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.
From a brief skim, the list includes pretty much all active Arbitration Enforcement (AE) admins.
For those not in the loop, AE is the main mechanism to enforce civility and neutrality in contentious areas (obvious stuff like Israel-Palestine, American Politics, but also India-Pakistan, casteism, etc etc). It removes editors that are obviously only on the site to astroturf a specific belief relating to a globally controversial topic.
This requires painstaking review of one's conduct and is the main reason Wikipedia is not astroturfed in the same way Reddit or other discussion forums are.
If the strike goes forward, Wikipedia will have a massive realignment towards whatever political groups can amass the most accounts agreeing with them.
Grokipedia would unironically become more neutral in a year.
Astroturf is not the right word, because appearing to be grassroots isn't how you sell your perspective on Wikipedia. Most of the people stopped from editing contentious topics on Wikipedia are in all likelihood more sincere about their beliefs than average. The more organized and professional they are about shilling, the better they do.
> The more organized and professional they are about shilling, the better they do.
This is incorrect.
Shills do well when they contribute outside of the topic area, memorize wiki-law, and only coordinate to !vote in contentious high-impact discussions. e.g. requested moves, reliable sources noticeboard discussions, and RfCs. They are seen as "normal" Wikipedia editors.
Professionally organized shills are unable to do this since they must ensure most of their time is "on-task" and find it difficult to justify doing non-shilling work. This works well on sites like Reddit or HackerNews. It does not work on Wikipedia.
For starters, discussion outcomes are moderated and closers do not count votes. Closers look at your history and assign lower weight to editors that appear only to be interested in a particular area.
Other mechanisms include a 500 edit minimum for certain areas + a "balanced editing restriction" (maintained by Tamzin, the same person starting the strike) which tracks %age of edits by subject area and can impose a maximum of 30% in the contentious subject.
Trying to skate under these bare minimums is similar to money-laundering by making cash deposits of $9999. It looks even more suspicious at Arbitration Enforcement.
You need someone who'll can non-professionally shoot-the-shit at random hours to maintain the cover story despite it not being a clear requirement.
Currently, the best shill-farm is run by the /r/Palestine subreddit. If you join their Discord, you can participate yourself! https://discord.com/invite/hhsG4QTf9n
Essentially, you're given free rein to edit as you see fit with an encouragement to make many uncontroversial edits & befriend normal editors. You do not know who else is part of the project. Then you are only "activated" by the Discord mod to !vote in high-impact RfCs/discussions, e.g. officially recognizing the Gaza Genocide.
This avoids creating a clear paper trail of collusion and means it's difficult for someone to infiltrate/burn the network. It also avoids the "cliqueyness" that typical farms display. If editors are part of a professional group, they will either edit collaboratively and can be ID'd with a network diagram or completely avoid each other even when they should have some overlap.
It's been going on for a few years now as a continuation of other farms. It's one of the main reasons there's been such a slant towards Palestine onwiki lately.
Yes, it's been reported many times by many people. It is an open secret at this point and Arbitration has failed at actioning this.
So far, the only people who have been banned were the ones dumb enough to re-use the same username on Discord as Wikipedia, so now you get a warning not to do that during onboarding. Otherwise, it's too difficult to prove participation.
Considering Wikipedia has remained high quality for so long, you're going to have to expand on this. As is, it exudes the same naivety as "the building hasn't gotten robbed, so why are we spending money on security?"
I'm sure they're effective at maintaining the appearance of objectivity, so I agree that things will look terribly biased if they take a collective leave. That it will actually be worse on contentious topics, I'm not so sure if. My assumption for Wikipedia on any contentious topic, is that professionals have been gaming the system for so long that you're going to see very competent propaganda.
Basically I think it's good if people stop trusting Wikipedia on contentious topics.
No. So if you're OK with having the most respectable wrong beliefs about a contentious topic, go for it. It's basically the political equivalent of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".
Just want to express gratitude for you and all who contributed to a Wikipedia "hand crafted with love and respect". Your contributions will last-- some of us set up Kiwix and a local copy of pre-AI Wikipedia that we'll keep forever, GFS style. No matter what happens your work will be preserved and used.
Wikipedia is a threat to the technofeodalist AI mind shaping consortium.
As long as it's reasonably decent, the AI can't go full biased without consequences, but once it's gone there's nowhere normal people can easily to go and get a good enough sanity check.
If I saw this comment 5 years ago, I would have thought you were some crazy conspiracy nut. Today I read it and worry that you might be right. I wonder what I will think seeing this sentiment 5 years from now.
I personally don't know if the world is on some sort of precipice. It seems like that's possibly the case. The strongest piece of evidence is that many of the rich and powerful, including those big tech leaders, are behaving like it is and that they think they're close to some sort of victory.
> 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.
That brings to mind an interesting parallel: I spent over ~2 years actively editing Waze for multiple hours every day. I don't fly much, but I remember taking notes about changes and taking my laptop out when I had a chance (wherever I was) to correct the map to better-match reality. While I originally started because the area I edited had way too much basemap[1], I quickly realized how vigorous the editing process could be when the end goal was to provide a map of driveable roads.
In some cases, the signal-to-noise ratio was so bad that I selectively nuked large parts of whole cities just to redraw them more-correctly.
I was producing good results that unambiguously had better validity than what I started with. The flurry of activity had me rise up quickly through both the editor ranks, and also the role-rankings.
It felt good.
But eventually, I got to see my careful well-researched edits be reverted by either stupid people or stupid bots. I didn't like this; I started editing Waze to make better maps of my area so I could have better maps with which to navigate with. That was awesome, but I finished those maps. So I branched out to improve adjacent areas and finished those maps, too. That also felt awesome.
I was motivated by improvement, not by competition.
When the competition showed up to re-arrange my work in ways that didn't make sense, I dropped out of editing maps on Waze as a serious pastime. I don't want to actively compete; I just want to passively fix.
I still fix things here or there, but months (instead of hours) will go by between edits.
And that's OK, I think: It still works better than it did before I put the effort in.
[1]: Oh, right. Basemap. We don't really have a single, official, freely-usable/government-supplied road map source in the US. We instead have counties doing their things with their formats, and 50 differnt states doing whatever they do, and sometimes cities with their own ways, with only the US Census Bureau's old TIGER database covering the whole gamut.
That conglomerate dataset is a damned mess, and that damnednness of that mess varies from place to place, but that damned mess is what Waze had to work with for the initial map import.
That initial import is known as "basemap."
And TIGER is cool and all (I remember an Internet where online census-provided TIGER maps were the only online maps), but it's really geared towards census-takers. It can include every private driveway, and every cowpath -- and it can include them as regular roads. I've cleaned up thousands of square miles of basemap in my area.
I have a hard time with the idea that Wikipedia is unbiased when the main source in most cases is news reporting. Wikipedia is a societal form of Gell-Mann Amnesia.
This is not entirely fair. The overwhelming majority of Wikipedia is not meaningless politics, but stated facts backed by decent sources.
The phenomenon you are referring to usually happens in areas where there is ideological or political friction. Sure, some articles can be biased, because staying perfectly factual in the middle of an active political debate or social change is difficult for most people. But in that case, there is still the option to edit the page or start a discussion.
If something is created by a community and editable by anyone, then yes, you can safely assume that certain topics will not be perfectly unbiased. But the fact that you can see the sources, edit history, and discussions that led to a given decision is already a major advantage.
Personally, I do not know a better alternative. I have a friend who told me Wikipedia is biased, so he refuses to use it. When I asked him what he uses instead, he said, completely seriously, “X is my main source of information.”
> But in that case, there is still the option to edit the page or start a discussion.
Honestly, I think on any politicised topic, that’s a waste of time - there’s a large contingent of Wikipedia editors with a shared deeply ingrained perspective that will reliably back each other up. There are better uses of one’s time than fighting such a losing battle.
> Personally, I do not know a better alternative. I have a friend who told me Wikipedia is biased, so he refuses to use it. When I asked him what he uses instead, he said, completely seriously, “X is my main source of information.”
