Wikipedia Turned on its Volunteers. Now it’s Coming for its Workers.
TL;DR: In the last year, the Wikimedia Foundation has fired several union organizers, including those that worked on the Community Tech team - a team dedicated to building features for the volunteer community that edits Wikipedia.
As the Wiki Workers Union tries to get the Wikimedia Foundation to recognize their union, it is worth remembering that this is not the first time that the Foundation has worked against the community.
Wikimedia Enterprise is a betrayal of the volunteer movement community of Wikipedia editors, as the Wikimedia Foundation is providing privileged access to big tech AI companies to the Wikipedia corpus - a body of work that the Foundation does not own.
Movement volunteer communities contributed to Wikipedia under copyleft licenses - licenses that work to ensure that the work remains free (as in speech). The big tech AI companies do not license derivative works under copyleft licenses and often do not even attribute where the works came from.
This means that volunteers are working for big tech for free, and the Wikimedia Foundation is selling privileged access to that free labor.
It is against that backdrop that the current unionization struggle unfolds.
https://www.quippd.com/writing/2026/08/04/wikipedia-turned-on-its-volunteers-now-its-coming-for-its-workers.htmlOpen linkView original on fedia.io
21 replies
I'm not donating this year or ever again. I downloaded the whole thing in 2020 when the writing was on the wall, that'll have to do.
Power always corrupts.
Looks like it's time to get serious about those local backups.
Nah, as someone who's worked on Wikipedia for 10 years, this article and thread is a wild overreaction.
The labor stuff I agree with, but in the grand scheme of things, it's not that big a deal compared to the amount of work being done "below" the WMF within the projects themselves. It sucks, but this is a bump in the road. (Edit: I don't mean to gloss over this, but I just assumed anyone here already knew the details; I should've linked to The Signpost article anyway.)
On the other hand, the article treating Wikimedia Enterprise as a "betrayal" of its editors is patently absurd. It's there so that companies and large institutions can access the data in a way that's 1) minimally invasive to the project, 2) genenerating revenue for the project, and 3) timely for users; by contrast, without this sort of program, Wikimedia projects get hammered harder through unofficial means, make nothing from it, and plausibly get credited for outdated information. Material published to Wikimedia is CC BY-SA 4.0; thus, those current Enterprise customers have every right to use the material basically however they see fit regardless of Enterprise. And therefore make no mistake: they will do so in any legal way they can, which could include hammering Wikimedia or finding a way to bypass them nearly altogether.
Wikimedia isn't selling access to the material, because it's literally nobody's to sell; they're selling access to stream the data on their servers which they host. And it's not gatekeeping it from normal users either; it's offered for free for what the Meta-Wiki accurarely calls "the vast majority of use cases" (they also give the Internet Archive free access).
Source: ~50,000+ contributions to Wikimedia projects.
Edit: Something I find peculiar in this article:
It strikes me that this entire article, this person never once (it's bloviating, so maybe I missed it) mentions any work they've personally contributed to a Wikimedia project or even wikis generally. I can say outright as an actual volunteer who adores the other people who volunteer for the project that I could not care less if the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation hasn't contributed to a Wikimedia project a single time. That'd be cool, but heading a nonprofit is so divorced from the daily volunteer work that I don't care, and I don't think it has any bearing on her attempt at union-busting. (They also just say "edited Wikipedia", which shows a level of project erasure actual editors wouldn't make; Wikipedia has several sister projects, they'd be addressed collectively as "Wikimedia projects", and veteran editors value their contributors just as highly if not moreso.)
I'm not saying they're not allowed to criticize anything they aren't a part of, but I am saying "put up or shut up" when the author claims a project they could've contributed to for the past 25 years but ostensibly haven't is under attack by ignorant/callous outsiders. More than almost anything, Wikimedia is excruciatingly open to work on if you really care (and this article shows they have the basic skills), so I expect an article this lengthy to disclose that when they start throwing other people under the bus for not having edited.
Edit 2: So anyway, this was my essay about why you should check out Wiktionary and use it as your daily driver.
I have a search shortcut in my browser for Wiktionary.
Clearly, everyone realizes that the big tech AI pirates will scrape and stream the data - what I am objecting to is the response. When Google began to pirate Disney's IP, Disney didn't immediately offer them a data sharing deal (that also somehow doesn't provide access to the IP) - they sued.
