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.
From Wikipedia for sure, but feeling like the ongoing cell division has them nearly fully divested from most of their stated mission and "What we do" pages.
Reaching the metastatic end stage of all organizations where the org exists for no purpose beyond continued existence of the org.
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".
> 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.
Except for the 90% or more of the world's 7000-ish languages which have barely any data online.
E.g. the huge CommonCrawl corpus has stats https://commoncrawl.github.io/cc-crawl-statistics/plots/lang... for only 160 languages. English takes up nearly half the corpus, and after the top 16 or so all languages have <1% of the corpus, over half of those 160 have <0.1% and the other 6000+ languages are distributed amongst the <unknown> category. The long tail is very long.
(You'll see people use the term "low-resource language" and then talk about Finnish or Macedonian – if you're not a linguist and you've heard of the language, it's most likely not low-resource ;-))
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).
Maybe I'm special, but as someone who doesn't have an account and just occasionally fixes errors or adds more context I've never had that happening for me. Or actually, once where I correct a fact to something that did not seem obvious, and it got reverted, but by adding it back with a long explanation and references it stuck. Ever since then I kept writing good "commit messages" just like for code and made sure to have reference to back up my claims and it works.
To be fair I try to stay away from pop culture and politically sensitive topics.
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.
I agree there needs to be a line, I just don't particularly like where the line has been drawn. Unfortunately I don't have a great idea for how to do it better. That is why I'm commenting on HN rather than arguing for any particular policy change on wiki.
Huh? The notability standard governs what may be the subject of a wikipedia page and what may not.
Ideological purity is enforced by the reliable source standard, not the notability standard. The Daily Stormer is unquestionably notable. And it has a wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Stormer
> 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.
They're saying that main stream media sources are what can be used to define something is notable or not. The question isn't "Is the Daily Stormer" notable (it is), it's should the daily stormer be usable as a source to determine if something is notable or not (it shouldn't be, obviously).
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.
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" meeting a comment/karma/etc qutoa 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 avoiding money-laundering by making many cash deposits of $9999. You'll be taken to Arbitration Enforcement and look even more suspicious.
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 and do not interact with them on Discord. It is very antisocial in that sense.
You are only "activated" by the Discord mod through direct messages 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's also incompatible with the micromanagement typical of traditional influence operations.
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.
> Professionally organized shills are unable to do this since they must ensure most of their time is "on-task"
Haha, it'd be funny if they sabotaged themselves with red tape around hours billing. I could see it happening - sometimes. But not generally. I assume professional manipulators understand that gaining trust in the Wikipedia bureaucracy is part of the job.
I have a low opinion of spy agencies - but not THAT low. I have an even lower opinion of open Reddit communities ability to get anything done.
Wikipedia bureaucracy is unlike other bureaucracies because there's accountability and it is decentralized.
On Wikipedia, the possibly Israeli intelligence operative known as "Icewhiz" spent years cultivating an account known as "Eostrix" that operated entirely out of Israel-Palestine. They were one day from passing their admin election* before getting banned. A member of the committee that oversees allegations of misconduct against admins analyzed patterns in Eostrix's writing/behaviour to discover the ruse.
This was presented to the committee and resulted in a ban of Eostrix.
If this were a Reddit, Discord, or even a government employee, banning Eostrix would've been a discretionary act of the top moderator/manager, who would've also been the person to have vetted Eostrix.
This is embarrassing and creates an incentive to cover up the scandal. In real life, Aldrich Ames was able to spend years avoiding scrutiny from the CIA because the CIA's management didn't follow-up on reports he was suspicious.
But because the committee is a group ultimately elected by the community, the individual incentive is to take action against, because any member of the committee could betray a cover-up and fuck over everyone else. If ArbCom did not take action, the information that they ignored a serious report would become public and lead to an even bigger scandal.
This is the same reason why even weak democracies are harder to emplace spies into than strong authoritarian regimes.
*technically not an election but they were almost guaranteed a win by that point
> 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 and do not interact with them on Discord. It is very antisocial in that sense.
Genuine question - where does the line between “group of people who are interested in a topic” and “shilling” lie? I don’t envy the arbitration group for having to try answer that.
Generally, it is unacceptable to notify people of a structured discussion in a non-neutral manner to get them to advocate a specific point of view in that discussion.
This can be applicable to notifying specific groups of people if only groups likely to have a specific viewpoint were notified.
It's also generally considered worse to give these notifications secretly or off of Wikipedia.
In this case, it would be acceptable to notify a project related to Israel and a project related to Palestine of discussions related to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
But its not acceptable to only notify the project related to Palestine.
It's also not acceptable to instruct people in your notification to vote in a certain way. r/Palestine giving these instructions is a big problem.
The fact it's "secret" and offsite also plays a role. Collaboration on Wikipedia itself shows you didn't have malicious intent, so unintentional violations usually result in warnings the first few times it happens. The fact you need to join a Discord server hidden from others is a clear signal to any reasonable person that the group is against the rules.
The line is clear and the arbitration group has banned some participants, the challenge is detecting who participated.
I think the answer is that neither is an appropriate way to contribute to Wikipedia, and so a group of people interested in a topic who, knowing that their intent (politicizing controversial articles, rather than their particular valence) is unwelcome, take steps to avoid being recognized as part of that group, is pretty clearly not acting in good faith.
I know of most of them, at this point. I was heavily involved in that segment of Wikipedia including Sockpuppet Investigations.
The pro-Israel ones have been around for decades. Icewhiz, NoCal100, etc. They are easy to spot because they are tightly regimented and run a volume game of many accounts. They are obviously billing by the hour to a nation-state level actor that is not demanding a clear ROI on their investment and is instead using shitty KPIs.