I tend to use AI to surface sources and concepts, and then go read the sources for myself to verify the AI’s claims. AI has a strong tendency to e.g. misrepresent what journal articles say, but (if they are open access or otherwise available-and they generally are if an AI is citing them) you can then read them yourself and make up your own mind.
AI has genuinely taught me things I didn’t know before about topics of interest to me-e.g. Islamic history-but I’m careful to verify its claims with reliable sources rather than just trusting them-which of course one should do with Wikipedia too
>I have a friend who told me Wikipedia is biased, so he refuses to use it. When I asked him what he uses instead, he said, completely seriously, “X is my main source of information.”
I guess that was a few years ago? Because now he also has Grokipedia ("from the guy that brought you X")...
For a long time, traditional encyclopedias had a much better track record on topics related to politics and society, simply because their editor selection process largely eliminated single-issue crusading. You wouldn't be picked to lead a particular domain unless your academic track record made it clear that you're level-headed.
But I think that AI, just like your X friend anecdote, actually illustrates an interesting point: most of the time, when we consult some sort of an online reference, we're not doing anything important, so the accuracy is not critical. Quite often, we're just trying to validate our beliefs or win online arguments. An LLM that's 90% accurate but sounds 120% authoritative (and almost always willing to support your priors) is perfect for that.
> The overwhelming majority of Wikipedia is not meaningless politics, but stated facts backed by decent sources.
This is true of good articles, but the overwhelming majority of Wikipedia tends to lack citations or, worse, cites sources that don't actually support the stated facts.
If an account in good standing adds a cited sentence the likelihood that anyone will actually go and check the source to confirm it supports the sentence is low. It's more likely that the edit will be reverted for other reasons.
Citogenesis is also a real problem, and wildly under-documented.
And most people who read Wikipedia do not take the time to examine all of the sources (if they're even able to - just cite a book if you want to make something up), read through the edit history, and get up to speed on the article-specific politics playing out on the talk page.
Still, it's better than everything else out there.
That's being overly charitable. Wikipedia articles will often frequently lack sources even on scientific articles and make up completely false history (like a Welsh king who has never existed). Bias is an issue, yes, but it's not the only issue.
i'm not sure you're why you're being downvoted, relying on journalism is the weakest part of wikipedia, far and away, because it affects accuracy, which is what gell man amnesia is about, not bias. in comparison bias, in general, seems to happen regardless of sourcing.
Also plenty of articles on WIki that got co-opted as being political got locked and nobody can edit them so the article only reflects one side of the argument giving massively biased often false view.
"Gell-Man" is an unfounded toy theory invented by an author without any research, using a colleague's name without permission to make it sound more authorative. It's hokum.
Also, I basically stopped visiting my building’s first floor because all the amenities I need are on my level now. I’m not sure I agree with the whole “buildings need foundations” stuff anymore.
I’ve seen cases where Wikipedia is completely missing any coverage of some topic, but AIs can cover it easily, because they are capable of doing a few web searches and pulling up relevant news articles or journal articles.
Admittedly this is mainly an issue for the long tail of more obscure topics. And of course AI is still reliant on some human to produce those articles it is using as input. But Wikipedia isn’t in the picture.
That is not the case, sorry. Pre-2015 Wikipedia was as honest and unbiased as we can get. Now the political, historical, philosophical segments of English Wikipedia is very biased and I cannot recommend or support it.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
The "abstract Wikipedia" just seems like a solved problem with LLMs.
However sceptical of "AI" you are, "give me the information on this page in my preferred language" is the kind of task they excel at. (I won't use the word translate). It wouldn't even require prioritising the English Wikipedia: any agent today could one shot a task like "check the Wikipedia pages in all languages for X, summarize the results and note any disagreements between them".
Abstract wikipedia is taking a symbolic AI approach instead of an LLM or other statistical approach. The hope is (as i understand it) that this will provide reliability, predictability and better extend to languages that don't have a large corpus of text to train things on.
Personally i think its a bit of a wild bet, that seems especially surprising in the modern context. Guess we'll have to see if it pans out.
I'd kind of expect that they do better with translation if one of the languages on either end is English due to the amount of input they get in it compared to this abstract language (even in the world of human translation, translating stuff into English as a "pivot language" and then doing every translation from the English translation rather than the original text is not an uncommon practice).
LLMs are great with minority languages compared to almost anything else. Including better than the by the natural language generation employed to use Abstract Wikipedia, which whiffs at relatively large languages like Zulu and Xhosa, let alone many of the rarer languages that popular LLMs speak fluently.
I've made a significant number of edits to Wikipedia over the years. I probably have an account but generally don't even bother to sign in because I don't care about credit or a dynamic IP that will change in a week being recorded in the edit history, which they've apparently stopped doing anyway.
My most recent edit (a minor addition to a technical article) was instantaneously reverted as "suspected vandalism" by a bot, an unambiguous false positive. The bot seemed to think I was going to follow its instructions if I thought it was a false positive instead of finding that irritating and concluding that I should stop making edits if having them actually go through requires me to fight with a broken AI.
You don't have to report the false positive, the link to the place to do it is just included in explanatory edit summary so that you can conveniently use it if you want to. (The reported ones eventually are reviewed by multiple other editors, and then, true or false, are included in the training data to improve the accuracy). The retrained bot is measured against the human-verified vandalism and non-vandalism data so that the bot is expected to generate 1% false positives of all the reverts it does.
By the way, the bot will only revert an edit once, so you can undo that revert and the edit goes back in (at least until a human editor decides it should be reverted). The bot has available to it not just the change text and its placement in the existing article text, but also meta information such as the editor's account information (and I believe logged-out edits happen to get dinged more often simply because those are the major source of vandalizing edits).
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.
> 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.
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.
This gets at one of the biggest flaws in Wikipedia, IMO. I think the notability standard is way too strict and gives way too much weight to main stream media sources as the blessed arbiters of what is notable.
Given that editors are pseudo-anonymous, there are some limitations on enforcing this. Sure you could term-limit a given account but the same person could have several accounts. I know sock puppets are not technically allowed but it's not entirely possible to prevent without sacrificing the anonymity of account ownership.
> 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.
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.
Regardless, even if you think its not a neccesary expenditure (obviously there is a big gap between bare minimum and healthy), its still an expenditure on hosting the site. The person i was responding to was claiming it wasnt related to the website.
I don't think that's true at all. I have to go pretty far up the Org tree at my corporate job to get to 300 engineers and that encompasses functionality easily broader than "running Wikipedia" in scope and scale.
I don't think you understand the scale of "running Wikipedia". I do. I worked there for years when there were 100 engineers and they were severely understaffed.
Wikipedia is: mediawiki (and its development), wikimedia cloud services (which I built) that runs tools and provides services for developers (including volunteers and tool authors), server/network infrastructure, wikidata, search, etc.
Mediawiki itself is extremely complicated to build and run, and it's running for numerous languages across multiple projects (wikipedia, commons, wikidata, wiktionary, etc etc).
I'm leaving out a lot of the other things handled by the engineering teams, but it's considerably more complex than you think it is.
18-24 months is a typical runway for a healthy American startup. As a mature nonprofit with a very predictable revenue source, 17 months is well within reason. Runways get shorter as you scale and stabilize, not longer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> The actual physical cost of hosting Wikipedia is < $5 million per year.
This is always a silly point. What do you plan to do with the servers if you don't hire people to plug them in or software engineers to maintain the software?
I think there are things to criticize WMF budget about, but the website wouldn't exist if you only paid for the web server. Legal is important. Trust and safety is important. Having people maintain the software is important. Having people on call in case the site goes down at 1am is important. Having people write new software features is important to stay relavent.
That's not to say i agree with everything WMF spends money on, but there is a lot more to running a major website then just buying a bunch of servers.
I'm skeptical. How much do they actually spend on necessary legal work?
What do you mean by "trust and safety"? We're talking about a public community edited website here not a bank or a healthcare provider, I wouldn't expect there to be any PII.
How much software maintenance is really required and could that not be left largely to the community at this point? It seems like an extremely mature stack. Am I missing something obvious?