The WMF has $296M in assets and they are grubbing for the pocket change that big tech throws at them for the fruits of the unpaid labor in Wikipedia. Why aren't they suing for us? They are the stewards of the corpus.
Has WMF even threatened the big tech owners with a good time, or were they simply salivating for the addition to their bottom line? Did they tell them to download the database? Did they attempt to ban their servers? Or did they simply provide big tech with privileged access to data they do not own?
While clearly commentary from the community will be more interesting than from it outside of it, I don't begrudge analysis or reporting from traditional media outlets - or do we want this all to be a private matter that 404 Media and the like don't cover, allowing the theft (and union busting) to continue apace?
In any case, I'll show you mine.
[Removed a reference to a different comment that I should have investigated more deeply.]
Edit:
You know, I was polite about this in this comment, but now: screw you. My arguments above are why I attacked this garbage, bloviating post. I have more skin in this game in my pinky finger than you have in your entire body, so I have every right to an informed, detailed opinion that you don't get to shut down by mining for a comment where I said "GPTs are useful to experts but problematic in the hands of the general public; also, I don't personally use generative AI" – such a controversial statement. Really shows I'm sucking on the teat of Big AI that I don't even use their product.
Original:
I appreciate that and your contributions (I would've believed you if you'd just said you had), and I just wish you'd established that before attacking someone else for not having volunteered contributions and tried to claim volunteers' work is being "stolen".
Now with that: where on Earth was I "appealing to authority"? You're just making up logical fallacies I didn't even use. My links to The Signpost and the Meta-Wiki both have their own sources and valid explanations. As for "ad hom", if you can attack people for being outsiders, I could absolutely question you for the same thing when you failed to assert you'd done anything within the project.
She runs the foundation and is firing union workers. I'm just writing commentary. We are not the same.
Volunteers' work is stolen no matter if it is my own or others - me being an editor has no bearing on that.
Hmm: "Source: ~50,000+ contributions to Wikimedia projects."
My actual sources for statements of fact were already listed. It's a shorthand for "This is my personal position as an experienced editor that this is an overreaction" that you're warping in bad-faith.
The volunteers' work is in no way being stolen. All contributors agree to release their content in perpetuity under CC-BY-SA (or similar licences that preceded it), meaning that all content is free for anyone to use, including commercial uses and derivatives, with the only restrictions being requiring attribution (credit the original contributor) and releasing under an equivalent license. The WMF can't restrict access to any use complying with that license. Meaning that if AI companies want to scrape Wikipedia's content for a compliant use, they will and they are fully legally permitted to.
The Disney example is not apt: Disney produces content to make money, and reserves all rights to that content. It is not intended to be free nor to make money for third parties (absent a licensing agreement), and they were right to sue when AI companies misused their content. Wikipedia's goals of creating a large collection of quality information and making it available to everyone for free are far from the same. The WMF does not own the content anyway, only the servers where the content resides.
The WMF negotiating paid privileged access to data streams for these large clients is a win for everyone. The purpose of Wikipedia is to disseminate information, not gatekeep it, and the WMF has literally no right to decide who can access it and who cannot. AI agents' ridiculous server demands threatened to impede access for everyone else, and the deals they have made sidestep that impending problem while also generating some revenue for the WMF.
The Wikipedia community (its editors) could decide not to allow its content to be used by AI, but it has not. It would be very legally complicated, anyway, given the content's license.
Why do you think the license allows for big tech to produce derivative works that are not licensed CC-BY-SA?
If WMF has no right to decide who can access it and who cannot, how can they sell privileged access to who can access it? Frankly, that assertion fails on its face.
“Maybe its time for wikipedia to die and for the copyleft corpus of data to evolve into something new” Was not on my bingocard and yet feels appropriate for the times.
Information would not be lost but the public image of the web if Wikipedia stops existing would scatter overnight.
This is all part of the plan for techno fascists. They need the Internet to fracture and become a place where everyone is trapped in a bubble of personalised propaganda that they control.
That's why they're acquiring/consolidating and destroying all non-fascist sources across the media/web, after multiple decades of constructing pro-fascist alternatives.
I prefer the alternate reality that matches how I read that headline.
Me too, man, I was so confused
everyday is a reminder to not support anything, ever
copy and paste this under every post, and I'll upvote it every time
Seems like openly socialist projects are now the only ones worth donating to.
We have withdrawn our support.
I stopped my monthly donation.
RIP Wikipedia