There are also commercial sock farms. They are easy to spot because their income is "clients that want Wikipedia articles and don't qualify for one". Any account who spends all their time writing articles on small market cap companies without news coverage is a paid shill.
They are meaningless to target because Wikipedia has a bureaucratic process called "Articles for Creation" where these shills can submit the same crap endlessly for years and bill the client for time spent without impacting the encyclopedia.
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.
I find that the type of person who think themselves very smart for noting how objectivity is never absolute, microbiases experts if you will, will give a pass to most obvious propaganda when it goes in the direction of their contrarian beliefs. The argument seems to always be "Since it's not perfect we may as well do away with it".
> Basically I think it's good if people stop trusting Wikipedia on contentious topics.
What is the alternative ? Being born smart (i.e "not a sheep") ? Review the much less accessible corpus of academic literature on any subject ? Read a 300 to 1000 pages book ?
If half the people who boast being critically minded (but really just contrarian) did the actual work to engage with Wikipedia articles, the commentariat would be in much better shape.
The alternative, is to "do your own research" yes. No matter how much they sneer at it, no matter how many people who say they do it suck at it. You have to put in work if you want to be well-informed about anything.
There doesn't have to be an alternative to Wikipedia as a short-cut to being well informed on contentious topics, because there isn't a short cut, and the sooner people realize, the better.
You can still use Wikipedia for non-contentious topics, if you wish. I do, sometimes. I'm still not going to invest into it though - I'm way too disgusted at the Wikipedia sausage making process for that. That process is made for the contentious topics, it poisons the non-contentious topics, and it doesn't even work well for the contentious topics.
After a point, sufficiently competent propaganda is indistinguishable from information.
If you make the bias so subtle that people actively looking for it can't find it, you're just doing a decent job describing the topic. Sure, the cumulative slant across hundreds of pages might be enough to tweak populations at the margins, but I don't think that's a bigger negative than access to the information is a positive.
And any other source of information is hardly going to be unbiased anyway. Everyone has an opinion!
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".
Yes. It's a contentious topic. It shouldn't be a contentious topic, but it is.
If you decide to go with the Wikipedia "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" opinion on climate, you won't be well-informed. For that you'll have to do a lot more of that reading you don't have time for. But as it happens, you'll be on the whole right, because (last time I checked) the people trying to deny the climate crisis on Wikipedia weren't very successful. It's such an old "dispute", I think Wikipedia may have developed antibodies so to speak, before manipulation could get really competent.
The scary topics are the ones we don't know are contentious. I couldn't give you examples of those, obviously.
If all the people who are uninformed and ignorant are on your side, I am sorry but it's your job to distantiate themselves from them and show what you actually care about is being integrated back into the scientific consensus (which is never perfect, terrible I know)
It seems that climate change denialists have failed to do that
I'm not sure you understood me. The people who are uninformed and ignorant and go to Wikipedia for their takes, get the right take on climate in my opinion.
But lots of uninformed and ignorant people don't go to Wikipedia for their takes on contentious topics, do they? It seems to me that the climate change denialists are capitalizing on that.
One of my mantras is: Bad people sometimes have good points. And it sucks when they do, because then they use that as leverage for all their bad points. Climate denialists have all bad points on climate, but "Wikipedia can't be trusted on contentious issues" is unfortunately not a bad point, because it's entirely true.
So your argument is basically "since it's not perfect, it shouldn't exist" aka Nirvana fallacy.
Concerning doing your own research, are you reading all research paper on all topics in the world? Or do you sometimes rely on an authority or scientific consensus, exactly as Wikipedia does?
I have never said Wikipedia shouldn't exist. I said you shouldn't trust Wikipedia on contentious issues.
If you had wanted suggestions for gradual improvement, I'd say wikipedia would be better with a "high stakes" template to a lot of pages, with blunt language about idiots fighting over defining the objective Wikipedia position on issues.
I can. They're oftentimes rather random, but the talk pages on contentious topics are rather illuminating. One of the more interesting ones I have encountered was about the descendants of Genghis Khan.
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.
Power has always tried to shape the perception of reality: kings, feudalists, slavers, industrialists, etc.
What’s novel isn’t that powerful people are trying to shape the perception of reality, it’s that who is powerful and what makes them powerful may be rapidly changing. I think it’s something that our “big tech leaders” are primarily concerned with, over everything else. Fundamentally evil, imo.
Other end is concentrated power (via money, violence, manipulation,...) so something like a dollar per universal vote.
Other end is one vote for each, including the future generations.
Wikipedia is an obstacle for the first one that must be taken down. Perhaps one of the last barriers before the endgame.
And there's no fuzzy middle option, we've (me included) have thought in our comfort for too long that us vs. them scenario that both the left and the right (at least mainstream ones) is possible. But it's now clear that there's no lukewarm at-right or green social democrat version. Only full fascism or full democracy.
We might still have the time but one by one the platforms that would enable this (wiki included) keep being ingested thus making it less and less likely.
But like you said five years ago this level of consciousness would have been out of the question for us both so perhaps there are more of us?
> an encyclopedia that, to be honest, is about as unbiased, astroturf-free, and low barrier of entry as you can get.
I recently read an article about a notable person. The article attacked her personal appearance as having "Mar-a-Lago Face". I'm certain it was backed up with quality "sources".
The outrageous part is that description linked to a deranged multi-page article explaining what that is, written by who I assume must be the most terminally-online basement-dwelling losers on planet Earth.
I was also curious. It looks like it's probably Kristy Noem[1], and the citations are to The Week and the NYT:
> Noem has since become one of the most prominent examples of so-called "Mar-a-Lago face", a cosmetic surgery trend among conservative women,[370][371] also known as "Republican makeup".[372]
Is [370] pushing it for a biography of a living person? Yeah, probably, especially with the "one of the most prominent" and "so-called" in there. But since "Mar-a-Lago face" has its own, cited Wikipedia entry... maybe not? It's not like Wikipedians made up the term, they're citing that _others_ use that term for her.