I agree that you need someone on call and I appreciate that they serve a massive amount of traffic. But then $5 million per year is a similarly massive estimate for a hosting budget.
IMO their stated mission would be better served by putting the funds towards the research and development of a more distributed and resilient system that could be hosted by community members. If they truly aim to preserve and disseminate the totality of human knowledge then they should be actively attempting to brace for both their own downfall as well as broader political instability and technological upheaval.
> Having people write new software features is important to stay relavent.
Going to have to hard disagree with that one. They aren't a startup or a for profit company they're effectively an archival service. "Staying relevant" is the last thing they should be doing IMO.
> I'm skeptical. How much do they actually spend on necessary legal work?
A non-zero amount.
This isn't like a huge part of their budget, but people sue wikipedia constantly. Someone has to deal with that. We're also seeing a more complicated regulatory environment with new privacy laws, new nsfw laws, new social media laws. Someone has to keep track of those developments, figure which apply, and figure out what needs to be done to comply with them.
> What do you mean by "trust and safety"? We're talking about a public community edited website here not a bank or a healthcare provider,
And what happens when someone in an edit war makes death threats to another editor. What happens when they figure out where that person lives and show up at their house? Big public communities have more Trust&safety needs not less. We want people to feel safe editing Wikipedia.
And then you also have people who are arrested for their edits to Wikipedia (e.g. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/05/eff-launches-new-offli... ). Often there is not a whole lot anyone can do about that, but having someone at WMF advocating for them where they can seems like a worthy thing to do.
Its also important to keep in mind, last year at a wikipedia event someone brought a gun and attempted to commit suicide on stage (traumatizig most of the attendees). The previous year the same event had a bomb threat. Part of trust and safety's job is to ensure proper security procedures for in person events
> I wouldn't expect there to be any PII.
People post PII to wikipedia all the time. You are right that WMF intentionally collects less than most, but people post PII to dox others all the time.
> How much software maintenance is really required and could that not be left largely to the community at this point? It seems like an extremely mature stack. Am I missing something obvious?
I'm mostly just claiming the amount is not zero. There is a lot of room to debate specifics. However stuff does pop up. Security vulns happen. Software needs to be updated to work with updates dependencies (php has been making a lot of breaking changes lately). The AI boom has made access patterns shift causing caches to be less effective then before. Sometimes servers die and you need to swap out a replacement. Etc etc. There is always something.
> IMO their stated mission would be better served by putting the funds towards the research and development of a more distributed and resilient system that could be hosted by community members. If they truly aim to preserve and disseminate the totality of human knowledge then they should be actively attempting to brace for both their own downfall as well as broader political instability and technological upheaval.
They do offer database downloads, which are mirrored extensively.
The thing with most distributed solutions is the make tradeoffs which make the product worse. Often they are rigid, and have poor latency characteristics. You could spend a lot of money trying to make a better distributed system only to get nowhere. I think most wikipedians would prefer WMF focus on lower risk ventures.
> > Having people write new software features is important to stay relavent.
> Going to have to hard disagree with that one. They aren't a startup or a for profit company they're effectively an archival service. "Staying relevant" is the last thing they should be doing IMO.
That's a debatable point, but i do think users eventually drift away if nobody fixes the bugs and frustrations they encounter. To be clear though, i dont think every software feature wmf works on is a good idea. Actually i think quite a few are stupid. But i think some are needed.
----
Anyways, my point is that all these things add up, and they are important at least to some extent. I'm sure you could dig in to these items and find parts of each that could be cut. All i want to say is they should not be eliminated entirely. I think to make fair criticisms of WMF budget people need to do the actual digging and not just say any money not spent on a server is wasted money.
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.
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.
Posting this without actually looking at what these stand for is more than useless.
People need to be paid. People want benefits. People need to be taught how to edit. Children need to be taught how to research. People need to be brought together to figure out where the site and the tech is going. People want to feel safe participating in their community. If Wikipedia had only ever been "server costs" it would be nowhere close to what it is today.
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.
> If the unions goal is to raid donations and get an increasing share, that could potentially go bad.
Why would you assume that is the unions goal? That the employees of Wikipedia will suddenly have as their purpose to raid donations from the foundation, instead of promoting the values they probably started there for?
Unions gives the employees a
voice representing them, and it gives the organisation someone to talk to and negotiate with. This can be highly advantageous to the organisation as well, since when you have someone to negotiate with, and make deals with, it opens up more possibilities. In places with strong functioning unions (e.g. Scandinavia) they can often function as a moderating force, keeping salaries low when times are bad, and an pragmatic partner when things like working times needs to change.
Non-profit executives are even more capable and better situated to "raid donations" or change the direction of the mission, and can do so a lot easier when there is no organized labor force to push back against it.
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.
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.
did you mean to reply to my comment? if yes, can I ask you to explain what do you mean by assumption? where is that coming from?
regarding WMF (and other non-profits, like Mozilla), this is a well-known phenomenon - regarding C-suite compensation (it's usually about risk aversion, and that the board or whatever foundations have, is also usually sitting on other non-profits, and rarely they optimize by moving to the cheapest place and hiring folks for much cheaper, etc)
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”?
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?
people enjoy doing high-status things and will trade off pay for status. asking for equal pay as low-status work is essentially asking to have your cake and eat it too
Can you name me a single job where the tradeoff is "You won't get paid much because this position is so respectable"?
There are respectable jobs where you don't get paid much because the area of work simply does not generate much money (charity), or because they're being exploited and guilt tripped into working hard because of their mission (charity), and there are jobs which are respectable primarily because they pay very well...
But there are no jobs where you're "status-compensated", where you are paid less but that's okay, because the job is so respectable so it's okay to pay you less.
Your edit is comparing opposites, basically making the ops point for them.
You work at google for money. Money is high status under capitalism.
You work at Wikipedia for status in the traditional sense - you trade capitalist status (the salary) for the higher actual status of working for a non profit.
No one thinks non-profit work is ‘high-status.’ People do it because making the world better in some way is more personally motivating than figuring out how to put video ads on refrigerators or whatever.o
Ok, I don't necessarily disagree, but it is thus living your values, which at the very least increases ones self confidence and self perception of status.
Whether one thinks that improves one's status in the eyes of others imo depends on one's cynicism. "Whatever, I'm living my values, they just don't get it. Maybe others will one day."
That's how I see it for myself anyway, if I'm being honest. But in the end I don't think there's any better path to happiness and fulfillment than living my values.
I'd love to live in a world where working for a non-profit was high status. Unfortunately that's just not the world we live in. Maybe if you are someone high up at a well known charity, but the bulk of the people keeping non-profits running do not get status from their work.
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.
Compared to, say, construction work... it's kinda OK. It won't mess your body up as badly, you do get to stay out of the rain, and it pays about the same.
There's a huge difference, though, between tech jobs. Some are Jira mills, where you spend your days picking up Jira tickets, completing them, arguing about sprints and story points, soullessly going through to motions of writing software without any of the joy of writing software. Some are more joyful, where you actually take ownership of large chunks of software that people actually use. Some are further along that spectrum and you're the only person who knows how the software works and life is a continual stressful fight against stupid business decisions while keeping the plates spinning.
And as for anyone anywhere getting involved... no, not really. I would say it's harder to get a job in Big Tech than it is to get a construction job, for sure. And you're more reliably going to have a solid income as a plasterer or bricklayer than as a programmer these days.
They lost their engineering aspect and are normal businesses now that treat their employees like replaceable cogs and cost centers like all enterprise shops. Nothing particularly bad about tech as they pay better than most other enterprise shops. It is more that they are no longer the tech/engineering led places they once were.
it's still ridiculously good compared to the alternatives, IME it's that a huge cohort of people came into tech during COVID and that was not a normal market. Now things are tightening up and the sense of entitlement is on display.
I've been doing this for a long time, and I remembering quiting my sales job to make 50% less as a developer, but I loved the work, the growth opportunities were amazing and playing the long game worked out.
