13 ms·

Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia

579 points by cdrnsf 5mo ago

gruez 5mo ago
[flagged]
- pimlottc 5mo ago
  They're not saying Wikipedia is Big Tech, just that they are using the same tactics as big tech companies.
- benmusch 5mo ago
  I don't read the article as implying wikipedia is "big tech" in any meaningful way If the New England Patriots copied the San Francisco 49er's playbook, and the headline read "Patriots are starting to use 49er's playbook", that does not imply the Patriots are now the 49ers.
jimbob45 5mo ago
[flagged]
- kennywinker 5mo ago
  The person writing the article isn’t in the wiki union. So… i guess anytime someone else describes your demands as reasonable, they’re unreasonable?
AndrewKemendo 5mo ago
They (private equity) come for everyone eventually. There’s nowhere left to go.
- benmusch 5mo ago
  what does "private equity" mean to you
  - elevation 5mo ago
    The US Federal Government spends twice as much as it collects in taxes, borrowing the difference. The mounting debt requires that we set interest rates as low as possible to keep interest payments feasible. 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."
    - benmusch 5mo ago
      and which part of this makes any sense at all when applied to the wikimedia foundation
      - mschuster91 5mo ago
        their point, if I distill it correctly, is that Meehan comes with an agenda of enshittification. Given the events we're talking here... it's not that far-fetched.
qsxfthnkp2322 5mo ago
Enshitification at the cost of your employees. Great.
msuniverse2026 5mo ago
[flagged]
- kennywinker 5mo ago
  Employees being loyal and well paid are in the company’s interests. And “the right to protect its interests” doesn’t actually include firing people for organizing. That’s illegal most places.
  - nickff 5mo ago
    These employees trying to organize seem to be ignoring that they don't actually provide the majority of the value that Wikipedia benefits from, volunteers do.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    - kennywinker 5mo ago
      What a horrible take. The janitor deserves to be paid well, work in safe conditions, and have stable hours. They may not provide “the majority of the value” but without them work would grind to a halt. Same applies to every other job. If it needs to be done, then it should be treated with respect and dignity.
      - nickff 5mo ago
        I agree that everyone deserves to be paid according to their contribution, and have their employer follow all relevant laws. I am not aware of anyone being murdered, enslaved, or even tortured by the Foundation. This group seems to be trying to ‘cash in’ on Wikipedia’s AI windfall, and I think that will cause long-term damage to the organization.
        kennywinker 5mo ago
        So, what you’re saying is you believe the bar for starting a union is being murdered, tortured, or enslaved? Why? Why would the bar not be: we feel our contributions are undervalued. Because that’s what you’re calling a “cash in” attempt. If they made the company work up to this point, and the company got a windfall because of its position, why do they not deserve a piece of that windfall?
nickff 5mo ago
>"Wikipedia’s workers are fighting to unionize because the institution hosting the world’s encyclopedia has started acting like a regular employer at exactly the moment when the world most needs it to act like something better. >"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.
- xocnad 5mo ago
  I am not knowledgeable at all about the structure or internal politics but on the face of it (based solely on the representations in this "article") wouldn't the staff that were directly dedicated to implementing the communities priorities be a "worthy cause"?
  - benmusch 5mo ago
    I think "worthy cause" is a poor choice of words from the OP, but the idea is: WMF has goals that it wants to accomplish in the world, and they should staff on that basis, not on the basis of honoring historical contributions, which were already compensated with the wages at the time. 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.
- throwaway894345 5mo ago
  I don't have a strong opinion on this particular conflict, but I have thought about this in the abstract a bit (and landed on no satisfying conclusion). Basically, I've always been a strong proponent of workers demanding their fair share from a traditional company where the entire game is squeezing employees / society to maximize shareholder returns at all costs. However, I'm much less convinced that the same applies when the employer organization has a genuine nonprofit mission (the thing that actually brought this to my mind was an Atlantic article about how Democratic Party employees were "squabbling" about perks while engaging in a literal fight against fascism). That said, I don't think those employees should sacrifice everything for some "greater good" particularly when the rest of us in society are not--like I said, no satisfying conclusions--just noting the different dynamics.
jmyeet 5mo ago
My suspicion here is that there are deeper issues for which union-busting is a symptom and not the main issue. There's a battle to control what information gets recorded and distributed, an effort to silence anything that contradicts US foreign policy, basically. 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 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35668352 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars [3]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-google-searches-are-promoting-genocide-denial/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-google-searches-are-prom... [4]: https://wassermanschultz.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=3330 https://wassermanschultz.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?... [5]: https://www.adl.org/resources/report/editing-hate-how-anti-israel-and-anti-jewish-bias-undermines-wikipedias-neutrality https://www.adl.org/resources/report/editing-hate-how-anti-i...
- keybored 5mo ago
  > Wikipedia has been the target of these influence campaigns too eg [4][5]. You need a Wasserman Schultz link just talking about [5] as well?