I'm not sure how I'd phrase it to say that she is a prominent example of the plastic surgery common to the Republican inner circle, and reference the "Mar-a-Lago Face" article, without attributing the phrase to her plastic surgery.
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.
> 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.
Please consider diverting your efforts to OpenStreetMap! The TIGER-derived basemap still needs fixup, but your work will benefit everyone, not just the Google shareholders who ultimately own Waze.
I would love do that. OSM is awesome, and basemap is a problem that I think I am good at solving.
But AFAIK OSM still has no mechanism that helps me get from A to B with dynamic and otherwise-unforeseeable roadway conditions. Waze still provides that, and improving the utility of a system that provides this kind of navigation aid has always been a primary motivation for working on Waze.
So my personal reward/payoff was/is high with Waze, because I could put those edits to use. It's not very good at all with OSM.
Besides. OSM seems to get bogged down in weird shit, like: Who cares how wide a public street is, in fractional meters? Maybe someone cares, but that someone isn't me: I drive a fairly large vehicle with fairly low ground clearance, but I've never had any difficulty driving it on urban roads in my neck of the woods. Those details don't matter to me.
So I'm not motivated to go out and measure these things like road width, and I'm also not motivated to provide assumed data as a presumed source of truth.
Falsification is bad. That's lies.
Superfluously-precise extrapolation is also bad. That's also lies.
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")...
It was few years ago indeed. I honestly do not give Grokipedia much credibility because it was created solely after Musk got political and someone edited wiki saying that he aligned with "right" or "far-right" politics. He saw that and created it as an "facts based" alternative purel out of spite.
> Musk is positioning Grokipedia as an alternative to Wikipedia, which he called "Wokepedia" in an X post last December.
> Grokipedia also says Wikipedia is the subject of "persistent criticisms regarding factual reliability, susceptibility to vandalism and hoaxes, and systemic ideological biases — particularly a left-leaning slant in coverage of political figures and topics.
...which is consistent with what the right side of the US political spectrum keeps saying about media outlets that dare to disagree with them.
> 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.
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.
> 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
That's a bit debatable. Traditional encyclopedias also had articles that were far from perfect, some of which had biases (not to mention there wasn't just one traditional encyclopedia. Different ones were of different quality). I think more research would be needed to figure out which is better.
Articles where almost everyone agrees on the facts are not interesting for discussing whether a particular encyclopedia is unbiased - it's precisely the contented topics where that distinction matters.
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.
He got done voted because that's an exaggerated claim. With no proof. Most of the articles on Wikipedia are just facts about nature, geography, history, etc and they don't need a newspaper as a source.
"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.
> you can’t say some politician filled a country with immigrants from the third world.
You can absolutely say that, if it's true. As it stands, I don't know of country "filled with immigrants", so it's possible your edits are getting revoked for being incendiary hyperbole.
I'm also not aware of any politician described as racist in the first paragraph of their article. Can you indicate who you have in mind?
More realistically, controversies about racism and immigration are likely to be mentioned in a section of the given article, not in the first paragraph. That strikes me as a very fair way to handle it, which conveniently disarms accusations of bias against Wikipedia.
“Filled with immigrants” will always be a subjective term. Does it need to be 100% immigrants to count as “filled”? 50%? 25%?
Canadian residents, for example, as of 2021 [1], were 23% foreign-born, and further 2.5% non-permanent residents. In the five year period from 2016 to 2021, the number of foreign-born Canadians increased by 18% alone, which to me is significant growth. The number of non-permanent residents doubled from 2016 to 2021, and tripled again by July 2024 [2]. The share of third-generation+ Canadians, defined as those born in Canada to parents born in Canada, was 56% in 2021 [1]. When the 2026 census data is released next year, it’s estimated that number could be as low as 52%.
> “Filled with immigrants” will always be a subjective term.
An encyclopedia is no place for subjectivity. [1]
> Canadian residents,
I don't care. I'm not here to discuss immigration. We're talking about Wikipedia and its standards. You can like immigration or be against it, but it's not Wikipedia's job to allow you to express your opinion.
This feels rather hand wavy and reductive. The bar isn’t “Wikipedia is completely unbiased and objective” - that’s a fool’s errand, it can’t be done. But we still strive to account for biases and reach for objectivity as best we can, and there are situations where language (with its subjectivity taken into due consideration) and claims clearly are not an attempt at that.
Those aren’t the same thing. I’m saying that and I did not miss the point of your comment. You can’t just declare the opposite opinion invalid like that
Have you considered the differences are because those are different people who have done much different things? I don't see a strong slant either way in these articles.
If you think about the most salient or well covered things by the news in each of their presidencies, they're right there in the header. I'd say it's difficult to write in an unbiased sense about these issues, and given the difficulty, Wikipedia has done a decent job.
I'm not seeing what's biased about Donald Trump's article?
It's all accurate info citing legal cases where he was literally convicted of things. A president being convicted of the things he's been convicted of is the story. Not mentioning it in the intro and elsewhere would be biased.
Your issue seems to be not with "bias" but with how topicality of Donald Trump's actions require them to be prominent within an encyclopedia entry. Which has nothing to do with bias of the editors.
It is sometimes said that reality has a liberal bias. But it is literally the case that historians rank these two presidents at nearly opposite ends of the spectrum, and the article's tone seems to reflect that. Which isn't really an example of bias in Wikipedia - it is supposed to reflect what reliable sources say.
