Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia
medium.com
medium.com
- Fired one of the original developers of MediaWiki (the open source project that powers wikipedia) - Brooke. This person was at one point in contention to basically be BDFL of MediaWiki. She is somewhat less publicly prominent now compared to back in the day, but to a lot of oldhands this is shocking.
- Laid off community tech team. This is a team that basically did development work by popular demand (literally people voted to decide on what they would work on). In many ways the existence of this team was a band-aid on the problem that many Wikipedians felt WMF was not being responsive to their needs or working on things that were important. The team was extremely popular, and disbanding it felt like a middle finger to many. In particular to many people (including me) it seems extremely cold to lay people off during a reorg instead of reassigning them.
On top of that both were involved with unionization activities, which further fueled concerns that this might be some sort of retalitory step.
The onwiki discussions are at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#W...
Reaching the metastatic end stage of all organizations where the org exists for no purpose beyond continued existence of the org.
The reason why is because the laid off team maintained the Community Wishlist, the main way for editors to feature request for "professional" solutions.
The Wikimedia Foundation also deweighted popularity as a metric for tackling feature requests on the Community Wishlist. This pisses off enwiki as the largest editor base.
From the WMF's perspective, though, enwiki is a cash cow on the BCG matrix.[1] It has been in seemingly terminal decline for over a decade[2], accelerated by LLMs, yet still drives the majority of donations/clicks.
As a result, WMF prioritizes investing in emerging markets over enwiki. This means outreach to indigenous languages in the Global South and developing supporting infrastructure. e.g. "Abstract Wikipedia" which aims to use a language-neutral syntax that can be automatically translated into any language.
These currently form a tiny segment of the editor population but have much larger potential TAM and are growing. So it's the correct strategy even if it pisses off editors.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth%E2%80%93share_matrix
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_is_Wikipedia_los...
Perhaps because their message to new contributors is a consistent "stop trying to make corrections, and go away"?
There isn't enough work anymore in a monopolized but declining market. A shrinking pie forces cliquey political slugfests. It happened to IBM and can happen to StackOverflow/Wikipedia.
I hate it now. There's so much doxxing and meanness. There's also sizable contingents of propagandists in anything controversial. Most famously, pro-Israel Icewhiz, who creates hundreds of sockpuppets and harassed people IRL, but now more recently r/Palestine's sock farm. There's similar farms in trans issues or India-Pakistan.
The saddest part is that Wikipedia's original purpose was unbiased copyleft-style free knowledge.
LLMs have the potential to democratize access to knowledge more than any other technology. But they are an existential threat to editors that previously did this deep research manually and served as gatekeepers with the attendant social status.
As a result, there's a vitriolic hatred of any attempt to integrate LLMs into Wikipedia. Even if it's open-weights stuff running locally.
So, Google will continue to eat Wikipedia alive with AI summaries.
I hope Wikipedia is replaced by something AI-native run by a non-profit that has the interests of readers at heart.
What's the relevance? Wikipedia contributors aren't employed by Wikipedia. Their work is volunteered, and nobody asks them to do it.
A lot of people do ask them not to do it.
Yet, there's tons of people that love having control over articles and what people see. I was one of them.
It's exciting seeing news outlets quote your arguments in an onwiki dispute, or paraphrase an article that you wrote. Or having millions of people look at an article. It's much easier than starting a blog.
"notability" means there are peer-reviewed/editorially controlled articles on the topic.
So, if I wanted to write an article on Gas Town, I couldn't. It got a lot of technical blogs and Arxiv preprints written about it by experts, but it won't be notable.
There has to be some mechanism of determining what should and shouldn't be usable as a source.
Ideological purity is enforced by the reliable source standard, not the notability standard. The Daily Stormer is unquestionably notable. And it has a wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Stormer
> I think the notability standard is way too strict and gives way too much weight to main stream media sources as the blessed arbiters of what is notable.
They're saying that main stream media sources are what can be used to define something is notable or not. The question isn't "Is the Daily Stormer" notable (it is), it's should the daily stormer be usable as a source to determine if something is notable or not (it shouldn't be, obviously).
My most recent edit (a minor addition to a technical article) was instantaneously reverted as "suspected vandalism" by a bot, an unambiguous false positive. The bot seemed to think I was going to follow its instructions if I thought it was a false positive instead of finding that irritating and concluding that I should stop making edits if having them actually go through requires me to fight with a broken AI.
By the way, the bot will only revert an edit once, so you can undo that revert and the edit goes back in (at least until a human editor decides it should be reverted). The bot has available to it not just the change text and its placement in the existing article text, but also meta information such as the editor's account information (and I believe logged-out edits happen to get dinged more often simply because those are the major source of vandalizing edits).
To be fair I try to stay away from pop culture and politically sensitive topics.
this is extremely reminiscent of the stackexchange situation
I'd disagree that there is a causal relationship here. I think most of the outreach to indigneous languages has more to do with politics and ideology than anything else (Wikimedia sees itself as a global movement to collect all knowladge. Can't exactly claim that if its all english).
As for abstract wikipedia. I think that is more a moonshot project driven by people wanting to make the next wikidata. I suspect a major part of support for it is that they can use alternative sources of funding for it (grants).
However sceptical of "AI" you are, "give me the information on this page in my preferred language" is the kind of task they excel at. (I won't use the word translate). It wouldn't even require prioritising the English Wikipedia: any agent today could one shot a task like "check the Wikipedia pages in all languages for X, summarize the results and note any disagreements between them".
Personally i think its a bit of a wild bet, that seems especially surprising in the modern context. Guess we'll have to see if it pans out.
> give me the information on this page in my preferred language
At a minimum, it provides more material to train an LLM on.
But it is a great idea for indigenous languages that aren't in the training data but many people speak, which was the original purpose.
I am hopeful that it'll create synthetic training data for those groups.