- bawolff 5mo ago
  > There's a battle to control what information gets recorded and distributed, an effort to silence anything that contradicts US foreign policy, basically. 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.
legitster 5mo ago
17 months of operating expenses are actually not a lot for a foundation. Especially one whose goal is to preserve something for a long horizon. 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.
- hiddencost 5mo ago
  On the countrary, nonprofits need unions more than for profits. They exploit their workers more. They have fewer resources and exploit their mission to get more work from their workers.
  - legitster 5mo ago
    If I'm donating money to fight cancer, and the majority of the money goes to administrative staff, that's inherently a flawed charity. It's exactly what led to the downfall of the Susan G Komen foundation. 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.
    - skywhopper 5mo ago
      What do you think the core purpose of the Wikipedia Foundation is? Do you think the engineers who write the code and operate the site are “administrative staff”?
      - appreciatorBus 5mo ago
        If a new software or hardware innovation came along that would allow the engineers to operate the site 2x more efficiently, thus saving the foundation and it's donors a significant amount of money, would the union support it or fight it?
roenxi 5mo ago
Maybe I'm behind the times, but isn't Big Tech known as one of the best employers on the planet? I thought most of the tech workers were in the industry because the work is light, the conditions pretty relaxed compared to most jobs and the pay was high. Especially for an industry where anyone anywhere can just get involved and become a great coder.
- ori_b 5mo ago
  Yes, why do you think there's so much emphasis on automating it from the management folks? It's more profitable if you don't have to treat your employees well.
  - roenxi 5mo ago
    > Yes, why do you think there's so much emphasis on automating it from the management folks? ... 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.
    - ori_b 5mo ago
      > ... and are we pretending that automating tasks is some strange new idea that has just appeared? 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.
aykutseker 5mo ago
[dead]
Wikipedianon 5mo ago
Some English Wikipedia (enwiki) editors are striking. They are predominantly non-technical that are forced to maintain their own shadow IT-style infrastructure that Wikimedia (nonprofit owners of Wikipedia) doesn't provide. It is very difficult to be a productive editor without custom tooling at this point. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth%E2%80%93share_matrix [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_is_Wikipedia_losing_contributors_-_Thinking_about_remedies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_is_Wikipedia_los...
- thaumasiotes 5mo ago
  >> Why is Wikipedia losing contributors Perhaps because their message to new contributors is a consistent "stop trying to make corrections, and go away"?
  - b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo ago
    [flagged]
  - Wikipedianon 5mo ago
    That's the English Wikipedia community in a nutshell. The WMF knows it's an issue but can't do anything about it. 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.
charcircuit 5mo ago
[flagged]
- cdrnsf 5mo ago
  But it is safe to trust MechaHitler?
  - tinfoilhatter 5mo ago
    Probably about as safe as trusting the people editing Wikipedia that also are attending Wikipedia Zionist editing conferences I imagine.
bawolff 5mo ago
To give context, it seems like what happened is WMF did two separate things: - 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)#WMF_Community_Tech_team_has_been_disbanded,_engineers_laid_off https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#W...
- mc32 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - harimau777 5mo ago
    I think it might be worth remembering that we are talking about human beings not spare parts.
  - bawolff 5mo ago
    I think a lot of the objections come from the proposed replacement which does not sound very promising. A friend of mine is fond of the quote "Change happens at the speed of trust". There is not an overwhelming amount of trust between the parties
- throwaway89864 5mo ago
  Prop. AB 1940?
- 5mo ago
tinfoilhatter 5mo ago
I like how Wikipedia is referred to as the world's encyclopedia, while stuff like this goes on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t52LB2fYhoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t52LB2fYhoY
orsenthil 5mo ago
Brooke Vibber is the single most person responsible for creating the software that runs wikipedia. There is a Brooke Vibber day in her honor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Brooke_Vibber_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Brooke_Vibber_Day It is wild to see she getting fired.
- pwdisswordfishq 5mo ago
  For those like me, who have stopped following WMF governance for a long while and wondered "huh, I remember a Brion Vibber, is she related to him?", yes indeed she is as related as a person could possibly ever be: it's the same person.
kleton 5mo ago
> The Wikimedia Foundation closed last fiscal year with $208.6 million in revenue. It holds $296.6 million in reserves, 17.1 months of operating expenses. The actual physical cost of hosting Wikipedia is < $5 million per year.
- DaSHacka 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - troad 5mo ago
    Internal DEI initiatives are very helpful for an organisation trying to create a comprehensive knowledge base without falling to any group's bias. That requires diverse perspectives. I don't care about internal DEI if the job is managing sewerage systems, but this is a perfect example of a context where fostering diverse engagement is both rational and improves the end product.
    - appreciatorBus 5mo ago
      That's a fine goal, but at some point, someone should evaluate if that goal is being achieved, if the purported methods actually work. It's difficult to look at any remotely contentious Wiki page today and conclude that they have succeeded.