OP’s chosen example was terrible. I’d agree with the premise, based anecdotoly but what a terrible selection of articles to prove a point. Better to link the discussion articles where the editors actively slant the articles
People become more conservative as they age, so maybe the reality quote is about the young and the young edit Wikipedia more
"The purpose of a system is what it does". Dangerous principle to apply too literally but almost always worth considering. In this case, the purpose of abstinence-only education is to increase teenage births and the purpose of modern sex education is to decrease it.
From his 2006 speech/routine at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, speaking to then president George Bush:
> Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32 percent approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in reality. And reality has a well-known liberal bias...
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.
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.
Unfortunately, with the NLRA as it currently exists, it is more or less impossible to form cross-sector unions like they have in Scandinavia. Which is why unions and industry are so hostile in the US in the first place.
If you're paying union dues, I would expect you want your union to fight to keep your job and make you more money above promoting the employer's values
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.
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?
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)
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
Yes, however, my point is that the vast majority of people working for non-profits do not receive that sort of recognition. So what does "social status" mean?
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.
feeling better because your job fits better in your moral framework that you get from society is a status-mediated effect and i feel you can usually find social scaffolding under things that are articulated as purely intrinsic.
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.
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.
I agree. For a decade Wikipedia has squandered it's substantial income on frivolous outreach and community projects when they should have been building up a large endowment so that they could be financially independent. They could have amassed a billion dollars by now and not need any donation begging at all.
The fact that they have a couple of hundred million at least is a great thing. (Firing developers isn't of course.)
> 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.
So you don't know and we can assume its not relevant.
> 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?
That's a matter for law enforcement and organizations shouldn't have their own badly implemented versions of it.
> 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).
They don't need to be organizing events in the first place. That's already itself a completely unnecessary money sink.
> 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.
Making unauthorized requests 100% static is not rocket science. This doesn't need an ongoing tens or hundreds of millions per year.
> That's a matter for law enforcement and organizations shouldn't have their own badly implemented versions of it.
Theoretically, yes.
Practically? Law enforcement can be ignorant, incompetent or slow as molasses, or a combination of all three of them. Besides, some places like the EU impose specific requirements on what happens with certain kinds of speech, especially anything glorifying or calling for violence, so as an organization, you have to have people and procedures to deal with it.
> They don't need to be organizing events in the first place. That's already itself a completely unnecessary money sink.
It was a core factor, other than Jimbo Wales wanting to distance himself/his company that hosted Wikipedia (Bomis) from it a bit, why Wikimedia got founded in the first place.
> Making unauthorized requests 100% static is not rocket science.
The problem is the bots are not respecting robots.txt and instead do stuff like load the source diff pages. It does not make any sense for AI training and likely pollutes the database, but unfortunately the diff pages are among the most expensive to render, the worse the older the requested diff is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When my dad worked as a butcher, he would cut himself all the time and the company was obligated to provide him mesh gloves to prevent such things, even though he was too stupid to use them.
Meanwhile in tech, we all sit in a chair 8 hours a day, something well known to cause real harms, and a creature that was never ever built to do Knowledge work is encouraged to run that system full bore for most of the day, even off hours, and when that inevitably harms you, burns you out, you get kicked to the curb.
When meat packing plants did this kind of thing 100 years ago, unionization was prominent and extremely effective at making sure my dad would be provided those gloves decades later. When unionization comes up for tech workers, a bunch of morons who are apparently incapable of reading history books insist that they negotiate better than any union could (laughable) because they make $300k a year while their employer pulls in millions a year per head.
It's truly astonishing just how little you have to trickle down to some code monkey to get them to think they are winning, and be willing to work against their own interests.
That union sure would have been helpful dealing with AI bullshit.
What does that have anything to do with what I said. We're talking about big tech here (which does pay half a million for mid level). If you can get a job at big tech then you can get a job elsewhere so if you think its unethical (which it probably is) then you can just move. The fact is that most people today are amoral and would gladly accept a big tech job so they can golf on the weekends; you'd be naive if you think that is against their interests. And if you are a history enjoyer then you should know that real change is predicated on violence and that some mesh gloves on software engineers will not stop meta from turning trillions of hours of human attention into ad revenue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> and that encompasses functionality easily broader than "running Wikipedia" in scope and scale.
I highly doubt that the totality of your corporate employers output is even close to the scope and scale of wikipedia. I’m pretty sure you and I both know that if your employer was gone tomorrow, most would not notice, and only the most severely bookish scholasts (they are likely to be wikipedia editors) will be able to recall what exactly was done there 5 years after the books are closed.
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.
>"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.
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".
On the other hand, charities also need to protect themselves from those that are only there to enrich themselves at the expense of the cause - that goes first for the leadership but also applies to regular employees. It's different if you're overpaying someone from profits that would otherwise go to shareholders compared to when you're overpaying someone from donations that people much worth off have spared for your cause.
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.
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.
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.
"A decade ago, Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, received 304 requests to alter or remove content over a two-year period, not including copyright complaints. In 2024 alone, it received 664 such takedown requests. Only four were granted. As complaints over user speech have grown, Wikimedia has expanded its legal team to defend the volunteer editors who write and maintain the encyclopedia."
"Protect our projects: Sustain and defend our model. Wikipedia's volunteers and values are increasingly under threat. We will provide volunteers with the safety and legal support they need, and defend neutral point of view in a world where facts are increasingly contested and politicized. We will strengthen protection for Wikimedia infrastructure from bot abuse, and lean into responsible reuse that drives value back to Wikipedia, not just traffic away."
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
I feel like my Wikipedia-boosting bona fides are pretty solid on HN. I think it's not just a very valuable resource but also one of the great intellectual achievements of the last 100 years. My point isn't that the project is unworthy; it's that they don't need your money.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can't with these AI generalizations for big effect.