...So long as you don't mind it introducing random hallucinations into the information.
Except for the 90% or more of the world's 7000-ish languages which have barely any data online.
E.g. the huge CommonCrawl corpus has stats https://commoncrawl.github.io/cc-crawl-statistics/plots/lang... for only 160 languages. English takes up nearly half the corpus, and after the top 16 or so all languages have <1% of the corpus, over half of those 160 have <0.1% and the other 6000+ languages are distributed amongst the <unknown> category. The long tail is very long.
(You'll see people use the term "low-resource language" and then talk about Finnish or Macedonian – if you're not a linguist and you've heard of the language, it's most likely not low-resource ;-))
For what simple HTML you see on the surface, you would be absolutely shocked to see how many hundreds of thousands of hours are spent to create an encyclopedia that, to be honest, is about as unbiased, astroturf-free, and low barrier of entry as you can get. It's not built with crappy automation but instead hand crafted with love and respect. I would bet my salary on Wikipedia turning to shit within a year if the editors who signed the Editor Strike[0] leave en masse.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Workers_United_...
For those not in the loop, AE is the main mechanism to enforce civility and neutrality in contentious areas (obvious stuff like Israel-Palestine, American Politics, but also India-Pakistan, casteism, etc etc). It removes editors that are obviously only on the site to astroturf a specific belief relating to a globally controversial topic.
This requires painstaking review of one's conduct and is the main reason Wikipedia is not astroturfed in the same way Reddit or other discussion forums are.
If the strike goes forward, Wikipedia will have a massive realignment towards whatever political groups can amass the most accounts agreeing with them.
Grokipedia would unironically become more neutral in a year.
This is incorrect.
Shills do well when they contribute outside of the topic area, memorize wiki-law, and only coordinate to !vote in contentious high-impact discussions. e.g. requested moves, reliable sources noticeboard discussions, and RfCs. They are seen as "normal" Wikipedia editors.
Professionally organized shills are unable to do this since they must ensure most of their time is "on-task" meeting a comment/karma/etc qutoa and find it difficult to justify doing non-shilling work. This works well on sites like Reddit or HackerNews. It does not work on Wikipedia.
For starters, discussion outcomes are moderated and closers do not count votes. Closers look at your history and assign lower weight to editors that appear only to be interested in a particular area.
Other mechanisms include a 500 edit minimum for certain areas + a "balanced editing restriction" (maintained by Tamzin, the same person starting the strike) which tracks %age of edits by subject area and can impose a maximum of 30% in the contentious subject.
Trying to skate under these bare minimums is similar to avoiding money-laundering by making many cash deposits of $9999. You'll be taken to Arbitration Enforcement and look even more suspicious.
You need someone who'll can non-professionally shoot-the-shit at random hours to maintain the cover story despite it not being a clear requirement.
Currently, the best shill-farm is run by the /r/Palestine subreddit. If you join their Discord, you can participate yourself! https://discord.com/invite/hhsG4QTf9n
Essentially, you're given free rein to edit as you see fit with an encouragement to make many uncontroversial edits & befriend normal editors. You do not know who else is part of the project and do not interact with them on Discord. It is very antisocial in that sense.
You are only "activated" by the Discord mod through direct messages to !vote in high-impact RfCs/discussions, e.g. officially recognizing the Gaza Genocide.
This avoids creating a clear paper trail of collusion and means it's difficult for someone to infiltrate/burn the network. It's also incompatible with the micromanagement typical of traditional influence operations.
It's been going on for a few years now as a continuation of other farms. It's one of the main reasons there's been such a slant towards Palestine onwiki lately.
Yes, it's been reported many times by many people. It is an open secret at this point and Arbitration has failed at actioning this.
So far, the only people who have been banned were the ones dumb enough to re-use the same username on Discord as Wikipedia, so now you get a warning not to do that during onboarding. Otherwise, it's too difficult to prove participation.
you mean the best one that you know of
The pro-Israel ones have been around for decades. Icewhiz, NoCal100, etc. They are easy to spot because they are tightly regimented and run a volume game of many accounts. They are obviously billing by the hour to a nation-state level actor that is not demanding a clear ROI on their investment and is instead using shitty KPIs.
There are also commercial sock farms. They are easy to spot because their income is "clients that want Wikipedia articles and don't qualify for one". Any account who spends all their time writing articles on small market cap companies without news coverage is a paid shill.
They are meaningless to target because Wikipedia has a bureaucratic process called "Articles for Creation" where these shills can submit the same crap endlessly for years and bill the client for time spent without impacting the encyclopedia.
Haha, it'd be funny if they sabotaged themselves with red tape around hours billing. I could see it happening - sometimes. But not generally. I assume professional manipulators understand that gaining trust in the Wikipedia bureaucracy is part of the job.
I have a low opinion of spy agencies - but not THAT low. I have an even lower opinion of open Reddit communities ability to get anything done.
On Wikipedia, the possibly Israeli intelligence operative known as "Icewhiz" spent years cultivating an account known as "Eostrix" that operated entirely out of Israel-Palestine. They were one day from passing their admin election* before getting banned. A member of the committee that oversees allegations of misconduct against admins analyzed patterns in Eostrix's writing/behaviour to discover the ruse.
This was presented to the committee and resulted in a ban of Eostrix.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration_Com...
If this were a Reddit, Discord, or even a government employee, banning Eostrix would've been a discretionary act of the top moderator/manager, who would've also been the person to have vetted Eostrix.
This is embarrassing and creates an incentive to cover up the scandal. In real life, Aldrich Ames was able to spend years avoiding scrutiny from the CIA because the CIA's management didn't follow-up on reports he was suspicious.
But because the committee is a group ultimately elected by the community, the individual incentive is to take action against, because any member of the committee could betray a cover-up and fuck over everyone else. If ArbCom did not take action, the information that they ignored a serious report would become public and lead to an even bigger scandal.