      - troad 5mo ago
        The perfect ought not be the enemy of the good - the question isn't whether Wikipedia has solved all prejudice, the question is whether it is doing better on that question than its peers. And I'd say it is, relatively speaking. I'm always happy for it to do better, though. Spending money to get people into editing Wikipedia that would never otherwise have done so seems like a very worthy goal to me.
        Pay08 5mo ago
        It doesn't have any peers.
josh-wrale 5mo ago
Is Wikimedia going to go IPO?
- wmf 5mo ago
  Don't give Sam Altman any ideas.
OsrsNeedsf2P 5mo ago
I spent ~2 years actively editing Wikipedia for multiple hours every day. I remember taking my laptop out at airports for 20 minutes between transfers, just to tweak an article or improve a source. While I originally started because I found some articles lackluster, I quickly realized how vigorous the editing process could be on controversial topics. 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_solidarity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Workers_United_...
- SkinTaco 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - mulmen 5mo ago
    [flagged]
  - jfengel 5mo ago
    If you think that's bad, you should compare the pages for Genghis Khan and Mr. Rogers.
    - SkinTaco 5mo ago
      You should've checked those pages first, they're actually very neutral lol.
      - ryoshu 5mo ago
        If Ghengis Khan was raping & pillaging in 2026 his Wikipedia article might have a more modern slant.
chr15m 5mo ago
> The point is the Foundation is rich. Seventeen-plus months of operating runway in the bank. 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.
- Aurornis 5mo ago
  They spend a ton of money on things unrelated to the website. The cost of running the website (including staff) is actually a very small piece of their budget. They could run Wikipedia basically forever on the interest from their money in the bank. In the event of a recession they could easily scale spending down to match.
  - bawolff 5mo ago
    > The cost of running the website (including staff) is actually a very small piece of their budget. 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.
    - loeg 5mo ago
      It is not a lie. Wikipedia does not need 300-325 engineers to run the website.
      - lostglass 5mo ago
        Ah yes, I too am something of an armchair engineer and I can speak confidently on topics I have no insight into.
      - bawolff 5mo ago
        Maybe not, but they need more than zero. 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.
Nevermark 5mo ago
An enshittified Wikipedia would be a sad thing. 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.
josefritzishere 5mo ago
Wikipedia hasn't been Wikipedia in a decade. I gave up on Wikipedia when the Deletionists started running the shop, editorially. I learned the hard way that it was run by cliques and not egalitarian ideals.
afh1 5mo ago
I hope it collapses, the Foundation has long cared more about begging for money while sitting on millions, paying for unrelated events, than for the well being of its site editors - even before recent news, it offered zero protection or aid against constant legal threats, for example. And most editors care more about politics than facts, the political bias on Wikipedia is ever increasing. Or at least was, since I have last used it years ago. Nowadays does anyone even read it? I think most people stop at the AI overview. I hope it faces the same future as StackOverflow. It built great value, but has declined into a mostly toxic community at the admin/power user levels who control most of the content. AI has already swallowed what was there and there are plenty of archives and alternatives for the trove of knowledge that was built in the past.
- setsewerd 5mo ago
  I haven't formed an opinion yet, but tangentially, since you hope for the collapse of these orgs, what do you propose we do to incentivize higher quality information sources online? 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.
- britta 5mo ago
  https://www.eff.org/pages/internet-still-works-wikipedia-defends-its-editors https://www.eff.org/pages/internet-still-works-wikipedia-def...: "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_Plan/2026-2027 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."
gowld 5mo ago
Is "anti-labor" a "Big Tech" thing, or a "every employer" thing?
newtonianrules 5mo ago
Never been a better time to stop or not donate to Wikipedia.
coldtea 5mo ago
No donated cent should be going to such "foundations" anymore. Projects like Wikipedia should be run strictly by volunteers and paid contributors with moderate pays. Not Wall Street people, big corporate execs, and lavish offices. "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.
- ares623 5mo ago
  I agree, but to do that you need _something_ and _someone_ (often multiple someones) to manage all that.
  - coldtea 5mo ago
    A small community driven team could manage all that fine. Like with Mozilla, it's not let to.
    - farfatched 5mo ago
      > A small community driven team could manage all that fine. Are there any examples of small community driven teams responsible for managing $200 million revenue?
- skeeter2020 5mo ago
  Her exact comp hasn't been filed yet (watch for next year's IRS filings) but I'd suspect she'll make around 500K. That's a lot of money, but it's obvious she could make more in some of those other roles. This is not "Big Tech CEO" money.
  - coldtea 5mo ago
    >That's a lot of money, but it's obvious she could make more in some of those other roles. 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.
mmooss 5mo ago
What is decisive is how the public responds, including the core public for this service here on HN: 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.
starkeeper 5mo ago
I personally never truste Jimmy Wales. Oh I didn't realize he is behind the "Fandom" sewer too.
- bawolff 5mo ago
  FWIW, he mostly only has symbolic influence at this point.
ryukoposting 5mo ago
https://wikimediafoundation.org/give/manage-your-donation/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/give/manage-your-donation/ Instructions for cancelling your WMF donation.