Heck no! Working in tech is an absolute nightmare! The pay is excellent which is why people do it, but the actual work environment sucks. Agile and modern performance review culture means that you are constantly pressured to work faster and churn out more code to keep your job (quality of course is never a priority). The "shift left" movement means that more and more work (testing, infrastructure, product management) gets heaped on developers plates. The burnout rate is sky high.
Tech is an awful industry to live in. It just happens to be one of the few jobs in America that can reliably provide enough money for a decent quality of life. Whether you can actually enjoy that life is more up in the air.
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.
> 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.
> ... 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.
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.
Why do the benefits of logistics go to people at the top of the food chain rather than being spread out evenly among everyone? That type of democratization of the benefits is the exact type of thing unions are meant to achieve.
The obvious rebuttal to that framing would be that if those workers are not able to create that value on their own (such as by starting their own business or bringing their expertise to a firm with more favorable terms) then they aren't actually contributing that outsized value, the company itself is. And if they are able to do so but choose not to, then they are not being exploited.
There is no such thing as exploitation with that mindset. That sweatshop worker isn't being exploited, they just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and open their own sweatshop.
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.
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.
>"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.
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.
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"
Looking at her resume, I don't see anything about writing encyclopedias or keeping them online.
I think "Wall Street person" is a reasonable description. Perhaps "Career government person with a Wall Street background", which still doesn't give her any background to understand at a deep level what Wikipedia's editors and staff do day-to-day.
A lot of what people do at Wikimedia is try and thread a compromise path through various factions of stakeholders. I could see how career diplomat would have some transferable skills.
these demands are also embarassingly vague and based on situational judgement. They can claim that there's no transparency, accountability, consultation and that inconsistency continues regardless of what happens, if they don't like the outcome. I'd have a lot more sympathy if they asked for some concrete things, even if those were specifically defined funding or programs. "The ability to safely dissent." - WTF does that mean? where do you draw the line? We've all worked with that person who thinks they're "dissenting" when in reality they're just being an asshole.
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"?
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.
This smells like astroturf as it makes absolutely no sense.
> If Wikipedia has excess reserves, that money should be directed to a worthy cause, not just the people at its office
What does this mean? What principle is being articulated here? Organizations should donate to charity instead of paying their workers?
> trying to milk monopoly rents out of Wikipedia will be its (long and slow) death sentence.
Monopoly rents? What monopoly? What rents? Are you saying that employees asking for a better workplace is the equivalent of "trying to milk monopoly rents"?
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.
The article did not mention demands for exorbitant raises, the people they fired seem to have been fired without cause, and there is no example of what "a worthy cause" is here.
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.
I don’t think there is any dispute about this, the question is to what degree? No one is advocating enslaving the employees and similarly no one (I think) is advocating for spending 100% of an organization’s resources on the salaries of existing employees. So how do we find the right spot in between? With a traditional for profit company, I can comfortably say that employees should do whatever they can to demand as much as they can because the alternative is yielding the wealth to the shareholder class. I don’t have a similar principle for how not-for-profit employees ought to behave because the moral calculus seems more complex.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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.
If you want to help Wikipedia, the best thing you can do is contribute to articles. Time and expertise is always going to be a more valuable donation than anything monentary.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
> 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.
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."
It doesn’t matter because they don’t control anything tangible - which is the point. Just like the 501(c)3 that openAI was.
Read for knowledge:
Bernadette Meehan became CEO on January 20, 2026, recruited from a career that included Wall Street stints at J.P. Morgan and Lehman Brothers, a spokesperson role at the National Security Council, senior leadership at the Obama Foundation, and most recently a posting as U.S. Ambassador to Chile. Four months in, the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki is fired, the team that personifies community service is dissolved, and the union is in open confrontation.
This person is a loyal PE capitalist and that’s the whole point.
It's not at all like the structure OpenAI was. OpenAI had a bizarre structure where the non-profit held shares in a for-profit sub-corporation. That's not how WMF is set up.
Did this person even have stints in PE at those firms? You can think someone is bad without throwing around the names of the bogeyman du jour as if you're actually making a meanigful argument.
All I can say is the anticapitalist train isn’t new, I’m just glad people are starting to get on, though tbh it’s annoying how illiterate they are in the history and theory. I doubt it will stick but this is the most excitement I’ve seen since Occupy though.
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.
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_...
From a brief skim, the list includes pretty much all active Arbitration Enforcement (AE) admins.
For those not in the loop, AE is the main mechanism to enforce civility and neutrality in contentious areas (obvious stuff like Israel-Palestine, American Politics, but also India-Pakistan, casteism, etc etc). It removes editors that are obviously only on the site to astroturf a specific belief relating to a globally controversial topic.
This requires painstaking review of one's conduct and is the main reason Wikipedia is not astroturfed in the same way Reddit or other discussion forums are.
If the strike goes forward, Wikipedia will have a massive realignment towards whatever political groups can amass the most accounts agreeing with them.
Grokipedia would unironically become more neutral in a year.
Astroturf is not the right word, because appearing to be grassroots isn't how you sell your perspective on Wikipedia. Most of the people stopped from editing contentious topics on Wikipedia are in all likelihood more sincere about their beliefs than average. The more organized and professional they are about shilling, the better they do.
> The more organized and professional they are about shilling, the better they do.
This is incorrect.
Shills do well when they contribute outside of the topic area, memorize wiki-law, and only coordinate to !vote in contentious high-impact discussions. e.g. requested moves, reliable sources noticeboard discussions, and RfCs. They are seen as "normal" Wikipedia editors.
Professionally organized shills are unable to do this since they must ensure most of their time is "on-task" and find it difficult to justify doing non-shilling work. This works well on sites like Reddit or HackerNews. It does not work on Wikipedia.
For starters, discussion outcomes are moderated and closers do not count votes. Closers look at your history and assign lower weight to editors that appear only to be interested in a particular area.
Other mechanisms include a 500 edit minimum for certain areas + a "balanced editing restriction" (maintained by Tamzin, the same person starting the strike) which tracks %age of edits by subject area and can impose a maximum of 30% in the contentious subject.
Trying to skate under these bare minimums is similar to money-laundering by making cash deposits of $9999. It looks even more suspicious at Arbitration Enforcement.
You need someone who'll can non-professionally shoot-the-shit at random hours to maintain the cover story despite it not being a clear requirement.
Currently, the best shill-farm is run by the /r/Palestine subreddit. If you join their Discord, you can participate yourself! https://discord.com/invite/hhsG4QTf9n
Essentially, you're given free rein to edit as you see fit with an encouragement to make many uncontroversial edits & befriend normal editors. You do not know who else is part of the project. Then you are only "activated" by the Discord mod to !vote in high-impact RfCs/discussions, e.g. officially recognizing the Gaza Genocide.
This avoids creating a clear paper trail of collusion and means it's difficult for someone to infiltrate/burn the network. It also avoids the "cliqueyness" that typical farms display. If editors are part of a professional group, they will either edit collaboratively and can be ID'd with a network diagram or completely avoid each other even when they should have some overlap.
It's been going on for a few years now as a continuation of other farms. It's one of the main reasons there's been such a slant towards Palestine onwiki lately.
Yes, it's been reported many times by many people. It is an open secret at this point and Arbitration has failed at actioning this.
So far, the only people who have been banned were the ones dumb enough to re-use the same username on Discord as Wikipedia, so now you get a warning not to do that during onboarding. Otherwise, it's too difficult to prove participation.
> the best shill-farm is run by the /r/Palestine subreddit
you mean the best one that you know of
The AE admins certainly don't seem to have been broadly useful.
Considering Wikipedia has remained high quality for so long, you're going to have to expand on this. As is, it exudes the same naivety as "the building hasn't gotten robbed, so why are we spending money on security?"
> remained high quality
That was ten years ago. Now, political stuff (countries articles for example) is biased. It really looks like CIA fact book.
Links?
It is probably one of those things, once they are gone you will see just how effective they were.
I'm sure they're effective at maintaining the appearance of objectivity, so I agree that things will look terribly biased if they take a collective leave. That it will actually be worse on contentious topics, I'm not so sure if. My assumption for Wikipedia on any contentious topic, is that professionals have been gaming the system for so long that you're going to see very competent propaganda.