This is the same reason why even weak democracies are harder to emplace spies into than strong authoritarian regimes.
*technically not an election but they were almost guaranteed a win by that point
Genuine question - where does the line between “group of people who are interested in a topic” and “shilling” lie? I don’t envy the arbitration group for having to try answer that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Canvassing
Generally, it is unacceptable to notify people of a structured discussion in a non-neutral manner to get them to advocate a specific point of view in that discussion.
This can be applicable to notifying specific groups of people if only groups likely to have a specific viewpoint were notified.
It's also generally considered worse to give these notifications secretly or off of Wikipedia.
In this case, it would be acceptable to notify a project related to Israel and a project related to Palestine of discussions related to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
But its not acceptable to only notify the project related to Palestine.
It's also not acceptable to instruct people in your notification to vote in a certain way. r/Palestine giving these instructions is a big problem.
The fact it's "secret" and offsite also plays a role. Collaboration on Wikipedia itself shows you didn't have malicious intent, so unintentional violations usually result in warnings the first few times it happens. The fact you need to join a Discord server hidden from others is a clear signal to any reasonable person that the group is against the rules.
The line is clear and the arbitration group has banned some participants, the challenge is detecting who participated.
The phenomenon you are referring to usually happens in areas where there is ideological or political friction. Sure, some articles can be biased, because staying perfectly factual in the middle of an active political debate or social change is difficult for most people. But in that case, there is still the option to edit the page or start a discussion.
If something is created by a community and editable by anyone, then yes, you can safely assume that certain topics will not be perfectly unbiased. But the fact that you can see the sources, edit history, and discussions that led to a given decision is already a major advantage.
Personally, I do not know a better alternative. I have a friend who told me Wikipedia is biased, so he refuses to use it. When I asked him what he uses instead, he said, completely seriously, “X is my main source of information.”
Honestly, I think on any politicised topic, that’s a waste of time - there’s a large contingent of Wikipedia editors with a shared deeply ingrained perspective that will reliably back each other up. There are better uses of one’s time than fighting such a losing battle.
> Personally, I do not know a better alternative. I have a friend who told me Wikipedia is biased, so he refuses to use it. When I asked him what he uses instead, he said, completely seriously, “X is my main source of information.”
I tend to use AI to surface sources and concepts, and then go read the sources for myself to verify the AI’s claims. AI has a strong tendency to e.g. misrepresent what journal articles say, but (if they are open access or otherwise available-and they generally are if an AI is citing them) you can then read them yourself and make up your own mind.
AI has genuinely taught me things I didn’t know before about topics of interest to me-e.g. Islamic history-but I’m careful to verify its claims with reliable sources rather than just trusting them-which of course one should do with Wikipedia too
I guess that was a few years ago? Because now he also has Grokipedia ("from the guy that brought you X")...
I haven't paid that much attention to it, to be honest.
> Musk is positioning Grokipedia as an alternative to Wikipedia, which he called "Wokepedia" in an X post last December.
> Grokipedia also says Wikipedia is the subject of "persistent criticisms regarding factual reliability, susceptibility to vandalism and hoaxes, and systemic ideological biases — particularly a left-leaning slant in coverage of political figures and topics.
...which is consistent with what the right side of the US political spectrum keeps saying about media outlets that dare to disagree with them.
This is true of good articles, but the overwhelming majority of Wikipedia tends to lack citations or, worse, cites sources that don't actually support the stated facts.
If an account in good standing adds a cited sentence the likelihood that anyone will actually go and check the source to confirm it supports the sentence is low. It's more likely that the edit will be reverted for other reasons.
Citogenesis is also a real problem, and wildly under-documented.
And most people who read Wikipedia do not take the time to examine all of the sources (if they're even able to - just cite a book if you want to make something up), read through the edit history, and get up to speed on the article-specific politics playing out on the talk page.
Still, it's better than everything else out there.
For a long time, traditional encyclopedias had a much better track record on topics related to politics and society, simply because their editor selection process largely eliminated single-issue crusading. You wouldn't be picked to lead a particular domain unless your academic track record made it clear that you're level-headed.
But I think that AI, just like your X friend anecdote, actually illustrates an interesting point: most of the time, when we consult some sort of an online reference, we're not doing anything important, so the accuracy is not critical. Quite often, we're just trying to validate our beliefs or win online arguments. An LLM that's 90% accurate but sounds 120% authoritative (and almost always willing to support your priors) is perfect for that.
That's a bit debatable. Traditional encyclopedias also had articles that were far from perfect, some of which had biases (not to mention there wasn't just one traditional encyclopedia. Different ones were of different quality). I think more research would be needed to figure out which is better.
Like WW2-era articles backed by books wtitten in 2003 from an obscure author. And only this author.
It’s their official policy.
As long as it's reasonably decent, the AI can't go full biased without consequences, but once it's gone there's nowhere normal people can easily to go and get a good enough sanity check.
I personally don't know if the world is on some sort of precipice. It seems like that's possibly the case. The strongest piece of evidence is that many of the rich and powerful, including those big tech leaders, are behaving like it is and that they think they're close to some sort of victory.
Other end is concentrated power (via money, violence, manipulation,...) so something like a dollar per universal vote.
Other end is one vote for each, including the future generations.
Wikipedia is an obstacle for the first one that must be taken down. Perhaps one of the last barriers before the endgame.
And there's no fuzzy middle option, we've (me included) have thought in our comfort for too long that us vs. them scenario that both the left and the right (at least mainstream ones) is possible. But it's now clear that there's no lukewarm at-right or green social democrat version. Only full fascism or full democracy.
We might still have the time but one by one the platforms that would enable this (wiki included) keep being ingested thus making it less and less likely.
But like you said five years ago this level of consciousness would have been out of the question for us both so perhaps there are more of us?