- tptacek 5mo ago
  Most of you shouldn't be donating to WMF in the first place; they don't need your money. You could reasonably cancel your donation without resolving any of the mission vs. labor conflicts indicated by this post.
  - blululu 5mo ago
    Just piling in to this because it needs to be stated with emphasis. Wikipedia foundation is not Wikipedia. Their donation campaigns are highly deceptive. Pennies on the dollar will go to supporting and maintaining the actual encyclopedia. WMF is as much a liability to the encyclopedia as a beneficiary.
    - ryukoposting 5mo ago
      I've heard this before, but I've not seen anyone go into detail on it (until now) I want to help fund Wikipedia. Is there a better way I can do that?
      - tptacek 5mo ago
        I have different reasoning than the parent commenter. Why do you want to help fund Wikipedia? It is in no danger at all. Funding it even more lavishly probably won't help it achieve its goals more effectively; it's dependent (by design, and for good reason) on volunteer effort, which is the real bottleneck.
        ryukoposting 5mo ago
        > Why do you want to help fund Wikipedia? 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!
Kim_Bruning 5mo ago
Update from WMF to community on may 20: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist#Update_from_Selena https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist#Upda... may 24: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist#Response_from_WMF_24_May https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist#Resp...
grunkolsky 5mo ago
[flagged]
epestr 5mo ago
I'm quite surprised by how the HN audience has multiple stakeholders with deep expertise and lived experience associated with any post, without all the generalisation and hollow speculation present elsewhere. And these comments get posted quite quickly too.
- BoggleOhYeah 5mo ago
  Everyone here is a genius because their LLM agrees with everything they say.
  - epestr 5mo ago
    There does seem to be some with AI psychosis[0] but it's fewer in number than other places and downvoted on posts with moderate amount of comments [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot_psychosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot_psychosis
skeeter2020 5mo ago
>> It was the one team at WMF whose product owner was, in effect, the volunteer community. 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.
petterroea 5mo ago
Why do orgs like Wikipedia and Mozilla keep hiring corporate CEOs thinking it will bring them anything else than toxic work culture
- marcus_holmes 5mo ago
  I'm a huge fan of co-operatives for this kind of org. 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.
  - petterroea 5mo ago
    Recently, every time there's a discussion about single CEOs and/or private equity ruining good things, co-operatives seem to come up. Maybe they aren't such a bad idea. Certainly, for starting a company or org, it seems like a decent option.
    - marcus_holmes 5mo ago
      The big problem from a startup pov is that there's no way of getting conventional/VC funding into a co-op that doesn't break the model. 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.
      - account42 5mo ago
        If you are looking for VC funding then you are already on the wrong track for an org to run something like Wikipedia.
- iririririr 5mo ago
  they promise more fundraising. 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.
theNewDevTalks 5mo ago
[flagged]
jocelyner 5mo ago
[dead]
arjie 5mo ago
Surely the purpose of Wikipedia is not to pay Wikipedia employees except where it serves Wikipedia's purpose of collecting knowledge. If a team is no longer required or is not fulfilling a function required of the organization, it makes sense that it should be eliminated. It doesn't seem that the correct structure of the team is functioning usefully, and it seems that the members of the team are being offered jobs appropriately in the rest of the org. As far as I can tell, nothing here seems particularly interesting. The Wikimedia Foundation's endowment is not for the purpose of enriching its workers. It should pay people what is an appropriate market rate and comply with local labour laws, of course, but there should be no greater requirement on it to preserve jobs for their own sake. 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. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales
- themafia 5mo ago
  > except where it serves Wikipedia's purpose of collecting knowledge 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.
senderista 5mo ago
"The content is free. The labor is not." ewww
Telaneo 5mo ago
I was really hoping that the WMF could manage to not shoot itself in the foot for a while, and I guess it's been nearly 7 years since Fram was banned and unbanned, so I guess it's about time.
rixed 5mo ago
Nice follow up to "Big tech's hierarchical organisation has come for Wikipedia"
- account42 5mo ago
  Was that before or after "Big tech's organizational bloat has come for Wikipedia"
ETH_start 5mo ago
A labor union restricting who can be part of the Arbitration Enforcement admin team flies directly in the face of the principle that Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that "anyone can edit". It is turning Wikipedia into a protected guild, with a privileged class of administrators. And if this drive to lock down control over Wikiedia succeeds, by framing opposition as "Big Tech", then Wikipedia is truly finished.
jcattle 5mo ago
I can't with these AI generalizations for big effect. > 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."
- mossTechnician 5mo ago
  I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed this. A similar section offers an apparently contradictory take with similar language: > 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?
  - jcattle 5mo ago
    Yea that part also stood out to me. 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?
user01815-2 5mo ago
So who is actually in charge at Wikimedia? I always assumed it was a grassroots project and not an industry association like say Linux Foundation.