Basically I think it's good if people stop trusting Wikipedia on contentious topics.
> Basically I think it's good if people stop trusting Wikipedia on contentious topics.
Why? Is there a better source of information for those not able to spend years following all news from all sides?
No. So if you're OK with having the most respectable wrong beliefs about a contentious topic, go for it. It's basically the political equivalent of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".
Please provide examples for "the most respectable wrong beliefs". Do you consider, e.g., the climate crisis as one?
Just want to express gratitude for you and all who contributed to a Wikipedia "hand crafted with love and respect". Your contributions will last-- some of us set up Kiwix and a local copy of pre-AI Wikipedia that we'll keep forever, GFS style. No matter what happens your work will be preserved and used.
Wikipedia is a threat to the technofeodalist AI mind shaping consortium.
As long as it's reasonably decent, the AI can't go full biased without consequences, but once it's gone there's nowhere normal people can easily to go and get a good enough sanity check.
If I saw this comment 5 years ago, I would have thought you were some crazy conspiracy nut. Today I read it and worry that you might be right. I wonder what I will think seeing this sentiment 5 years from now.
I personally don't know if the world is on some sort of precipice. It seems like that's possibly the case. The strongest piece of evidence is that many of the rich and powerful, including those big tech leaders, are behaving like it is and that they think they're close to some sort of victory.
> 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.
That brings to mind an interesting parallel: I spent over ~2 years actively editing Waze for multiple hours every day. I don't fly much, but I remember taking notes about changes and taking my laptop out when I had a chance (wherever I was) to correct the map to better-match reality. While I originally started because the area I edited had way too much basemap[1], I quickly realized how vigorous the editing process could be when the end goal was to provide a map of driveable roads.
In some cases, the signal-to-noise ratio was so bad that I selectively nuked large parts of whole cities just to redraw them more-correctly.
I was producing good results that unambiguously had better validity than what I started with. The flurry of activity had me rise up quickly through both the editor ranks, and also the role-rankings.
It felt good.
But eventually, I got to see my careful well-researched edits be reverted by either stupid people or stupid bots. I didn't like this; I started editing Waze to make better maps of my area so I could have better maps with which to navigate with. That was awesome, but I finished those maps. So I branched out to improve adjacent areas and finished those maps, too. That also felt awesome.
I was motivated by improvement, not by competition.
When the competition showed up to re-arrange my work in ways that didn't make sense, I dropped out of editing maps on Waze as a serious pastime. I don't want to actively compete; I just want to passively fix.
I still fix things here or there, but months (instead of hours) will go by between edits.
And that's OK, I think: It still works better than it did before I put the effort in.
[1]: Oh, right. Basemap. We don't really have a single, official, freely-usable/government-supplied road map source in the US. We instead have counties doing their things with their formats, and 50 differnt states doing whatever they do, and sometimes cities with their own ways, with only the US Census Bureau's old TIGER database covering the whole gamut.
That conglomerate dataset is a damned mess, and that damnednness of that mess varies from place to place, but that damned mess is what Waze had to work with for the initial map import.
That initial import is known as "basemap."
And TIGER is cool and all (I remember an Internet where online census-provided TIGER maps were the only online maps), but it's really geared towards census-takers. It can include every private driveway, and every cowpath -- and it can include them as regular roads. I've cleaned up thousands of square miles of basemap in my area.
It's certainly not unbiased, it's IMCO very prone to a pro-western bias.
That said it's still the best we have for most things.
Wikipedia is extremely susceptible to woke laundering, deletionism and overall power tripping.
Wikipedia is absolutely not unbiased, astroturf-free, or low entry, but it was close to that, and it could be.
The first draft of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declaration was very biased, but over time it has been neutered.
I see this as a win for Wikipedia.
Though arguably it being biased during the time of its relevance achieved the goals of the original biased editors.
You’ve managed quite the word soup here. Unless you are a chatbot or regurgitated grok
Gentle suggestion for you to read the guidelines again
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
See: Spanish Flu
I have a hard time with the idea that Wikipedia is unbiased when the main source in most cases is news reporting. Wikipedia is a societal form of Gell-Mann Amnesia.
This is not entirely fair. The overwhelming majority of Wikipedia is not meaningless politics, but stated facts backed by decent sources.
The phenomenon you are referring to usually happens in areas where there is ideological or political friction. Sure, some articles can be biased, because staying perfectly factual in the middle of an active political debate or social change is difficult for most people. But in that case, there is still the option to edit the page or start a discussion.
If something is created by a community and editable by anyone, then yes, you can safely assume that certain topics will not be perfectly unbiased. But the fact that you can see the sources, edit history, and discussions that led to a given decision is already a major advantage.
Personally, I do not know a better alternative. I have a friend who told me Wikipedia is biased, so he refuses to use it. When I asked him what he uses instead, he said, completely seriously, “X is my main source of information.”
> But in that case, there is still the option to edit the page or start a discussion.
Honestly, I think on any politicised topic, that’s a waste of time - there’s a large contingent of Wikipedia editors with a shared deeply ingrained perspective that will reliably back each other up. There are better uses of one’s time than fighting such a losing battle.
> Personally, I do not know a better alternative. I have a friend who told me Wikipedia is biased, so he refuses to use it. When I asked him what he uses instead, he said, completely seriously, “X is my main source of information.”
I tend to use AI to surface sources and concepts, and then go read the sources for myself to verify the AI’s claims. AI has a strong tendency to e.g. misrepresent what journal articles say, but (if they are open access or otherwise available-and they generally are if an AI is citing them) you can then read them yourself and make up your own mind.
AI has genuinely taught me things I didn’t know before about topics of interest to me-e.g. Islamic history-but I’m careful to verify its claims with reliable sources rather than just trusting them-which of course one should do with Wikipedia too
>I have a friend who told me Wikipedia is biased, so he refuses to use it. When I asked him what he uses instead, he said, completely seriously, “X is my main source of information.”
I guess that was a few years ago? Because now he also has Grokipedia ("from the guy that brought you X")...
> Personally, I do not know a better alternative.
For a long time, traditional encyclopedias had a much better track record on topics related to politics and society, simply because their editor selection process largely eliminated single-issue crusading. You wouldn't be picked to lead a particular domain unless your academic track record made it clear that you're level-headed.
But I think that AI, just like your X friend anecdote, actually illustrates an interesting point: most of the time, when we consult some sort of an online reference, we're not doing anything important, so the accuracy is not critical. Quite often, we're just trying to validate our beliefs or win online arguments. An LLM that's 90% accurate but sounds 120% authoritative (and almost always willing to support your priors) is perfect for that.
> The overwhelming majority of Wikipedia is not meaningless politics, but stated facts backed by decent sources.
This is true of good articles, but the overwhelming majority of Wikipedia tends to lack citations or, worse, cites sources that don't actually support the stated facts.
If an account in good standing adds a cited sentence the likelihood that anyone will actually go and check the source to confirm it supports the sentence is low. It's more likely that the edit will be reverted for other reasons.
Citogenesis is also a real problem, and wildly under-documented.
And most people who read Wikipedia do not take the time to examine all of the sources (if they're even able to - just cite a book if you want to make something up), read through the edit history, and get up to speed on the article-specific politics playing out on the talk page.
Still, it's better than everything else out there.
> stated facts backed by decent sources.
Like WW2-era articles backed by books wtitten in 2003 from an obscure author. And only this author.
That's being overly charitable. Wikipedia articles will often frequently lack sources even on scientific articles and make up completely false history (like a Welsh king who has never existed). Bias is an issue, yes, but it's not the only issue.
The worst part is when they cite an article that says the opposite of the citing sentence.
So fix it dear Henry.
i'm not sure you're why you're being downvoted, relying on journalism is the weakest part of wikipedia, far and away, because it affects accuracy, which is what gell man amnesia is about, not bias. in comparison bias, in general, seems to happen regardless of sourcing.
Also plenty of articles on WIki that got co-opted as being political got locked and nobody can edit them so the article only reflects one side of the argument giving massively biased often false view.
"Gell-Man" is an unfounded toy theory invented by an author without any research, using a colleague's name without permission to make it sound more authorative. It's hokum.