What’s novel isn’t that powerful people are trying to shape the perception of reality, it’s that who is powerful and what makes them powerful may be rapidly changing. I think it’s something that our “big tech leaders” are primarily concerned with, over everything else. Fundamentally evil, imo.
That said it's still the best we have for most things.
That is not the case, sorry. Pre-2015 Wikipedia was as honest and unbiased as we can get. Now the political, historical, philosophical segments of English Wikipedia is very biased and I cannot recommend or support it.
That brings to mind an interesting parallel: I spent over ~2 years actively editing Waze for multiple hours every day. I don't fly much, but I remember taking notes about changes and taking my laptop out when I had a chance (wherever I was) to correct the map to better-match reality. While I originally started because the area I edited had way too much basemap[1], I quickly realized how vigorous the editing process could be when the end goal was to provide a map of driveable roads.
In some cases, the signal-to-noise ratio was so bad that I selectively nuked large parts of whole cities just to redraw them more-correctly.
I was producing good results that unambiguously had better validity than what I started with. The flurry of activity had me rise up quickly through both the editor ranks, and also the role-rankings.
It felt good.
But eventually, I got to see my careful well-researched edits be reverted by either stupid people or stupid bots. I didn't like this; I started editing Waze to make better maps of my area so I could have better maps with which to navigate with. That was awesome, but I finished those maps. So I branched out to improve adjacent areas and finished those maps, too. That also felt awesome.
I was motivated by improvement, not by competition.
When the competition showed up to re-arrange my work in ways that didn't make sense, I dropped out of editing maps on Waze as a serious pastime. I don't want to actively compete; I just want to passively fix.
I still fix things here or there, but months (instead of hours) will go by between edits.
And that's OK, I think: It still works better than it did before I put the effort in.
[1]: Oh, right. Basemap. We don't really have a single, official, freely-usable/government-supplied road map source in the US. We instead have counties doing their things with their formats, and 50 differnt states doing whatever they do, and sometimes cities with their own ways, with only the US Census Bureau's old TIGER database covering the whole gamut.
That conglomerate dataset is a damned mess, and that damnednness of that mess varies from place to place, but that damned mess is what Waze had to work with for the initial map import.
That initial import is known as "basemap."
And TIGER is cool and all (I remember an Internet where online census-provided TIGER maps were the only online maps), but it's really geared towards census-takers. It can include every private driveway, and every cowpath -- and it can include them as regular roads. I've cleaned up thousands of square miles of basemap in my area.
But AFAIK OSM still has no mechanism that helps me get from A to B with dynamic and otherwise-unforeseeable roadway conditions. Waze still provides that, and improving the utility of a system that provides this kind of navigation aid has always been a primary motivation for working on Waze.
So my personal reward/payoff was/is high with Waze, because I could put those edits to use. It's not very good at all with OSM.
Besides. OSM seems to get bogged down in weird shit, like: Who cares how wide a public street is, in fractional meters? Maybe someone cares, but that someone isn't me: I drive a fairly large vehicle with fairly low ground clearance, but I've never had any difficulty driving it on urban roads in my neck of the woods. Those details don't matter to me.
So I'm not motivated to go out and measure these things like road width, and I'm also not motivated to provide assumed data as a presumed source of truth.
Falsification is bad. That's lies.
Superfluously-precise extrapolation is also bad. That's also lies.
I recently read an article about a notable person. The article attacked her personal appearance as having "Mar-a-Lago Face". I'm certain it was backed up with quality "sources".
The outrageous part is that description linked to a deranged multi-page article explaining what that is, written by who I assume must be the most terminally-online basement-dwelling losers on planet Earth.
So I'm going to disagree with you.
> Noem has since become one of the most prominent examples of so-called "Mar-a-Lago face", a cosmetic surgery trend among conservative women,[370][371] also known as "Republican makeup".[372]
Is [370] pushing it for a biography of a living person? Yeah, probably, especially with the "one of the most prominent" and "so-called" in there. But since "Mar-a-Lago face" has its own, cited Wikipedia entry... maybe not? It's not like Wikipedians made up the term, they're citing that _others_ use that term for her.
I'm not sure how I'd phrase it to say that she is a prominent example of the plastic surgery common to the Republican inner circle, and reference the "Mar-a-Lago Face" article, without attributing the phrase to her plastic surgery.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristi_Noem#Religion_and_publi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar-a-Lago_face
[370] https://theweek.com/health/mar-a-lago-face-the-hottest-maga-...
[371] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/20/style/kristi-noem-teeth-t...
[372] https://www.thelist.com/1796655/politicians-reporters-republ...
Unions exist to combat the monopsony power of corporations. Corporations and unions can exist in constant tension with each other because ultimately both are bound by the market of their product.
I don't think the logic holds up when you're talking about foundations or charities. I'm donating to Wikipedia because I want to advance their cause. If the unions goal is to raid donations and get an increasing share, that could potentially go bad.
Worse, the union can sometimes capture an org and begin to exert control of the mission.
Even if you're very pro-union, there is legitimate reason to be hesitant here.
There's also a death spiral problem. If donations drop and administrative costs stay the same, that charity's ratings only get worse.
There's a reason most examples of successful non-profit unions all rely on steady streams of government grant funding.
https://www.charitynavigator.org/discover-charities/best-cha...
but see also
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog/arent-the-best-charitie...
and
also, back on topic:
Executive Salaries Position Salary (Annual)
Ex-CEO (Katherine Maher) $789,495
COO (Janeen Uzzell) $503,844
CFO (Jaime Villagomez) $386,433
General Counsel (Amanda Keton) $396,514
Current Highest Salaries Position Salary (Annual)
Software Engineering Manager $164,080
Technical Program Manager $159,200
Senior Software Engineer $109,513
Product Designer $95,972
Additional Salary Insights
The median total compensation for employees at the Wikimedia Foundation is approximately $109,513.regarding WMF (and other non-profits, like Mozilla), this is a well-known phenomenon - regarding C-suite compensation (it's usually about risk aversion, and that the board or whatever foundations have, is also usually sitting on other non-profits, and rarely they optimize by moving to the cheapest place and hiring folks for much cheaper, etc)
edit: I'm asking because my 7 year stint as an engineer at Wikipedia hasn't provided me with an endless stream of lucrative job offers.
e: and to your edit, i'm talking about social/moral status
You work at google for money. Money is high status under capitalism.