579 points by cdrnsf 5mo ago

gruez 5mo ago

[flagged]

pimlottc 5mo ago
They're not saying Wikipedia is Big Tech, just that they are using the same tactics as big tech companies.
benmusch 5mo ago
I don't read the article as implying wikipedia is "big tech" in any meaningful way If the New England Patriots copied the San Francisco 49er's playbook, and the headline read "Patriots are starting to use 49er's playbook", that does not imply the Patriots are now the 49ers.

jimbob45 5mo ago

[flagged]

kennywinker 5mo ago
The person writing the article isn’t in the wiki union. So… i guess anytime someone else describes your demands as reasonable, they’re unreasonable?

AndrewKemendo 5mo ago

They (private equity) come for everyone eventually. There’s nowhere left to go.

benmusch 5mo ago
what does "private equity" mean to you
- elevation 5mo ago
  The US Federal Government spends twice as much as it collects in taxes, borrowing the difference. The mounting debt requires that we set interest rates as low as possible to keep interest payments feasible. 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."
  - benmusch 5mo ago
    and which part of this makes any sense at all when applied to the wikimedia foundation
    - mschuster91 5mo ago
      their point, if I distill it correctly, is that Meehan comes with an agenda of enshittification. Given the events we're talking here... it's not that far-fetched.

qsxfthnkp2322 5mo ago

Enshitification at the cost of your employees. Great.

msuniverse2026 5mo ago

[flagged]

kennywinker 5mo ago
Employees being loyal and well paid are in the company’s interests. And “the right to protect its interests” doesn’t actually include firing people for organizing. That’s illegal most places.
- nickff 5mo ago
  These employees trying to organize seem to be ignoring that they don't actually provide the majority of the value that Wikipedia benefits from, volunteers do.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - kennywinker 5mo ago
    What a horrible take. The janitor deserves to be paid well, work in safe conditions, and have stable hours. They may not provide “the majority of the value” but without them work would grind to a halt. Same applies to every other job. If it needs to be done, then it should be treated with respect and dignity.
    - nickff 5mo ago
      I agree that everyone deserves to be paid according to their contribution, and have their employer follow all relevant laws. I am not aware of anyone being murdered, enslaved, or even tortured by the Foundation. This group seems to be trying to ‘cash in’ on Wikipedia’s AI windfall, and I think that will cause long-term damage to the organization.
      - kennywinker 5mo ago
        So, what you’re saying is you believe the bar for starting a union is being murdered, tortured, or enslaved? Why? Why would the bar not be: we feel our contributions are undervalued. Because that’s what you’re calling a “cash in” attempt. If they made the company work up to this point, and the company got a windfall because of its position, why do they not deserve a piece of that windfall?

nickff 5mo ago

>"Wikipedia’s workers are fighting to unionize because the institution hosting the world’s encyclopedia has started acting like a regular employer at exactly the moment when the world most needs it to act like something better. >"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.

xocnad 5mo ago
I am not knowledgeable at all about the structure or internal politics but on the face of it (based solely on the representations in this "article") wouldn't the staff that were directly dedicated to implementing the communities priorities be a "worthy cause"?
- benmusch 5mo ago
  I think "worthy cause" is a poor choice of words from the OP, but the idea is: WMF has goals that it wants to accomplish in the world, and they should staff on that basis, not on the basis of honoring historical contributions, which were already compensated with the wages at the time. 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.
throwaway894345 5mo ago
I don't have a strong opinion on this particular conflict, but I have thought about this in the abstract a bit (and landed on no satisfying conclusion). Basically, I've always been a strong proponent of workers demanding their fair share from a traditional company where the entire game is squeezing employees / society to maximize shareholder returns at all costs. However, I'm much less convinced that the same applies when the employer organization has a genuine nonprofit mission (the thing that actually brought this to my mind was an Atlantic article about how Democratic Party employees were "squabbling" about perks while engaging in a literal fight against fascism). That said, I don't think those employees should sacrifice everything for some "greater good" particularly when the rest of us in society are not--like I said, no satisfying conclusions--just noting the different dynamics.

jmyeet 5mo ago

My suspicion here is that there are deeper issues for which union-busting is a symptom and not the main issue. There's a battle to control what information gets recorded and distributed, an effort to silence anything that contradicts US foreign policy, basically. 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 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35668352 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars [3]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-google-searches-are-promoting-genocide-denial/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-google-searches-are-prom... [4]: https://wassermanschultz.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=3330 https://wassermanschultz.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?... [5]: https://www.adl.org/resources/report/editing-hate-how-anti-israel-and-anti-jewish-bias-undermines-wikipedias-neutrality https://www.adl.org/resources/report/editing-hate-how-anti-i...

keybored 5mo ago
> Wikipedia has been the target of these influence campaigns too eg [4][5]. You need a Wasserman Schultz link just talking about [5] as well?
bawolff 5mo ago
> There's a battle to control what information gets recorded and distributed, an effort to silence anything that contradicts US foreign policy, basically. 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.