> This is the standard tech playbook. Fire the engineers who know how the system works, fire the ones organizing labor, hope nothing catastrophic breaks before you can ship something splashy. Twitter did it. Meta did it. Salesforce did it. Google did it. We have all seen this movie.
Just fluff without any substance.
Is that the standard tech playbook? What did Twitter, Meta etc do? "Ah you know, didn't you hear? They did that thing. With that splashy release."
I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed this. A similar section offers an apparently contradictory take with similar language:
> A smart executive welcomes the union, signs a generous contract, and uses the goodwill to consolidate authority for the difficult AI-era decisions ahead. That is the textbook play. Meehan and her team chose the opposite. They picked a fight.
The "standard tech playbook" fires union organizers, but a "textbook play" welcomes them?
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.
I don't read the article as implying wikipedia is "big tech" in any meaningful way
If the New England Patriots copied the San Francisco 49er's playbook, and the headline read "Patriots are starting to use 49er's playbook", that does not imply the Patriots are now the 49ers.
These employees trying to organize seem to be ignoring that they don't actually provide the majority of the value that Wikipedia benefits from, volunteers do.
The janitor deserves to be paid well, work in safe conditions, and have stable hours. They may not provide “the majority of the value” but without them work would grind to a halt.
Same applies to every other job. If it needs to be done, then it should be treated with respect and dignity.
I agree that everyone deserves to be paid according to their contribution, and have their employer follow all relevant laws. I am not aware of anyone being murdered, enslaved, or even tortured by the Foundation. This group seems to be trying to ‘cash in’ on Wikipedia’s AI windfall, and I think that will cause long-term damage to the organization.
So, what you’re saying is you believe the bar for starting a union is being murdered, tortured, or enslaved?
Why?
Why would the bar not be: we feel our contributions are undervalued. Because that’s what you’re calling a “cash in” attempt.
If they made the company work up to this point, and the company got a windfall because of its position, why do they not deserve a piece of that windfall?
you mentioned alice bailey elsewhere in this thread, i didnt do research into theosophy before listening to the words of j. krishnamurti, this is now making me think that the concepts i absorbed might be vehicles to demonic activity ... may i ask whether you have researched the connection between these individuals, if so may i ask you to explain your viewpoint
The Gnostics were essentially a mystery school, but they are often framed as a heresy of Christianity led by St. Thomas. They taught that the material world was fundamentally flawed and created by a deity (not God) that they referred to as the Demiurge. They posited that salvation is achieved through Gnosis and that would allow one's soul to escape this flawed realm and enter the divine realm. The moves The Matrix and The Truman Show are very heavily influenced by Gnosticism.
Theosophists brought reincarnation and karma into the fold, but were also essentially a mystery school. Helena Blavatsky is probably the most famous person related to the Theosophy movement, and she was also rumored to be an intelligence asset.
I haven't done much research into the relationship between Alice Baily and J. Krishnamurti, but they are both a part of the same Luciferian new-age movement, and were members of Masonic secret societies, which date back to antiquity (in the forms of different mystery schools / orders / socities / etc...)
Without going too deep down the rabbit hole - yes I believe both of these people were Luciferians and while they do I believe speak some truth, ultimately I believe they are attempting to steer people down the wrong path. You clearly have some discernment based on your question, and I think that's the most important quality a person can possess and hone on their spiritual journey. If you'd like to chat more, or if you have any questions regarding my reply, please feel free to email me at fragworks@proton.me
my way of sitting this fence is that a very tiny fraction of transgender people do exist, but nowadays there are probably more people who simply think they are transgender, an effect spurred by the trajectory of western society (because westerners live disconnected from life therefore disconnected from themselves)
I would agree with you. I think people are searching for something and attempt to find it in all sorts of forms. The truth is, nothing was missing all-along it just takes some self-realization / actualization to realize that, and that takes time and lived experience. In the West, with all of the materialism that is shoved down our throats from a young age, we very much grow up disconnected from ourselves.
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."
their point, if I distill it correctly, is that Meehan comes with an agenda of enshittification. Given the events we're talking here... it's not that far-fetched.
ok and it's worth discussing on its merits. but "wikipedia is private equity" is a dumb thing to say and it matters to actually make concrete criticisms instead of throwing around buzzwords. the agenda of private equity is driven by profit incentives that make absolutely zero sense here.
> the agenda of private equity is driven by profit incentives that make absolutely zero sense here.
well, that also makes a bit of sense. like, why focus on cashing in from AI crap or on continuously expanding the cash bunker like a PE firm would, instead of actually investing money into coordinating with the communities when it comes to stuff like a new theme?
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.
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
Wikimedia is already way past that if you look at their expenses.
From Wikipedia for sure, but feeling like the ongoing cell division has them nearly fully divested from most of their stated mission and "What we do" pages.
Reaching the metastatic end stage of all organizations where the org exists for no purpose beyond continued existence of the org.
Prop. AB 1940?
[flagged]
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".
> 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.
Except for the 90% or more of the world's 7000-ish languages which have barely any data online.
E.g. the huge CommonCrawl corpus has stats https://commoncrawl.github.io/cc-crawl-statistics/plots/lang... for only 160 languages. English takes up nearly half the corpus, and after the top 16 or so all languages have <1% of the corpus, over half of those 160 have <0.1% and the other 6000+ languages are distributed amongst the <unknown> category. The long tail is very long.
(You'll see people use the term "low-resource language" and then talk about Finnish or Macedonian – if you're not a linguist and you've heard of the language, it's most likely not low-resource ;-))
Common Crawl is working hard to improve diversity in our crawl.
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.
LLMs are really bad at smaller European languages even, e.g. scandinavian ones, or Finnish. Much worse than the NLP situation before LLMs.
My experience with their Norwegian has been fantastic, I'd be shocked if the other Scandanavian languages aren't at least as good.
