia in languages other than English, crucially including Chinese, I am painfully aware that there are a lot of restrictions of the rights of users of Wikipedia all over the world, evidently some of them not within the reach of the United States legal system. There seems to be no prospect, for example, of the Wikimedia Foundation suing the Russian or Chinese central governments (not even to mention north Korea's regime or the ISIS self-styled regime) to protect the rights of users of Wikipedia. That's too bad. If the NSA surveillance programs ceased later today, there would still be a lot of places around the world where Wikipedia would be inaccessible or Wikipedia users would be harassed by agents of other governments.