legitster 5mo ago

17 months of operating expenses are actually not a lot for a foundation. Especially one whose goal is to preserve something for a long horizon. 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.

hiddencost 5mo ago
On the countrary, nonprofits need unions more than for profits. They exploit their workers more. They have fewer resources and exploit their mission to get more work from their workers.
- legitster 5mo ago
  If I'm donating money to fight cancer, and the majority of the money goes to administrative staff, that's inherently a flawed charity. It's exactly what led to the downfall of the Susan G Komen foundation. 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.
  - skywhopper 5mo ago
    What do you think the core purpose of the Wikipedia Foundation is? Do you think the engineers who write the code and operate the site are “administrative staff”?
    - appreciatorBus 5mo ago
      If a new software or hardware innovation came along that would allow the engineers to operate the site 2x more efficiently, thus saving the foundation and it's donors a significant amount of money, would the union support it or fight it?

roenxi 5mo ago

Maybe I'm behind the times, but isn't Big Tech known as one of the best employers on the planet? I thought most of the tech workers were in the industry because the work is light, the conditions pretty relaxed compared to most jobs and the pay was high. Especially for an industry where anyone anywhere can just get involved and become a great coder.

ori_b 5mo ago
Yes, why do you think there's so much emphasis on automating it from the management folks? It's more profitable if you don't have to treat your employees well.
- roenxi 5mo ago
  > Yes, why do you think there's so much emphasis on automating it from the management folks? ... 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.
  - ori_b 5mo ago
    > ... and are we pretending that automating tasks is some strange new idea that has just appeared? 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.

aykutseker 5mo ago

[dead]

Wikipedianon 5mo ago

Some English Wikipedia (enwiki) editors are striking. They are predominantly non-technical that are forced to maintain their own shadow IT-style infrastructure that Wikimedia (nonprofit owners of Wikipedia) doesn't provide. It is very difficult to be a productive editor without custom tooling at this point. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth%E2%80%93share_matrix [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_is_Wikipedia_losing_contributors_-_Thinking_about_remedies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_is_Wikipedia_los...

thaumasiotes 5mo ago
>> Why is Wikipedia losing contributors Perhaps because their message to new contributors is a consistent "stop trying to make corrections, and go away"?
- b65e8bee43c2ed0 5mo ago
  [flagged]
- Wikipedianon 5mo ago
  That's the English Wikipedia community in a nutshell. The WMF knows it's an issue but can't do anything about it. 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.

charcircuit 5mo ago

[flagged]

cdrnsf 5mo ago
But it is safe to trust MechaHitler?
- tinfoilhatter 5mo ago
  Probably about as safe as trusting the people editing Wikipedia that also are attending Wikipedia Zionist editing conferences I imagine.

bawolff 5mo ago

To give context, it seems like what happened is WMF did two separate things: - 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)#WMF_Community_Tech_team_has_been_disbanded,_engineers_laid_off https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#W...

mc32 5mo ago
[flagged]
- harimau777 5mo ago
  I think it might be worth remembering that we are talking about human beings not spare parts.
- bawolff 5mo ago
  I think a lot of the objections come from the proposed replacement which does not sound very promising. A friend of mine is fond of the quote "Change happens at the speed of trust". There is not an overwhelming amount of trust between the parties
throwaway89864 5mo ago
Prop. AB 1940?
5mo ago

tinfoilhatter 5mo ago

I like how Wikipedia is referred to as the world's encyclopedia, while stuff like this goes on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t52LB2fYhoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t52LB2fYhoY

orsenthil 5mo ago

Brooke Vibber is the single most person responsible for creating the software that runs wikipedia. There is a Brooke Vibber day in her honor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Brooke_Vibber_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Brooke_Vibber_Day It is wild to see she getting fired.

pwdisswordfishq 5mo ago
For those like me, who have stopped following WMF governance for a long while and wondered "huh, I remember a Brion Vibber, is she related to him?", yes indeed she is as related as a person could possibly ever be: it's the same person.

kleton 5mo ago

> The Wikimedia Foundation closed last fiscal year with $208.6 million in revenue. It holds $296.6 million in reserves, 17.1 months of operating expenses. The actual physical cost of hosting Wikipedia is < $5 million per year.

DaSHacka 5mo ago
[flagged]
- troad 5mo ago
  Internal DEI initiatives are very helpful for an organisation trying to create a comprehensive knowledge base without falling to any group's bias. That requires diverse perspectives. I don't care about internal DEI if the job is managing sewerage systems, but this is a perfect example of a context where fostering diverse engagement is both rational and improves the end product.
  - appreciatorBus 5mo ago
    That's a fine goal, but at some point, someone should evaluate if that goal is being achieved, if the purported methods actually work. It's difficult to look at any remotely contentious Wiki page today and conclude that they have succeeded.
    - troad 5mo ago
      The perfect ought not be the enemy of the good - the question isn't whether Wikipedia has solved all prejudice, the question is whether it is doing better on that question than its peers. And I'd say it is, relatively speaking. I'm always happy for it to do better, though. Spending money to get people into editing Wikipedia that would never otherwise have done so seems like a very worthy goal to me.
      - Pay08 5mo ago
        It doesn't have any peers.

josh-wrale 5mo ago

Is Wikimedia going to go IPO?

wmf 5mo ago
Don't give Sam Altman any ideas.