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.
Biased by its training data to boot, the opposite of what you’d want in an encyclopedia.
> 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).
Maybe I'm special, but as someone who doesn't have an account and just occasionally fixes errors or adds more context I've never had that happening for me. Or actually, once where I correct a fact to something that did not seem obvious, and it got reverted, but by adding it back with a long explanation and references it stuck. Ever since then I kept writing good "commit messages" just like for code and made sure to have reference to back up my claims and it works.
To be fair I try to stay away from pop culture and politically sensitive topics.
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.
I agree there needs to be a line, I just don't particularly like where the line has been drawn. Unfortunately I don't have a great idea for how to do it better. That is why I'm commenting on HN rather than arguing for any particular policy change on wiki.
Huh? The notability standard governs what may be the subject of a wikipedia page and what may not.
Ideological purity is enforced by the reliable source standard, not the notability standard. The Daily Stormer is unquestionably notable. And it has a wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Stormer
I think it's the parent that's confusing this:
> 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.
They're saying that main stream media sources are what can be used to define something is notable or not. The question isn't "Is the Daily Stormer" notable (it is), it's should the daily stormer be usable as a source to determine if something is notable or not (it shouldn't be, obviously).
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Are you seriously asking if a Nazi website is a bad reference?
So putting on a label makes it a bad source of information?
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.
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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" meeting a comment/karma/etc qutoa 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 avoiding money-laundering by making many cash deposits of $9999. You'll be taken to Arbitration Enforcement and look even more suspicious.
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 and do not interact with them on Discord. It is very antisocial in that sense.
You are only "activated" by the Discord mod through direct messages 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's also incompatible with the micromanagement typical of traditional influence operations.
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.
> Professionally organized shills are unable to do this since they must ensure most of their time is "on-task"
Haha, it'd be funny if they sabotaged themselves with red tape around hours billing. I could see it happening - sometimes. But not generally. I assume professional manipulators understand that gaining trust in the Wikipedia bureaucracy is part of the job.
I have a low opinion of spy agencies - but not THAT low. I have an even lower opinion of open Reddit communities ability to get anything done.
Wikipedia bureaucracy is unlike other bureaucracies because there's accountability and it is decentralized.
On Wikipedia, the possibly Israeli intelligence operative known as "Icewhiz" spent years cultivating an account known as "Eostrix" that operated entirely out of Israel-Palestine. They were one day from passing their admin election* before getting banned. A member of the committee that oversees allegations of misconduct against admins analyzed patterns in Eostrix's writing/behaviour to discover the ruse.
This was presented to the committee and resulted in a ban of Eostrix.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Arbitration_Com...
If this were a Reddit, Discord, or even a government employee, banning Eostrix would've been a discretionary act of the top moderator/manager, who would've also been the person to have vetted Eostrix.
This is embarrassing and creates an incentive to cover up the scandal. In real life, Aldrich Ames was able to spend years avoiding scrutiny from the CIA because the CIA's management didn't follow-up on reports he was suspicious.
But because the committee is a group ultimately elected by the community, the individual incentive is to take action against, because any member of the committee could betray a cover-up and fuck over everyone else. If ArbCom did not take action, the information that they ignored a serious report would become public and lead to an even bigger scandal.
This is the same reason why even weak democracies are harder to emplace spies into than strong authoritarian regimes.
*technically not an election but they were almost guaranteed a win by that point
> 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 and do not interact with them on Discord. It is very antisocial in that sense.
Genuine question - where does the line between “group of people who are interested in a topic” and “shilling” lie? I don’t envy the arbitration group for having to try answer that.
Here's the applicable policy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Canvassing
Generally, it is unacceptable to notify people of a structured discussion in a non-neutral manner to get them to advocate a specific point of view in that discussion.
This can be applicable to notifying specific groups of people if only groups likely to have a specific viewpoint were notified.
It's also generally considered worse to give these notifications secretly or off of Wikipedia.
In this case, it would be acceptable to notify a project related to Israel and a project related to Palestine of discussions related to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
But its not acceptable to only notify the project related to Palestine.
It's also not acceptable to instruct people in your notification to vote in a certain way. r/Palestine giving these instructions is a big problem.
The fact it's "secret" and offsite also plays a role. Collaboration on Wikipedia itself shows you didn't have malicious intent, so unintentional violations usually result in warnings the first few times it happens. The fact you need to join a Discord server hidden from others is a clear signal to any reasonable person that the group is against the rules.
The line is clear and the arbitration group has banned some participants, the challenge is detecting who participated.
I think the answer is that neither is an appropriate way to contribute to Wikipedia, and so a group of people interested in a topic who, knowing that their intent (politicizing controversial articles, rather than their particular valence) is unwelcome, take steps to avoid being recognized as part of that group, is pretty clearly not acting in good faith.
A shill gets a paycheck. Without one, I would call it activism or something.
So the /r/palestine group are paid but not actually told what to do?
> the best shill-farm is run by the /r/Palestine subreddit
you mean the best one that you know of
I know of most of them, at this point. I was heavily involved in that segment of Wikipedia including Sockpuppet Investigations.
The pro-Israel ones have been around for decades. Icewhiz, NoCal100, etc. They are easy to spot because they are tightly regimented and run a volume game of many accounts. They are obviously billing by the hour to a nation-state level actor that is not demanding a clear ROI on their investment and is instead using shitty KPIs.
There are also commercial sock farms. They are easy to spot because their income is "clients that want Wikipedia articles and don't qualify for one". Any account who spends all their time writing articles on small market cap companies without news coverage is a paid shill.
They are meaningless to target because Wikipedia has a bureaucratic process called "Articles for Creation" where these shills can submit the same crap endlessly for years and bill the client for time spent without impacting the encyclopedia.