You work at Wikipedia for status in the traditional sense - you trade capitalist status (the salary) for the higher actual status of working for a non profit.
Whether one thinks that improves one's status in the eyes of others imo depends on one's cynicism. "Whatever, I'm living my values, they just don't get it. Maybe others will one day."
That's how I see it for myself anyway, if I'm being honest. But in the end I don't think there's any better path to happiness and fulfillment than living my values.
Can you name me a single job where the tradeoff is "You won't get paid much because this position is so respectable"?
There are respectable jobs where you don't get paid much because the area of work simply does not generate much money (charity), or because they're being exploited and guilt tripped into working hard because of their mission (charity), and there are jobs which are respectable primarily because they pay very well...
But there are no jobs where you're "status-compensated", where you are paid less but that's okay, because the job is so respectable so it's okay to pay you less.
Why would you assume that is the unions goal? That the employees of Wikipedia will suddenly have as their purpose to raid donations from the foundation, instead of promoting the values they probably started there for?
Unions gives the employees a voice representing them, and it gives the organisation someone to talk to and negotiate with. This can be highly advantageous to the organisation as well, since when you have someone to negotiate with, and make deals with, it opens up more possibilities. In places with strong functioning unions (e.g. Scandinavia) they can often function as a moderating force, keeping salaries low when times are bad, and an pragmatic partner when things like working times needs to change.
But this isn't a Scandinavian union now, is it? It is an American union with all the problems which comes with that.
Unfortunately, with the NLRA as it currently exists, it is more or less impossible to form cross-sector unions like they have in Scandinavia. Which is why unions and industry are so hostile in the US in the first place.
If you're paying union dues, I would expect you want your union to fight to keep your job and make you more money above promoting the employer's values
The fact that they have a couple of hundred million at least is a great thing. (Firing developers isn't of course.)
The actual physical cost of hosting Wikipedia is < $5 million per year.
This is always a silly point. What do you plan to do with the servers if you don't hire people to plug them in or software engineers to maintain the software?
I think there are things to criticize WMF budget about, but the website wouldn't exist if you only paid for the web server. Legal is important. Trust and safety is important. Having people maintain the software is important. Having people on call in case the site goes down at 1am is important. Having people write new software features is important to stay relavent.
That's not to say i agree with everything WMF spends money on, but there is a lot more to running a major website then just buying a bunch of servers.
What do you mean by "trust and safety"? We're talking about a public community edited website here not a bank or a healthcare provider, I wouldn't expect there to be any PII.
How much software maintenance is really required and could that not be left largely to the community at this point? It seems like an extremely mature stack. Am I missing something obvious?
I agree that you need someone on call and I appreciate that they serve a massive amount of traffic. But then $5 million per year is a similarly massive estimate for a hosting budget.
IMO their stated mission would be better served by putting the funds towards the research and development of a more distributed and resilient system that could be hosted by community members. If they truly aim to preserve and disseminate the totality of human knowledge then they should be actively attempting to brace for both their own downfall as well as broader political instability and technological upheaval.
> Having people write new software features is important to stay relavent.
Going to have to hard disagree with that one. They aren't a startup or a for profit company they're effectively an archival service. "Staying relevant" is the last thing they should be doing IMO.
A non-zero amount.
This isn't like a huge part of their budget, but people sue wikipedia constantly. Someone has to deal with that. We're also seeing a more complicated regulatory environment with new privacy laws, new nsfw laws, new social media laws. Someone has to keep track of those developments, figure which apply, and figure out what needs to be done to comply with them.
> What do you mean by "trust and safety"? We're talking about a public community edited website here not a bank or a healthcare provider,
And what happens when someone in an edit war makes death threats to another editor. What happens when they figure out where that person lives and show up at their house? Big public communities have more Trust&safety needs not less. We want people to feel safe editing Wikipedia.
And then you also have people who are arrested for their edits to Wikipedia (e.g. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/05/eff-launches-new-offli... ). Often there is not a whole lot anyone can do about that, but having someone at WMF advocating for them where they can seems like a worthy thing to do.
Its also important to keep in mind, last year at a wikipedia event someone brought a gun and attempted to commit suicide on stage (traumatizig most of the attendees). The previous year the same event had a bomb threat. Part of trust and safety's job is to ensure proper security procedures for in person events
> I wouldn't expect there to be any PII.
People post PII to wikipedia all the time. You are right that WMF intentionally collects less than most, but people post PII to dox others all the time.
> How much software maintenance is really required and could that not be left largely to the community at this point? It seems like an extremely mature stack. Am I missing something obvious?
I'm mostly just claiming the amount is not zero. There is a lot of room to debate specifics. However stuff does pop up. Security vulns happen. Software needs to be updated to work with updates dependencies (php has been making a lot of breaking changes lately). The AI boom has made access patterns shift causing caches to be less effective then before. Sometimes servers die and you need to swap out a replacement. Etc etc. There is always something.
> IMO their stated mission would be better served by putting the funds towards the research and development of a more distributed and resilient system that could be hosted by community members. If they truly aim to preserve and disseminate the totality of human knowledge then they should be actively attempting to brace for both their own downfall as well as broader political instability and technological upheaval.
They do offer database downloads, which are mirrored extensively.