OsrsNeedsf2P 5mo ago

I spent ~2 years actively editing Wikipedia for multiple hours every day. I remember taking my laptop out at airports for 20 minutes between transfers, just to tweak an article or improve a source. While I originally started because I found some articles lackluster, I quickly realized how vigorous the editing process could be on controversial topics. 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_solidarity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Workers_United_...

SkinTaco 5mo ago
[flagged]
- mulmen 5mo ago
  [flagged]
- jfengel 5mo ago
  If you think that's bad, you should compare the pages for Genghis Khan and Mr. Rogers.
  - SkinTaco 5mo ago
    You should've checked those pages first, they're actually very neutral lol.
    - ryoshu 5mo ago
      If Ghengis Khan was raping & pillaging in 2026 his Wikipedia article might have a more modern slant.

chr15m 5mo ago

> The point is the Foundation is rich. Seventeen-plus months of operating runway in the bank. 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.

Aurornis 5mo ago
They spend a ton of money on things unrelated to the website. The cost of running the website (including staff) is actually a very small piece of their budget. They could run Wikipedia basically forever on the interest from their money in the bank. In the event of a recession they could easily scale spending down to match.
- bawolff 5mo ago
  > The cost of running the website (including staff) is actually a very small piece of their budget. 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.
  - loeg 5mo ago
    It is not a lie. Wikipedia does not need 300-325 engineers to run the website.
    - lostglass 5mo ago
      Ah yes, I too am something of an armchair engineer and I can speak confidently on topics I have no insight into.
    - bawolff 5mo ago
      Maybe not, but they need more than zero. 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.

Nevermark 5mo ago

An enshittified Wikipedia would be a sad thing. 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.

josefritzishere 5mo ago

Wikipedia hasn't been Wikipedia in a decade. I gave up on Wikipedia when the Deletionists started running the shop, editorially. I learned the hard way that it was run by cliques and not egalitarian ideals.

afh1 5mo ago

I hope it collapses, the Foundation has long cared more about begging for money while sitting on millions, paying for unrelated events, than for the well being of its site editors - even before recent news, it offered zero protection or aid against constant legal threats, for example. And most editors care more about politics than facts, the political bias on Wikipedia is ever increasing. Or at least was, since I have last used it years ago. Nowadays does anyone even read it? I think most people stop at the AI overview. I hope it faces the same future as StackOverflow. It built great value, but has declined into a mostly toxic community at the admin/power user levels who control most of the content. AI has already swallowed what was there and there are plenty of archives and alternatives for the trove of knowledge that was built in the past.

setsewerd 5mo ago
I haven't formed an opinion yet, but tangentially, since you hope for the collapse of these orgs, what do you propose we do to incentivize higher quality information sources online? 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.
britta 5mo ago
https://www.eff.org/pages/internet-still-works-wikipedia-defends-its-editors https://www.eff.org/pages/internet-still-works-wikipedia-def...: "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_Plan/2026-2027 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."

gowld 5mo ago

Is "anti-labor" a "Big Tech" thing, or a "every employer" thing?

newtonianrules 5mo ago

Never been a better time to stop or not donate to Wikipedia.

coldtea 5mo ago

No donated cent should be going to such "foundations" anymore. Projects like Wikipedia should be run strictly by volunteers and paid contributors with moderate pays. Not Wall Street people, big corporate execs, and lavish offices. "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.

ares623 5mo ago
I agree, but to do that you need _something_ and _someone_ (often multiple someones) to manage all that.
- coldtea 5mo ago
  A small community driven team could manage all that fine. Like with Mozilla, it's not let to.
  - farfatched 5mo ago
    > A small community driven team could manage all that fine. Are there any examples of small community driven teams responsible for managing $200 million revenue?
skeeter2020 5mo ago
Her exact comp hasn't been filed yet (watch for next year's IRS filings) but I'd suspect she'll make around 500K. That's a lot of money, but it's obvious she could make more in some of those other roles. This is not "Big Tech CEO" money.
- coldtea 5mo ago
  >That's a lot of money, but it's obvious she could make more in some of those other roles. 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.

mmooss 5mo ago

What is decisive is how the public responds, including the core public for this service here on HN: 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.

starkeeper 5mo ago

I personally never truste Jimmy Wales. Oh I didn't realize he is behind the "Fandom" sewer too.

bawolff 5mo ago
FWIW, he mostly only has symbolic influence at this point.