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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.
I find that the type of person who think themselves very smart for noting how objectivity is never absolute, microbiases experts if you will, will give a pass to most obvious propaganda when it goes in the direction of their contrarian beliefs. The argument seems to always be "Since it's not perfect we may as well do away with it".
> Basically I think it's good if people stop trusting Wikipedia on contentious topics.
What is the alternative ? Being born smart (i.e "not a sheep") ? Review the much less accessible corpus of academic literature on any subject ? Read a 300 to 1000 pages book ?
If half the people who boast being critically minded (but really just contrarian) did the actual work to engage with Wikipedia articles, the commentariat would be in much better shape.
The alternative, is to "do your own research" yes. No matter how much they sneer at it, no matter how many people who say they do it suck at it. You have to put in work if you want to be well-informed about anything.
There doesn't have to be an alternative to Wikipedia as a short-cut to being well informed on contentious topics, because there isn't a short cut, and the sooner people realize, the better.
You can still use Wikipedia for non-contentious topics, if you wish. I do, sometimes. I'm still not going to invest into it though - I'm way too disgusted at the Wikipedia sausage making process for that. That process is made for the contentious topics, it poisons the non-contentious topics, and it doesn't even work well for the contentious topics.
s/voting/read wikipedia
s/firebomb a Walmart/do your own research
You know which tweet
After a point, sufficiently competent propaganda is indistinguishable from information.
If you make the bias so subtle that people actively looking for it can't find it, you're just doing a decent job describing the topic. Sure, the cumulative slant across hundreds of pages might be enough to tweak populations at the margins, but I don't think that's a bigger negative than access to the information is a positive.
And any other source of information is hardly going to be unbiased anyway. Everyone has an opinion!
> 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?
Yes. It's a contentious topic. It shouldn't be a contentious topic, but it is.
If you decide to go with the Wikipedia "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" opinion on climate, you won't be well-informed. For that you'll have to do a lot more of that reading you don't have time for. But as it happens, you'll be on the whole right, because (last time I checked) the people trying to deny the climate crisis on Wikipedia weren't very successful. It's such an old "dispute", I think Wikipedia may have developed antibodies so to speak, before manipulation could get really competent.
The scary topics are the ones we don't know are contentious. I couldn't give you examples of those, obviously.
If all the people who are uninformed and ignorant are on your side, I am sorry but it's your job to distantiate themselves from them and show what you actually care about is being integrated back into the scientific consensus (which is never perfect, terrible I know)
It seems that climate change denialists have failed to do that
I'm not sure you understood me. The people who are uninformed and ignorant and go to Wikipedia for their takes, get the right take on climate in my opinion.
But lots of uninformed and ignorant people don't go to Wikipedia for their takes on contentious topics, do they? It seems to me that the climate change denialists are capitalizing on that.
One of my mantras is: Bad people sometimes have good points. And it sucks when they do, because then they use that as leverage for all their bad points. Climate denialists have all bad points on climate, but "Wikipedia can't be trusted on contentious issues" is unfortunately not a bad point, because it's entirely true.
So your argument is basically "since it's not perfect, it shouldn't exist" aka Nirvana fallacy.
Concerning doing your own research, are you reading all research paper on all topics in the world? Or do you sometimes rely on an authority or scientific consensus, exactly as Wikipedia does?
I have never said Wikipedia shouldn't exist. I said you shouldn't trust Wikipedia on contentious issues.
If you had wanted suggestions for gradual improvement, I'd say wikipedia would be better with a "high stakes" template to a lot of pages, with blunt language about idiots fighting over defining the objective Wikipedia position on issues.
I can. They're oftentimes rather random, but the talk pages on contentious topics are rather illuminating. One of the more interesting ones I have encountered was about the descendants of Genghis Khan.
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.
Power has always tried to shape the perception of reality: kings, feudalists, slavers, industrialists, etc.
What’s novel isn’t that powerful people are trying to shape the perception of reality, it’s that who is powerful and what makes them powerful may be rapidly changing. I think it’s something that our “big tech leaders” are primarily concerned with, over everything else. Fundamentally evil, imo.
I see this as a line.
Other end is concentrated power (via money, violence, manipulation,...) so something like a dollar per universal vote.
Other end is one vote for each, including the future generations.
Wikipedia is an obstacle for the first one that must be taken down. Perhaps one of the last barriers before the endgame.
And there's no fuzzy middle option, we've (me included) have thought in our comfort for too long that us vs. them scenario that both the left and the right (at least mainstream ones) is possible. But it's now clear that there's no lukewarm at-right or green social democrat version. Only full fascism or full democracy.
We might still have the time but one by one the platforms that would enable this (wiki included) keep being ingested thus making it less and less likely.
But like you said five years ago this level of consciousness would have been out of the question for us both so perhaps there are more of us?
https://youtu.be/TaKrm5txGCQ?si=VQ3R64fSeQ9Xv_Rr this is something I keep coming back to. It doesn't seem so fictional anymore.
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.
> an encyclopedia that, to be honest, is about as unbiased, astroturf-free, and low barrier of entry as you can get.
I recently read an article about a notable person. The article attacked her personal appearance as having "Mar-a-Lago Face". I'm certain it was backed up with quality "sources".
The outrageous part is that description linked to a deranged multi-page article explaining what that is, written by who I assume must be the most terminally-online basement-dwelling losers on planet Earth.
So I'm going to disagree with you.
Surely, you must have taken on yourself to correct this blatant mistake (that you curiously won't link to)? Can you name this "notable person"?
