| ▲ | Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia(medium.com) |
| 191 points by cdrnsf 3 hours ago | 65 comments |
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| ▲ | OsrsNeedsf2P 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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_... |
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| ▲ | bawolff an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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)#W... |
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| ▲ | mc32 2 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Maybe good will come out of this. Sometimes you get a team that become entrenched and everything follows from there with little give to other ways. New blood may be an opportunistic change for a new direction. Maybe better maybe worse -time will tell. Renewal is not bad. |
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| ▲ | chr15m 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | Aurornis 9 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | Wikipedianon an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_is_Wikipedia_los... |
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| ▲ | bawolff an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. 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). | |
| ▲ | tensegrist an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > It is very difficult to be a productive editor without custom tooling at this point this is extremely reminiscent of the stackexchange situation | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | >> Why is Wikipedia losing contributors Perhaps because their message to new contributors is a consistent "stop trying to make corrections, and go away"? | | |
| ▲ | b65e8bee43c2ed0 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | pretty much. if anything, tragically losing the current cabal of ~~commissars~~ editors might make wikipedia great again. | |
| ▲ | Wikipedianon an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > There isn't enough work anymore in a monopolized but declining market. 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. | | |
| ▲ | Wikipedianon 42 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > What's the relevance? Wikipedia contributors aren't employed by Wikipedia. Their work is volunteered, and nobody asks them 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. | | |
| ▲ | thaumasiotes 36 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Ok, but what are you saying in "there isn't enough work anymore"? What is "work"? How much is there? Enough for what? | | |
| ▲ | Wikipedianon 18 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Most articles on notable AND interesting subjects have already been written and are of a high quality. "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. |
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| ▲ | briandear an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | It would be great if editors had some kind of terms limits to avoid the WikiMafia stuff we commonly see. |
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| ▲ | legitster 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | hiddencost 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 an hour ago | parent [-] | | 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”? |
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| ▲ | whimsicalism an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes, workers in non-profits are status-compensated as well as monetarily compensated. I don't think this is an argument for non-profit unionization. |
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| ▲ | kleton an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | nickff 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >"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. |
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| ▲ | anigbrowl 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You make it sound like they're demanding multi-mmilion $ bonuses. FTA: 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. | | |
| ▲ | bawolff an hour ago | parent [-] | | In what world is Bernadette Meehan a "wall street finance guy"? | | |
| ▲ | eaglelamp an hour ago | parent [-] | | From Wikipedia: >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. | | |
| ▲ | bawolff an hour ago | parent [-] | | I wasn't actually aware of that, but key point here is that she quit that job in 2004. I'm not sure i'd describe someone who worked in wall street 20 years ago as a "wall street guy" |
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| ▲ | xocnad 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | throwaway894345 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | oytis 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | An organization genuinely dedicated to a mission for common good has even more reasons to share power with its employees in my view | |
| ▲ | foobarchu 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | As others have said, there's even more at stake with a nonprofit. Charities famously milk their employees dry by emphasizing what good and important work they're doing, to justify overworking and underpaying them. If someone chooses to work for a nonprofit, that should not be interpreted as "willing to be a human doormat". | |
| ▲ | gowld 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | roenxi 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | eikenberry an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | You are behind the times... Big Tech lost that luster more than a decade ago when they turned into your standard cookie-cutter enterprise types. | |
| ▲ | dyauspitr an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I don’t know where you’re getting the work is light part. It’s long hours and incredibly stressful work. You’ll probably never hit this level of stress in years of trades work. | | |
| ▲ | trollbridge 7 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I would invite you to come experience the trades for a bit, particularly in senior positions. | |
| ▲ | benmusch an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | it's pretty team/org dependent. on the aggregate i suspect big tech works pretty light hours compared to other jobs in the same pay scale | |
| ▲ | mikebenfield an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Having worked at two big tech companies, I’d say one was the most laid-back, stress free environment I’ve ever worked in, and the other was pretty middle of the road. | |
| ▲ | s1artibartfast an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | It is obviously a range. Most of my personal firends work a couple hours a day and get pampered. |
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| ▲ | slg an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Whether the average Big Tech job is better than the average job overall has no real relationship to whether Big Tech workers are being exploited. I think we can simply look at the number of billionaires that Big Tech has created as evidence that even those workers making relatively high salaries are being underpaid compared to the value they are actually creating. | | |
| ▲ | scottyah an hour ago | parent [-] | | Or because the logistics behind scaling are much much much easier than any physical product. |
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| ▲ | ori_b an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 an hour ago | parent [-] | | > 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 an hour ago | parent [-] | | > ... 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, but typing fast doesn't someone a software engineer. The excitement is about automating the understanding of problems. |
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| ▲ | Nevermark 8 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| An enshittified Wikipedia would be a sad thing. The vulnerabilities and very 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 networked and coordinated 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 there is no need to consult with external contributor 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. |
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| ▲ | josefritzishere 2 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | orsenthil an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 It is wild to see she getting fired. |
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| ▲ | josh-wrale 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Is Wikimedia going to go IPO? |
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| ▲ | tinfoilhatter an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 |
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| ▲ | qsxfthnkp2322 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Enshitification at the cost of your employees. Great. |
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| ▲ | jmyeet 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 [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... |
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| ▲ | bawolff an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | keybored an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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? |
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| ▲ | charcircuit an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| A benefit of sites like Grokipedia is that you don't have to worry about editors going on strike and acting malicious towards the encyclopedia. Humans are not safe to trust with such power. >They can afford six engineers. This is a common misconception. Just because a company has millions or billions dollars, that doesn't mean it makes financial sense to spend it on hiring people. >Wikipedia is not a website. Yes it is. It operates at https://www.wikipedia.org/ >The encyclopedia belongs to everyone. The labor that sustains it deserves the same protection. It makes no sense to license labor under the CC 4.0 license. |
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| ▲ | AndrewKemendo 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| They (private equity) come for everyone eventually. There’s nowhere left to go. |
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| ▲ | benmusch 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | what does "private equity" mean to you | | |
| ▲ | elevation an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 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." | | |
| ▲ | foobarchu 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I think the question was intended more as "what does PE have to do with Wikimedia", not "why is PE a problem". | |
| ▲ | benmusch 36 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | and which part of this makes any sense at all when applied to the wikimedia foundation |
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| ▲ | AndrewKemendo an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Individual people who own shares of an organization that they do not produce value for, as a wage based laborer | | |
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