I've basically stopped using wikipedia entirely since OpenAI Deep Research does a much better job.
Not sure I agree with the whole "human editors" stuff anymore.
Yeah.
Also, I basically stopped visiting my building’s first floor because all the amenities I need are on my level now. I’m not sure I agree with the whole “buildings need foundations” stuff anymore.
Unironically an excellent analogy
How could it ever be perceived as ironic?
Where does OpenAI take its information?
I’ve seen cases where Wikipedia is completely missing any coverage of some topic, but AIs can cover it easily, because they are capable of doing a few web searches and pulling up relevant news articles or journal articles.
Admittedly this is mainly an issue for the long tail of more obscure topics. And of course AI is still reliant on some human to produce those articles it is using as input. But Wikipedia isn’t in the picture.
I need you to think real hard about the second order implications of this...
I too prefer my misinformation delivered with maximum confidence and no accountability.
Is this satire?
Must be :D
> honest, unbiased, astroturf-free
That is not the case, sorry. Pre-2015 Wikipedia was as honest and unbiased as we can get. Now the political, historical, philosophical segments of English Wikipedia is very biased and I cannot recommend or support it.
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...
The organization mitosing from the product
Prop. AB 1940?
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.
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
I think it might be worth remembering that we are talking about human beings not spare parts.
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...
> 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).
The "abstract Wikipedia" just seems like a solved problem with LLMs.
However sceptical of "AI" you are, "give me the information on this page in my preferred language" is the kind of task they excel at. (I won't use the word translate). It wouldn't even require prioritising the English Wikipedia: any agent today could one shot a task like "check the Wikipedia pages in all languages for X, summarize the results and note any disagreements between them".
Abstract wikipedia is taking a symbolic AI approach instead of an LLM or other statistical approach. The hope is (as i understand it) that this will provide reliability, predictability and better extend to languages that don't have a large corpus of text to train things on.
Personally i think its a bit of a wild bet, that seems especially surprising in the modern context. Guess we'll have to see if it pans out.
I'd kind of expect that they do better with translation if one of the languages on either end is English due to the amount of input they get in it compared to this abstract language (even in the world of human translation, translating stuff into English as a "pivot language" and then doing every translation from the English translation rather than the original text is not an uncommon practice).
LLMs are great with minority languages compared to almost anything else. Including better than the by the natural language generation employed to use Abstract Wikipedia, which whiffs at relatively large languages like Zulu and Xhosa, let alone many of the rarer languages that popular LLMs speak fluently.
This program is aimed at getting actual humans to write their actual language. Nothing beats that.
At a minimum, it provides more material to train an LLM on.
It's not a good idea for common languages like German or English or French.
But it is a great idea for indigenous languages that aren't in the training data but many people speak, which was the original purpose.
I am hopeful that it'll create synthetic training data for those groups.
> "give me the information on this page in my preferred language" is the kind of task they excel at.
...So long as you don't mind it introducing random hallucinations into the information.
> It is very difficult to be a productive editor without custom tooling at this point
this is extremely reminiscent of the stackexchange situation
>> Why is Wikipedia losing contributors
Perhaps because their message to new contributors is a consistent "stop trying to make corrections, and go away"?
I've made a significant number of edits to Wikipedia over the years. I probably have an account but generally don't even bother to sign in because I don't care about credit or a dynamic IP that will change in a week being recorded in the edit history, which they've apparently stopped doing anyway.
My most recent edit (a minor addition to a technical article) was instantaneously reverted as "suspected vandalism" by a bot, an unambiguous false positive. The bot seemed to think I was going to follow its instructions if I thought it was a false positive instead of finding that irritating and concluding that I should stop making edits if having them actually go through requires me to fight with a broken AI.
You don't have to report the false positive, the link to the place to do it is just included in explanatory edit summary so that you can conveniently use it if you want to. (The reported ones eventually are reviewed by multiple other editors, and then, true or false, are included in the training data to improve the accuracy). The retrained bot is measured against the human-verified vandalism and non-vandalism data so that the bot is expected to generate 1% false positives of all the reverts it does.
By the way, the bot will only revert an edit once, so you can undo that revert and the edit goes back in (at least until a human editor decides it should be reverted). The bot has available to it not just the change text and its placement in the existing article text, but also meta information such as the editor's account information (and I believe logged-out edits happen to get dinged more often simply because those are the major source of vandalizing edits).
pretty much. if anything, tragically losing the current cabal of ~~commissars~~ editors might make wikipedia great again.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Ok, but what are you saying in "there isn't enough work anymore"? What is "work"? How much is there? Enough for what?
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.
This gets at one of the biggest flaws in Wikipedia, IMO. I think the notability standard is way too strict and gives way too much weight to main stream media sources as the blessed arbiters of what is notable.
The alternative is that the Daily Stormer is usable as a source.
There has to be some mechanism of determining what should and shouldn't be usable as a source.
It would be great if editors had some kind of terms limits to avoid the WikiMafia stuff we commonly see.
Given that editors are pseudo-anonymous, there are some limitations on enforcing this. Sure you could term-limit a given account but the same person could have several accounts. I know sock puppets are not technically allowed but it's not entirely possible to prevent without sacrificing the anonymity of account ownership.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
It is not a lie. Wikipedia does not need 300-325 engineers to run the website.
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.
300 employees is an extremely low number of employees for a project of this scope.
I think some of yall need to think about how this would be run if it was a company. There would be thousands of employees, realistically.
I don't think that's true at all. I have to go pretty far up the Org tree at my corporate job to get to 300 engineers and that encompasses functionality easily broader than "running Wikipedia" in scope and scale.
I don't think you understand the scale of "running Wikipedia". I do. I worked there for years when there were 100 engineers and they were severely understaffed.
Wikipedia is: mediawiki (and its development), wikimedia cloud services (which I built) that runs tools and provides services for developers (including volunteers and tool authors), server/network infrastructure, wikidata, search, etc.
Mediawiki itself is extremely complicated to build and run, and it's running for numerous languages across multiple projects (wikipedia, commons, wikidata, wiktionary, etc etc).
I'm leaving out a lot of the other things handled by the engineering teams, but it's considerably more complex than you think it is.
Ah yes, I too am something of an armchair engineer and I can speak confidently on topics I have no insight into.
17 months of runway for the something with the scale and ambition of Wikipedia is living hand-to-mouth.
18-24 months is a typical runway for a healthy American startup. As a mature nonprofit with a very predictable revenue source, 17 months is well within reason. Runways get shorter as you scale and stabilize, not longer.
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.
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.
Why do orgs like Wikipedia and Mozilla keep hiring corporate CEOs thinking it will bring them anything else than toxic work culture
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.
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.
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.
Usually people who want these roles most are the least suitable for the job.
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200307222956/https://www.gnome...
They never declared bankruptcy.
> 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.
> The actual physical cost of hosting Wikipedia is < $5 million per year.
This is always a silly point. What do you plan to do with the servers if you don't hire people to plug them in or software engineers to maintain the software?
I think there are things to criticize WMF budget about, but the website wouldn't exist if you only paid for the web server. Legal is important. Trust and safety is important. Having people maintain the software is important. Having people on call in case the site goes down at 1am is important. Having people write new software features is important to stay relavent.
That's not to say i agree with everything WMF spends money on, but there is a lot more to running a major website then just buying a bunch of servers.
I'm skeptical. How much do they actually spend on necessary legal work?
What do you mean by "trust and safety"? We're talking about a public community edited website here not a bank or a healthcare provider, I wouldn't expect there to be any PII.
How much software maintenance is really required and could that not be left largely to the community at this point? It seems like an extremely mature stack. Am I missing something obvious?
I agree that you need someone on call and I appreciate that they serve a massive amount of traffic. But then $5 million per year is a similarly massive estimate for a hosting budget.
IMO their stated mission would be better served by putting the funds towards the research and development of a more distributed and resilient system that could be hosted by community members. If they truly aim to preserve and disseminate the totality of human knowledge then they should be actively attempting to brace for both their own downfall as well as broader political instability and technological upheaval.