ryukoposting 5mo ago

https://wikimediafoundation.org/give/manage-your-donation/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/give/manage-your-donation/ Instructions for cancelling your WMF donation.

tptacek 5mo ago
Most of you shouldn't be donating to WMF in the first place; they don't need your money. You could reasonably cancel your donation without resolving any of the mission vs. labor conflicts indicated by this post.
- blululu 5mo ago
  Just piling in to this because it needs to be stated with emphasis. Wikipedia foundation is not Wikipedia. Their donation campaigns are highly deceptive. Pennies on the dollar will go to supporting and maintaining the actual encyclopedia. WMF is as much a liability to the encyclopedia as a beneficiary.
  - ryukoposting 5mo ago
    I've heard this before, but I've not seen anyone go into detail on it (until now) I want to help fund Wikipedia. Is there a better way I can do that?
    - tptacek 5mo ago
      I have different reasoning than the parent commenter. Why do you want to help fund Wikipedia? It is in no danger at all. Funding it even more lavishly probably won't help it achieve its goals more effectively; it's dependent (by design, and for good reason) on volunteer effort, which is the real bottleneck.
      - ryukoposting 5mo ago
        > Why do you want to help fund Wikipedia? 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!

Kim_Bruning 5mo ago

Update from WMF to community on may 20: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist#Update_from_Selena https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist#Upda... may 24: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist#Response_from_WMF_24_May https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist#Resp...

grunkolsky 5mo ago

[flagged]

epestr 5mo ago

I'm quite surprised by how the HN audience has multiple stakeholders with deep expertise and lived experience associated with any post, without all the generalisation and hollow speculation present elsewhere. And these comments get posted quite quickly too.

BoggleOhYeah 5mo ago
Everyone here is a genius because their LLM agrees with everything they say.
- epestr 5mo ago
  There does seem to be some with AI psychosis[0] but it's fewer in number than other places and downvoted on posts with moderate amount of comments [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot_psychosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatbot_psychosis

skeeter2020 5mo ago

>> It was the one team at WMF whose product owner was, in effect, the volunteer community. 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.

petterroea 5mo ago

Why do orgs like Wikipedia and Mozilla keep hiring corporate CEOs thinking it will bring them anything else than toxic work culture

marcus_holmes 5mo ago
I'm a huge fan of co-operatives for this kind of org. 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.
- petterroea 5mo ago
  Recently, every time there's a discussion about single CEOs and/or private equity ruining good things, co-operatives seem to come up. Maybe they aren't such a bad idea. Certainly, for starting a company or org, it seems like a decent option.
  - marcus_holmes 5mo ago
    The big problem from a startup pov is that there's no way of getting conventional/VC funding into a co-op that doesn't break the model. 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.
    - account42 5mo ago
      If you are looking for VC funding then you are already on the wrong track for an org to run something like Wikipedia.
iririririr 5mo ago
they promise more fundraising. 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.

theNewDevTalks 5mo ago

[flagged]

jocelyner 5mo ago

[dead]

arjie 5mo ago

Surely the purpose of Wikipedia is not to pay Wikipedia employees except where it serves Wikipedia's purpose of collecting knowledge. If a team is no longer required or is not fulfilling a function required of the organization, it makes sense that it should be eliminated. It doesn't seem that the correct structure of the team is functioning usefully, and it seems that the members of the team are being offered jobs appropriately in the rest of the org. As far as I can tell, nothing here seems particularly interesting. The Wikimedia Foundation's endowment is not for the purpose of enriching its workers. It should pay people what is an appropriate market rate and comply with local labour laws, of course, but there should be no greater requirement on it to preserve jobs for their own sake. 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. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales

themafia 5mo ago
> except where it serves Wikipedia's purpose of collecting knowledge 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.

senderista 5mo ago

"The content is free. The labor is not." ewww

Telaneo 5mo ago

I was really hoping that the WMF could manage to not shoot itself in the foot for a while, and I guess it's been nearly 7 years since Fram was banned and unbanned, so I guess it's about time.

rixed 5mo ago

Nice follow up to "Big tech's hierarchical organisation has come for Wikipedia"

account42 5mo ago
Was that before or after "Big tech's organizational bloat has come for Wikipedia"

ETH_start 5mo ago

A labor union restricting who can be part of the Arbitration Enforcement admin team flies directly in the face of the principle that Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that "anyone can edit". It is turning Wikipedia into a protected guild, with a privileged class of administrators. And if this drive to lock down control over Wikiedia succeeds, by framing opposition as "Big Tech", then Wikipedia is truly finished.

jcattle 5mo ago

I can't with these AI generalizations for big effect. > 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."

mossTechnician 5mo ago
I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed this. A similar section offers an apparently contradictory take with similar language: > 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?
- jcattle 5mo ago
  Yea that part also stood out to me. 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?

user01815-2 5mo ago

So who is actually in charge at Wikimedia? I always assumed it was a grassroots project and not an industry association like say Linux Foundation.