The thing with most distributed solutions is the make tradeoffs which make the product worse. Often they are rigid, and have poor latency characteristics. You could spend a lot of money trying to make a better distributed system only to get nowhere. I think most wikipedians would prefer WMF focus on lower risk ventures.
> > Having people write new software features is important to stay relavent.
> Going to have to hard disagree with that one. They aren't a startup or a for profit company they're effectively an archival service. "Staying relevant" is the last thing they should be doing IMO.
That's a debatable point, but i do think users eventually drift away if nobody fixes the bugs and frustrations they encounter. To be clear though, i dont think every software feature wmf works on is a good idea. Actually i think quite a few are stupid. But i think some are needed.
----
Anyways, my point is that all these things add up, and they are important at least to some extent. I'm sure you could dig in to these items and find parts of each that could be cut. All i want to say is they should not be eliminated entirely. I think to make fair criticisms of WMF budget people need to do the actual digging and not just say any money not spent on a server is wasted money.
So you don't know and we can assume its not relevant.
> And what happens when someone in an edit war makes death threats to another editor. What happens when they figure out where that person lives and show up at their house?
That's a matter for law enforcement and organizations shouldn't have their own badly implemented versions of it.
> Its also important to keep in mind, last year at a wikipedia event someone brought a gun and attempted to commit suicide on stage (traumatizig most of the attendees).
They don't need to be organizing events in the first place. That's already itself a completely unnecessary money sink.
> I'm mostly just claiming the amount is not zero. There is a lot of room to debate specifics. However stuff does pop up. Security vulns happen. Software needs to be updated to work with updates dependencies (php has been making a lot of breaking changes lately). The AI boom has made access patterns shift causing caches to be less effective then before. Sometimes servers die and you need to swap out a replacement. Etc etc. There is always something.
Making unauthorized requests 100% static is not rocket science. This doesn't need an ongoing tens or hundreds of millions per year.
Theoretically, yes.
Practically? Law enforcement can be ignorant, incompetent or slow as molasses, or a combination of all three of them. Besides, some places like the EU impose specific requirements on what happens with certain kinds of speech, especially anything glorifying or calling for violence, so as an organization, you have to have people and procedures to deal with it.
> They don't need to be organizing events in the first place. That's already itself a completely unnecessary money sink.
It was a core factor, other than Jimbo Wales wanting to distance himself/his company that hosted Wikipedia (Bomis) from it a bit, why Wikimedia got founded in the first place.
> Making unauthorized requests 100% static is not rocket science.
The problem is the bots are not respecting robots.txt and instead do stuff like load the source diff pages. It does not make any sense for AI training and likely pollutes the database, but unfortunately the diff pages are among the most expensive to render, the worse the older the requested diff is.
... and are we pretending that automating tasks is some strange new idea that has just appeared? Software engineers have always wanted to automate everything. The advice has been "automate it!" for the last 30, 40 years.
It is different that the steamroller is heading for our own domain this time, but really. The industry isn't doing anything new or out of character. Of course management were going to automate software engineering at the first opportunity. Any software engineer would. One of the things I've discovered since Claude crossed 1,500 on CodeArena is I don't even like writing code. Waste of time, writing good-enough code is a machines job.
Of course not. Paying people has always been undesirable for the people paying. Software has been an exceptionally cushy job for an exceptionally long time, so people are exceptionally excited to pay less.
Since the act of typing has never been the bulk of a software engineer's time -- the act of understanding has been -- the way that AI speeds up development is by allowing the shortcutting of understanding. The understanding of details is what has historically made software engineers expensive and difficult to replace. Any idiot can type fast, but typing fast doesn't someone a software engineer. The excitement is about automating the understanding of problems, because understanding is expensive.
I've been doing this for a long time, and I remembering quiting my sales job to make 50% less as a developer, but I loved the work, the growth opportunities were amazing and playing the long game worked out.
You're saying that we should have more people get paid by artificially paying less people more...
Isn't that backwards? Don't they take money that previously would be going to the CEO/C-suite; (aka profit), and give it to the union and it's members? The corporation certainly isn't sharing it with the public (aka lower prices) for the fun off it.
You end up just having to cover slackers who choose the life of working less and making less money, but at a company where others want to work harder.
Tech is an awful industry to live in. It just happens to be one of the few jobs in America that can reliably provide enough money for a decent quality of life. Whether you can actually enjoy that life is more up in the air.
When my dad worked as a butcher, he would cut himself all the time and the company was obligated to provide him mesh gloves to prevent such things, even though he was too stupid to use them.
Meanwhile in tech, we all sit in a chair 8 hours a day, something well known to cause real harms, and a creature that was never ever built to do Knowledge work is encouraged to run that system full bore for most of the day, even off hours, and when that inevitably harms you, burns you out, you get kicked to the curb.
When meat packing plants did this kind of thing 100 years ago, unionization was prominent and extremely effective at making sure my dad would be provided those gloves decades later. When unionization comes up for tech workers, a bunch of morons who are apparently incapable of reading history books insist that they negotiate better than any union could (laughable) because they make $300k a year while their employer pulls in millions a year per head.
It's truly astonishing just how little you have to trickle down to some code monkey to get them to think they are winning, and be willing to work against their own interests.
That union sure would have been helpful dealing with AI bullshit.
There's a huge difference, though, between tech jobs. Some are Jira mills, where you spend your days picking up Jira tickets, completing them, arguing about sprints and story points, soullessly going through to motions of writing software without any of the joy of writing software. Some are more joyful, where you actually take ownership of large chunks of software that people actually use. Some are further along that spectrum and you're the only person who knows how the software works and life is a continual stressful fight against stupid business decisions while keeping the plates spinning.
And as for anyone anywhere getting involved... no, not really. I would say it's harder to get a job in Big Tech than it is to get a construction job, for sure. And you're more reliably going to have a solid income as a plasterer or bricklayer than as a programmer these days.