> Having people write new software features is important to stay relavent.
Going to have to hard disagree with that one. They aren't a startup or a for profit company they're effectively an archival service. "Staying relevant" is the last thing they should be doing IMO.
> I'm skeptical. How much do they actually spend on necessary legal work?
A non-zero amount.
This isn't like a huge part of their budget, but people sue wikipedia constantly. Someone has to deal with that. We're also seeing a more complicated regulatory environment with new privacy laws, new nsfw laws, new social media laws. Someone has to keep track of those developments, figure which apply, and figure out what needs to be done to comply with them.
> What do you mean by "trust and safety"? We're talking about a public community edited website here not a bank or a healthcare provider,
And what happens when someone in an edit war makes death threats to another editor. What happens when they figure out where that person lives and show up at their house? Big public communities have more Trust&safety needs not less. We want people to feel safe editing Wikipedia.
And then you also have people who are arrested for their edits to Wikipedia (e.g. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/05/eff-launches-new-offli... ). Often there is not a whole lot anyone can do about that, but having someone at WMF advocating for them where they can seems like a worthy thing to do.
Its also important to keep in mind, last year at a wikipedia event someone brought a gun and attempted to commit suicide on stage (traumatizig most of the attendees). The previous year the same event had a bomb threat. Part of trust and safety's job is to ensure proper security procedures for in person events
> I wouldn't expect there to be any PII.
People post PII to wikipedia all the time. You are right that WMF intentionally collects less than most, but people post PII to dox others all the time.
> How much software maintenance is really required and could that not be left largely to the community at this point? It seems like an extremely mature stack. Am I missing something obvious?
I'm mostly just claiming the amount is not zero. There is a lot of room to debate specifics. However stuff does pop up. Security vulns happen. Software needs to be updated to work with updates dependencies (php has been making a lot of breaking changes lately). The AI boom has made access patterns shift causing caches to be less effective then before. Sometimes servers die and you need to swap out a replacement. Etc etc. There is always something.
> IMO their stated mission would be better served by putting the funds towards the research and development of a more distributed and resilient system that could be hosted by community members. If they truly aim to preserve and disseminate the totality of human knowledge then they should be actively attempting to brace for both their own downfall as well as broader political instability and technological upheaval.
They do offer database downloads, which are mirrored extensively.
The thing with most distributed solutions is the make tradeoffs which make the product worse. Often they are rigid, and have poor latency characteristics. You could spend a lot of money trying to make a better distributed system only to get nowhere. I think most wikipedians would prefer WMF focus on lower risk ventures.
> > Having people write new software features is important to stay relavent.
> Going to have to hard disagree with that one. They aren't a startup or a for profit company they're effectively an archival service. "Staying relevant" is the last thing they should be doing IMO.
That's a debatable point, but i do think users eventually drift away if nobody fixes the bugs and frustrations they encounter. To be clear though, i dont think every software feature wmf works on is a good idea. Actually i think quite a few are stupid. But i think some are needed.
----
Anyways, my point is that all these things add up, and they are important at least to some extent. I'm sure you could dig in to these items and find parts of each that could be cut. All i want to say is they should not be eliminated entirely. I think to make fair criticisms of WMF budget people need to do the actual digging and not just say any money not spent on a server is wasted money.
You need $140 million/yr for the rest of it?
But if "the open encyclopedia" doesn't spend $50 Million on internal DEI initiatives[0], what's even the point?
[0] https://i.sstatic.net/H35whdaO.jpg
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.
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.
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.
It doesn't have any peers.
Posting this without actually looking at what these stand for is more than useless.
People need to be paid. People want benefits. People need to be taught how to edit. Children need to be taught how to research. People need to be brought together to figure out where the site and the tech is going. People want to feel safe participating in their community. If Wikipedia had only ever been "server costs" it would be nowhere close to what it is today.
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.
> If the unions goal is to raid donations and get an increasing share, that could potentially go bad.
Why would you assume that is the unions goal? That the employees of Wikipedia will suddenly have as their purpose to raid donations from the foundation, instead of promoting the values they probably started there for?
Unions gives the employees a voice representing them, and it gives the organisation someone to talk to and negotiate with. This can be highly advantageous to the organisation as well, since when you have someone to negotiate with, and make deals with, it opens up more possibilities. In places with strong functioning unions (e.g. Scandinavia) they can often function as a moderating force, keeping salaries low when times are bad, and an pragmatic partner when things like working times needs to change.
Non-profit executives are even more capable and better situated to "raid donations" or change the direction of the mission, and can do so a lot easier when there is no organized labor force to push back against it.
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.
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.
Is there any charity (older than five years) where the majority of the money doesn’t go to administrative staff?
yes, check program expense ratios
https://www.charitynavigator.org/discover-charities/best-cha...
but see also
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/blog/arent-the-best-charitie...
and
https://www.givewell.org/
this is all insane. it assumes you want charity forever! the initial assumption is already wrong.
also, back on topic:
Executive Salaries Position Salary (Annual)
Ex-CEO (Katherine Maher) $789,495
COO (Janeen Uzzell) $503,844
CFO (Jaime Villagomez) $386,433
General Counsel (Amanda Keton) $396,514
Current Highest Salaries Position Salary (Annual)
Software Engineering Manager $164,080
Technical Program Manager $159,200
Senior Software Engineer $109,513
Product Designer $95,972
Additional Salary Insights
did you mean to reply to my comment? if yes, can I ask you to explain what do you mean by assumption? where is that coming from?
regarding WMF (and other non-profits, like Mozilla), this is a well-known phenomenon - regarding C-suite compensation (it's usually about risk aversion, and that the board or whatever foundations have, is also usually sitting on other non-profits, and rarely they optimize by moving to the cheapest place and hiring folks for much cheaper, etc)
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”?
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?
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.
I don't think you've ever met anybody who worked for a non-profit in your life.
both my parents worked for non-profits their entire lives
"status-compensated"?
people enjoy doing high-status things and will trade off pay for status. asking for equal pay as low-status work is essentially asking to have your cake and eat it too
Uh...
Can you name me a single job where the tradeoff is "You won't get paid much because this position is so respectable"?
There are respectable jobs where you don't get paid much because the area of work simply does not generate much money (charity), or because they're being exploited and guilt tripped into working hard because of their mission (charity), and there are jobs which are respectable primarily because they pay very well...
But there are no jobs where you're "status-compensated", where you are paid less but that's okay, because the job is so respectable so it's okay to pay you less.
Is working for Wikipedia somehow a higher status job than working for Google?
edit: I'm asking because my 7 year stint as an engineer at Wikipedia hasn't provided me with an endless stream of lucrative job offers.
absolutely and i'm surprised that you don't think so.
e: and to your edit, i'm talking about social/moral status
Can you explain what you mean by social/moral status? I haven't seen a big run of non-profit workers marrying movie stars or becoming Pope.
Isn't the Pope like the canonical high-status non-profit worker?
Yes, but notice that the pope gets paid very well
Your edit is comparing opposites, basically making the ops point for them.
You work at google for money. Money is high status under capitalism.
You work at Wikipedia for status in the traditional sense - you trade capitalist status (the salary) for the higher actual status of working for a non profit.
No one thinks non-profit work is ‘high-status.’ People do it because making the world better in some way is more personally motivating than figuring out how to put video ads on refrigerators or whatever.o
Ok, I don't necessarily disagree, but it is thus living your values, which at the very least increases ones self confidence and self perception of status.
Whether one thinks that improves one's status in the eyes of others imo depends on one's cynicism. "Whatever, I'm living my values, they just don't get it. Maybe others will one day."
That's how I see it for myself anyway, if I'm being honest. But in the end I don't think there's any better path to happiness and fulfillment than living my values.
Sure, but happiness and fulfillment isn't status. Not because there's anything wrong with them but because that's not what "status" means.
I'd love to live in a world where working for a non-profit was high status. Unfortunately that's just not the world we live in. Maybe if you are someone high up at a well known charity, but the bulk of the people keeping non-profits running do not get status from their work.
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.
