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

(medium.com)

69 points by cdrnsf1 hour ago

7 comments

nickff31 minutes 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.
- anigbrowl9 minutes ago
 You make it sound like they're demanding multi-mmilion $ bonuses. FTA:The union’s demands are embarrassingly modestThis 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.
- xocnad18 minutes 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"?
 - benmusch6 minutes 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.
- throwaway89434514 minutes 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.
 - gowld6 minutes ago
 Wikipedia owners are free to not have any employees, to prefer employees who donate some of their pay back to the organization, or solicit only volunteers. Workers are free to ask to be paid for their work.
- 12_throw_away12 minutes ago
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 - card_zero9 minutes ago
 It means that us lowly volunteer Wikipedians, who write the articles, have long mistrusted those who are paid to work for Wikimedia, and we are unsure what good they do, if any.This may of course be unfair, but that's the background information.
 - 12_throw_away7 minutes ago
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 - card_zero4 minutes ago
 I apologize for being a lizard person.
 - benmusch4 minutes ago
 you can disagree with that comment but its clearly not PR speak lmao. not everyone who disagrees with you is astroturfed
qsxfthnkp232236 minutes ago
Enshitification at the cost of your employees. Great.
AndrewKemendo37 minutes ago
They (private equity) come for everyone eventually.There’s nowhere left to go.
- benmusch34 minutes ago
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jmyeet10 minutes ago
My usspicion 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]: <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35668352" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35668352</a>[2]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars</a>[3]: <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-google-searches-are-promoting-genocide-denial/" rel="nofollow">https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-google-searches-are-prom...</a>[4]: <a href="https://wassermanschultz.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=3330" rel="nofollow">https://wassermanschultz.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?...</a>[5]: <a href="https://www.adl.org/resources/report/editing-hate-how-anti-israel-and-anti-jewish-bias-undermines-wikipedias-neutrality" rel="nofollow">https://www.adl.org/resources/report/editing-hate-how-anti-i...</a>
jimbob4540 minutes ago
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- kennywinker33 minutes 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?
gruez44 minutes ago
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- pimlottc37 minutes ago
 They're not saying Wikipedia is Big Tech, just that they are using the same tactics as big tech companies.
- benmusch35 minutes ago
 I don't read the article as implying wikipedia is "big tech" in any meaningful wayIf 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.
msuniverse202635 minutes ago
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- kennywinker32 minutes 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.
 - nickff28 minutes 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.
- trial327 minutes ago
 misgendering people in 2026 is lazy and uninspired