I don't think "rich" is the correct way to describe this. It sounds like a lot of money but there are a lot of expenses and people to pay. Seventeen months sounds fragile - one long-ish recession and they're toast. I hope they survive.
In the event of a recession they could easily scale spending down to match.
This is a lie. The only way to make this true is if you don't count programmers, and managers of those programmers as part of running the website.
Regardless, even if you think its not a neccesary expenditure (obviously there is a big gap between bare minimum and healthy), its still an expenditure on hosting the site. The person i was responding to was claiming it wasnt related to the website.
I think some of yall need to think about how this would be run if it was a company. There would be thousands of employees, realistically.
Wikipedia is: mediawiki (and its development), wikimedia cloud services (which I built) that runs tools and provides services for developers (including volunteers and tool authors), server/network infrastructure, wikidata, search, etc.
Mediawiki itself is extremely complicated to build and run, and it's running for numerous languages across multiple projects (wikipedia, commons, wikidata, wiktionary, etc etc).
I'm leaving out a lot of the other things handled by the engineering teams, but it's considerably more complex than you think it is.
I highly doubt that the totality of your corporate employers output is even close to the scope and scale of wikipedia. I’m pretty sure you and I both know that if your employer was gone tomorrow, most would not notice, and only the most severely bookish scholasts (they are likely to be wikipedia editors) will be able to recall what exactly was done there 5 years after the books are closed.
Like orders of magnitude. Wikipedia gets more traffic than Amazon.
>"The encyclopedia belongs to everyone. The labor that sustains it deserves the same protection."
If Wikipedia has excess reserves, that money should be directed to a worthy cause, not just the people at its office. The labor that sustains it is made up of many more people than those who are employees; trying to milk monopoly rents out of Wikipedia will be its (long and slow) death sentence.
I don't have an opinion on how that's used in this situation FWIW, this seems like an extremely reasonable engineering team to employ for that basis.
The union’s demands are embarrassingly modest
This is what Wiki Workers United is asking for. Transparency and accountability from leadership toward both staff and movement communities. Real staff input on annual planning before decisions are finalized. An end to inconsistent hiring, firing, and promotion practices. The ability to safely dissent. Mental health support for the workers who deal with the community directly. Their organizing principle, borrowed from disability rights, is nothing about us without us.
I'm unclear why Wikimedia has brought in a wall Street finance guy as CEO, but complaining about labor while shrugging indifferently at the money people imposing a hierarchical model of control on a community-driven venture is absurd.
>After graduation, she worked on Wall Street, first at JPMorgan Chase and then Lehman Brothers. She later joined the United States Foreign Service.
Looks pretty wall street to me.
I think "Wall Street person" is a reasonable description. Perhaps "Career government person with a Wall Street background", which still doesn't give her any background to understand at a deep level what Wikipedia's editors and staff do day-to-day.
Wikipedia isn't perfect by any means and I don't read it as often as I used to, but it's still a wealth of information for a huge depth of knowledge, and gets updated regularly by people invested in the topic. So if all these info sources start collapsing when people turn to AI, at a certain point our data sources get stale. And as of right now I don't see what system is replacing that.
"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."
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...:
"Protect our projects: Sustain and defend our model. Wikipedia's volunteers and values are increasingly under threat. We will provide volunteers with the safety and legal support they need, and defend neutral point of view in a world where facts are increasingly contested and politicized. We will strengthen protection for Wikimedia infrastructure from bot abuse, and lean into responsible reuse that drives value back to Wikipedia, not just traffic away."
It is wild to see she getting fired.
Reading some of the content on Jimbo Wales's user talk page[0] it seems this is an internal organizational change and I really can't find myself getting heated up about this.
Of course, I'm a small-time Wikipedia editor and so on. It will be a pity if Wikipedia fails, and I'll be sad because I built my blog on Mediawiki thinking it was eternal, because I don't think Grokipedia is going to correctly fill the hole.
Right. Exactly! They should use notepad.exe and be _grateful_ they get to participate at all. What more do you need to "collect knowledge?"
> a function required
It's a non-profit. Very little is actually "required" of them.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist#Upda...
may 24:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist#Resp...
It would be interesting to create WikiMedia as a co-op and transfer ownership to editors, staff, donors, on some basis. There would be a huge argument about that basis, for sure. But if anyone has the experience to manage an enormous argument, and then handle the mechanics of conducting votes across multi-million-people ownership groups, it's WikiMedia.
WikiMedia is different because it already has funds - you could reasonably offer donors an ownership share for their donation, and it wouldn't flood the voting.
It doesn't seem to be anywhere close to where they're heading, however, which is a shame.
gnome foundation voted for a new president in 2010s who then hired several directors "specialized in fund raising" for obscene salaries, and then 4yrs iirc left, and the foundation declared bankruptcy or something
most devs in the board kept blogging what was happening, in kinda of an oblivious way. so it's a good insight on how those things are sold and how they happen.
They never declared bankruptcy.
Lots of people have objected to most Archive Today links because of their behavior. Will people insist on using other links besides Wikipedia? What will they post? (What would it take to fork and serve Wikipedia's content, without all the editing, etc. infrastructure?)
And will other organizations act? For example, search engines that default put Wikipedia results in infoboxes at the top? Will Mozilla and other non-profits say something?
Wikipedia is a public resource, not a private business, and even businesses bow to public pressure (recently, especially pressure from the right, but that's irrelevent here - the point is, it works). If we don't act, nobody will.
And if this drive to lock down control over Wikiedia succeeds, by framing opposition as "Big Tech", then Wikipedia is truly finished.
The author has no idea what a product entails if they think community suggestions - regardless of how sophisticated a community - is equivalent to a product owner. The most valuable thing a PO does is say "no" to what on the surface sound like good ideas.
ewww
Instructions for cancelling your WMF donation.
I want to help fund Wikipedia. Is there a better way I can do that?
Because it's a very valuable resource that I use every day.