Compared to, say, construction work... it's kinda OK. It won't mess your body up as badly, you do get to stay out of the rain, and it pays about the same.
There's a huge difference, though, between tech jobs. Some are Jira mills, where you spend your days picking up Jira tickets, completing them, arguing about sprints and story points, soullessly going through to motions of writing software without any of the joy of writing software. Some are more joyful, where you actually take ownership of large chunks of software that people actually use. Some are further along that spectrum and you're the only person who knows how the software works and life is a continual stressful fight against stupid business decisions while keeping the plates spinning.
And as for anyone anywhere getting involved... no, not really. I would say it's harder to get a job in Big Tech than it is to get a construction job, for sure. And you're more reliably going to have a solid income as a plasterer or bricklayer than as a programmer these days.
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.
So... what's actually changed? Is the pay no good now?
They lost their engineering aspect and are normal businesses now that treat their employees like replaceable cogs and cost centers like all enterprise shops. Nothing particularly bad about tech as they pay better than most other enterprise shops. It is more that they are no longer the tech/engineering led places they once were.
My friends who have been there for many years are overall very wealthy and continue to earn enormous amounts. So the pay continues to be good.
it's still ridiculously good compared to the alternatives, IME it's that a huge cohort of people came into tech during COVID and that was not a normal market. Now things are tightening up and the sense of entitlement is on display.
I've been doing this for a long time, and I remembering quiting my sales job to make 50% less as a developer, but I loved the work, the growth opportunities were amazing and playing the long game worked out.
Heck no! Working in tech is an absolute nightmare! The pay is excellent which is why people do it, but the actual work environment sucks. Agile and modern performance review culture means that you are constantly pressured to work faster and churn out more code to keep your job (quality of course is never a priority). The "shift left" movement means that more and more work (testing, infrastructure, product management) gets heaped on developers plates. The burnout rate is sky high.
Tech is an awful industry to live in. It just happens to be one of the few jobs in America that can reliably provide enough money for a decent quality of life. Whether you can actually enjoy that life is more up in the air.
yall are babies, 99% of jobs on earth suck ass but they dont pay half a million
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.
> 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.
> ... 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.
Except it does not work ex-nihilo and the bubble busrt is going to be painful
It doesn't have to; it just has to be good enough for any idiot to operate it, and get good enough results.
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.
Or because the logistics behind scaling are much much much easier than any physical product.
Why do the benefits of logistics go to people at the top of the food chain rather than being spread out evenly among everyone? That type of democratization of the benefits is the exact type of thing unions are meant to achieve.
The obvious rebuttal to that framing would be that if those workers are not able to create that value on their own (such as by starting their own business or bringing their expertise to a firm with more favorable terms) then they aren't actually contributing that outsized value, the company itself is. And if they are able to do so but choose not to, then they are not being exploited.
There is no such thing as exploitation with that mindset. That sweatshop worker isn't being exploited, they just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and open their own sweatshop.
You're misunderstanding your own argument.
Great contribution to the conversation, thanks for sharing it.
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.
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
I would invite you to come experience the trades for a bit, particularly in senior positions.
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.
It is obviously a range. Most of my personal firends work a couple hours a day and get pampered.
>"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.
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.
In what world is Bernadette Meehan a "wall street finance guy"?
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.
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"
Looking at her resume, I don't see anything about writing encyclopedias or keeping them online.
I think "Wall Street person" is a reasonable description. Perhaps "Career government person with a Wall Street background", which still doesn't give her any background to understand at a deep level what Wikipedia's editors and staff do day-to-day.
A lot of what people do at Wikimedia is try and thread a compromise path through various factions of stakeholders. I could see how career diplomat would have some transferable skills.
these demands are also embarassingly vague and based on situational judgement. They can claim that there's no transparency, accountability, consultation and that inconsistency continues regardless of what happens, if they don't like the outcome. I'd have a lot more sympathy if they asked for some concrete things, even if those were specifically defined funding or programs. "The ability to safely dissent." - WTF does that mean? where do you draw the line? We've all worked with that person who thinks they're "dissenting" when in reality they're just being an asshole.
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"?
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.
This smells like astroturf as it makes absolutely no sense.
> If Wikipedia has excess reserves, that money should be directed to a worthy cause, not just the people at its office
What does this mean? What principle is being articulated here? Organizations should donate to charity instead of paying their workers?
> trying to milk monopoly rents out of Wikipedia will be its (long and slow) death sentence.
Monopoly rents? What monopoly? What rents? Are you saying that employees asking for a better workplace is the equivalent of "trying to milk monopoly rents"?
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.
The article did not mention demands for exorbitant raises, the people they fired seem to have been fired without cause, and there is no example of what "a worthy cause" is here.
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.
An organization genuinely dedicated to a mission for common good has even more reasons to share power with its employees in my view
I don’t think there is any dispute about this, the question is to what degree? No one is advocating enslaving the employees and similarly no one (I think) is advocating for spending 100% of an organization’s resources on the salaries of existing employees. So how do we find the right spot in between? With a traditional for profit company, I can comfortably say that employees should do whatever they can to demand as much as they can because the alternative is yielding the wealth to the shareholder class. I don’t have a similar principle for how not-for-profit employees ought to behave because the moral calculus seems more complex.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Update from WMF to community on may 20:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist#Upda...
may 24:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist#Resp...
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
> 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.
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.
Everyone here is a genius because their LLM agrees with everything they say.
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
>> 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.
Nice follow up to "Big tech's hierarchical organisation has come for Wikipedia"
"The content is free. The labor is not."
ewww
https://wikimediafoundation.org/give/manage-your-donation/
Instructions for cancelling your WMF donation.
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.
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.
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?
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.
If you want to help Wikipedia, the best thing you can do is contribute to articles. Time and expertise is always going to be a more valuable donation than anything monentary.
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.
Never been a better time to stop or not donate to Wikipedia.
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.
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.
I agree, but to do that you need _something_ and _someone_ (often multiple someones) to manage all that.
I personally never truste Jimmy Wales. Oh I didn't realize he is behind the "Fandom" sewer too.
FWIW, he mostly only has symbolic influence at this point.
Is Wikimedia going to go IPO?
Don't give Sam Altman any ideas.
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.
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.
Is "anti-labor" a "Big Tech" thing, or a "every employer" thing?
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.
Enshitification at the cost of your employees. Great.
And this surprises you how? Good luck commies. Be careful what you built.
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...
> 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.
> 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?
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
They (private equity) come for everyone eventually.
There’s nowhere left to go.
what does "private equity" mean to you
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."
I think the question was intended more as "what does PE have to do with Wikimedia", not "why is PE a problem".
and which part of this makes any sense at all when applied to the wikimedia foundation
Individual people who own shares of an organization that they do not produce value for, as a wage based laborer
and who exactly owns shares of the 501(c)3 wikimedia foundation?
It doesn’t matter because they don’t control anything tangible - which is the point. Just like the 501(c)3 that openAI was.
Read for knowledge:
Bernadette Meehan became CEO on January 20, 2026, recruited from a career that included Wall Street stints at J.P. Morgan and Lehman Brothers, a spokesperson role at the National Security Council, senior leadership at the Obama Foundation, and most recently a posting as U.S. Ambassador to Chile. Four months in, the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki is fired, the team that personifies community service is dissolved, and the union is in open confrontation.
This person is a loyal PE capitalist and that’s the whole point.
It's not at all like the structure OpenAI was. OpenAI had a bizarre structure where the non-profit held shares in a for-profit sub-corporation. That's not how WMF is set up.
Did this person even have stints in PE at those firms? You can think someone is bad without throwing around the names of the bogeyman du jour as if you're actually making a meanigful argument.
You’ll have to excuse me if I’m not continuing.
All I can say is the anticapitalist train isn’t new, I’m just glad people are starting to get on, though tbh it’s annoying how illiterate they are in the history and theory. I doubt it will stick but this is the most excitement I’ve seen since Occupy though.
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.
But it is safe to trust MechaHitler?
Probably about as safe as trusting the people editing Wikipedia that also are attending Wikipedia Zionist editing conferences I imagine.