Without a solid base of grassroots funding, nonprofits are vulnerable to takeover by entities with ulterior motives.
> It is in no danger at all.
Given what's going on at WMF right now, it sure seems like it is!
"Bernadette Meehan became CEO on January 20, 2026, recruited from a career that included Wall Street stints at J.P. Morgan and Lehman Brothers, a spokesperson role at the National Security Council, senior leadership at the Obama Foundation, and most recently a posting as U.S. Ambassador to Chile."
Fuck that.
Like with Mozilla, it's not let to.
Are there any examples of small community driven teams responsible for managing $200 million revenue?
She should be told "thank you" then, and let go to make more in some of those other roles.
Such corporate/political world/etc non-community-arising execs just mess with the goals of such projects as Wikipedia or Mozilla.
The vulnerabilities and strong incentives are there.
• People contribute to Wikipedia with the intension of sharing value freely, but without retaining any rights or control over what they contribute.
• The community has created so much coordinated, networked and compounding value, invested so much time, that it can't sensibly walk away, or start over.
• Centralized leadership ends up in control of an increasingly valuable and unique asset, they didn't have to pay to produce (at anything like market rates). They have increasing opportunities to extract value by means unanticipated by contributors. And they have no requirement to consult with external contributing individuals, representatives, or organizations.
That situation rarely ends well.
Wikipedia, and similar community content efforts, need a standardized license that does for community produced/shared content what open source licenses do for community produced/shared code.
> This is the standard tech playbook. Fire the engineers who know how the system works, fire the ones organizing labor, hope nothing catastrophic breaks before you can ship something splashy. Twitter did it. Meta did it. Salesforce did it. Google did it. We have all seen this movie.
Just fluff without any substance.
Is that the standard tech playbook? What did Twitter, Meta etc do? "Ah you know, didn't you hear? They did that thing. With that splashy release."
> A smart executive welcomes the union, signs a generous contract, and uses the goodwill to consolidate authority for the difficult AI-era decisions ahead. That is the textbook play. Meehan and her team chose the opposite. They picked a fight.
The "standard tech playbook" fires union organizers, but a "textbook play" welcomes them?
Everything else is also chock-full of plausible sounding but baseless claims and generalizations devoid of any nuance.
> For the people inside the Foundation: this is not a moment to manage. It is a moment to decide.
What does that even mean? Moment to manage what? Decide on what?
Wikimedia Foundation CEO Bernadette Meehan has very much a Beltway insider, working for the the US foreign service, the Obama administration (NSC), the Obama foundation and the Biden administration (Ambassador to Chile). Personally, I deeply distrust anyone having a lot of influence over what is essentially the world's actively recorded history book.
There's history here too, specifically the 2016 secret project to essentially label infomration on the Internet as "reliable" [1]. It became controversial because it violated the Foundation's transparency rules so there's cause for concern over transparency.
We're all familiar I'm sure with some of the lamest edit wars [2]. But this stuff matters. STates actively interfere with Wikipedia to whitewash or outright falsiy the record or reputation of states or people.
Not Wikipedia, but the Turkish government fairly famously was caught manipulating Google search results to surface propaganda as the first link on the Aremanian genocide [3].
Wikipedia has been the target of these influence campaigns too eg [4][5].
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35668352
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars
[3]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-google-searches-are-prom...
[4]: https://wassermanschultz.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?...
[5]: https://www.adl.org/resources/report/editing-hate-how-anti-i...
You need a Wasserman Schultz link just talking about [5] as well?
The Wikimedia foundation does not exercise editorial control over Wikipedia. Neither the people fired nor the people doing the firing have any control over article contents.
There’s nowhere left to go.
For depositors, this means you can't make money in the bank. And the stock markets gains look good on paper but inflation erases much of the real value. So people with giant pools of capital have learned to make their own fortunes by buying companies directly. This is "private equity."
Their playbook once they do so is limited to a few extractive techniques. They might buy a few leading competitors in an industry and merge them, double/triple the rates, and shutdown the associated 3rd party services "marketplace" and force people to buy only their services. Or start charging for API access that previously offered to all customers for free.
They might buy a service provider who charges reasonable rates, double/triple the rates, then sell them off again 14 months later.
They might buy a solvent company, saddle it with debt, and sell it off.
These private equity gains drive everyday costs for consumers like me. In a recent 24 months period, every monthly bill I pay went up $$$ as PE firms took over my service providers.
We could slow PE (and inflation in general) by raising interest rates, incentivizing deposits and increasing the cost of capital. But this would require national fiscal responsibility, and nobody wants that. Additionally, we could choose to bootstrap companies with sustainable multigeneration succession planning instead of sudden financialized cash outs. But after tirelessly building a company for a decade most founders would rather cash out so someone else can begin to abuse their customers. "I deserve this."
well, that also makes a bit of sense. like, why focus on cashing in from AI crap or on continuously expanding the cash bunker like a PE firm would, instead of actually investing money into coordinating with the communities when it comes to stuff like a new theme?
The person above you seemed to be able to figure it out without much issue
Read for knowledge:
Bernadette Meehan became CEO on January 20, 2026, recruited from a career that included Wall Street stints at J.P. Morgan and Lehman Brothers, a spokesperson role at the National Security Council, senior leadership at the Obama Foundation, and most recently a posting as U.S. Ambassador to Chile. Four months in, the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki is fired, the team that personifies community service is dissolved, and the union is in open confrontation.
This person is a loyal PE capitalist and that’s the whole point.
Did this person even have stints in PE at those firms? You can think someone is bad without throwing around the names of the bogeyman du jour as if you're actually making a meanigful argument.
All I can say is the anticapitalist train isn’t new, I’m just glad people are starting to get on, though tbh it’s annoying how illiterate they are in the history and theory. I doubt it will stick but this is the most excitement I’ve seen since Occupy though.