I was also curious. It looks like it's probably Kristy Noem[1], and the citations are to The Week and the NYT:
> Noem has since become one of the most prominent examples of so-called "Mar-a-Lago face", a cosmetic surgery trend among conservative women,[370][371] also known as "Republican makeup".[372]
Is [370] pushing it for a biography of a living person? Yeah, probably, especially with the "one of the most prominent" and "so-called" in there. But since "Mar-a-Lago face" has its own, cited Wikipedia entry... maybe not? It's not like Wikipedians made up the term, they're citing that _others_ use that term for her.
I'm not sure how I'd phrase it to say that she is a prominent example of the plastic surgery common to the Republican inner circle, and reference the "Mar-a-Lago Face" article, without attributing the phrase to her plastic surgery.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristi_Noem#Religion_and_publi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar-a-Lago_face
[370] https://theweek.com/health/mar-a-lago-face-the-hottest-maga-...
[371] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/20/style/kristi-noem-teeth-t...
[372] https://www.thelist.com/1796655/politicians-reporters-republ...
> 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.
In what ways? Provide examples.
> 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.
Please consider diverting your efforts to OpenStreetMap! The TIGER-derived basemap still needs fixup, but your work will benefit everyone, not just the Google shareholders who ultimately own Waze.
I would love do that. OSM is awesome, and basemap is a problem that I think I am good at solving.
But AFAIK OSM still has no mechanism that helps me get from A to B with dynamic and otherwise-unforeseeable roadway conditions. Waze still provides that, and improving the utility of a system that provides this kind of navigation aid has always been a primary motivation for working on Waze.
So my personal reward/payoff was/is high with Waze, because I could put those edits to use. It's not very good at all with OSM.
Besides. OSM seems to get bogged down in weird shit, like: Who cares how wide a public street is, in fractional meters? Maybe someone cares, but that someone isn't me: I drive a fairly large vehicle with fairly low ground clearance, but I've never had any difficulty driving it on urban roads in my neck of the woods. Those details don't matter to me.
So I'm not motivated to go out and measure these things like road width, and I'm also not motivated to provide assumed data as a presumed source of truth.
Falsification is bad. That's lies.
Superfluously-precise extrapolation is also bad. That's also lies.
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")...
It was few years ago indeed. I honestly do not give Grokipedia much credibility because it was created solely after Musk got political and someone edited wiki saying that he aligned with "right" or "far-right" politics. He saw that and created it as an "facts based" alternative purel out of spite.
To what extent does Grokipedia reflect Musk's personal ideological biases?
I haven't paid that much attention to it, to be honest.
According to https://www.npr.org/2025/10/29/nx-s1-5588695/wikipedia-groki...
> Musk is positioning Grokipedia as an alternative to Wikipedia, which he called "Wokepedia" in an X post last December.
> Grokipedia also says Wikipedia is the subject of "persistent criticisms regarding factual reliability, susceptibility to vandalism and hoaxes, and systemic ideological biases — particularly a left-leaning slant in coverage of political figures and topics.
...which is consistent with what the right side of the US political spectrum keeps saying about media outlets that dare to disagree with them.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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
That's a bit debatable. Traditional encyclopedias also had articles that were far from perfect, some of which had biases (not to mention there wasn't just one traditional encyclopedia. Different ones were of different quality). I think more research would be needed to figure out which is better.
> stated facts backed by decent sources.
Like WW2-era articles backed by books wtitten in 2003 from an obscure author. And only this author.
Where did you find that?
Articles where almost everyone agrees on the facts are not interesting for discussing whether a particular encyclopedia is unbiased - it's precisely the contented topics where that distinction matters.
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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.
He got done voted because that's an exaggerated claim. With no proof. Most of the articles on Wikipedia are just facts about nature, geography, history, etc and they don't need a newspaper as a source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Use_of_primary_sourc...
It’s their official policy.
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"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.
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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.
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Gentle suggestion for you to read the guidelines again
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
See: Spanish Flu
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If you think that's bad, you should compare the pages for Genghis Khan and Mr. Rogers.
You should've checked those pages first, they're actually very neutral lol.
If Ghengis Khan was raping & pillaging in 2026 his Wikipedia article might have a more modern slant.
How is the Trump or Obama article not neutral? You can literally correct them yourself if there is anything untrue or biased.
You could correct them but the admins responsible for the slant will just revert them or debate you until you give up.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/how-wikipedia-whitewashe...
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> you can’t say some politician filled a country with immigrants from the third world.
You can absolutely say that, if it's true. As it stands, I don't know of country "filled with immigrants", so it's possible your edits are getting revoked for being incendiary hyperbole.
I'm also not aware of any politician described as racist in the first paragraph of their article. Can you indicate who you have in mind?
More realistically, controversies about racism and immigration are likely to be mentioned in a section of the given article, not in the first paragraph. That strikes me as a very fair way to handle it, which conveniently disarms accusations of bias against Wikipedia.
“Filled with immigrants” will always be a subjective term. Does it need to be 100% immigrants to count as “filled”? 50%? 25%?
Canadian residents, for example, as of 2021 [1], were 23% foreign-born, and further 2.5% non-permanent residents. In the five year period from 2016 to 2021, the number of foreign-born Canadians increased by 18% alone, which to me is significant growth. The number of non-permanent residents doubled from 2016 to 2021, and tripled again by July 2024 [2]. The share of third-generation+ Canadians, defined as those born in Canada to parents born in Canada, was 56% in 2021 [1]. When the 2026 census data is released next year, it’s estimated that number could be as low as 52%.
[1] https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/as-sa/fo... [2] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/91-215-x/91-215-x2024001...
> “Filled with immigrants” will always be a subjective term.
An encyclopedia is no place for subjectivity. [1]
> Canadian residents,
I don't care. I'm not here to discuss immigration. We're talking about Wikipedia and its standards. You can like immigration or be against it, but it's not Wikipedia's job to allow you to express your opinion.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie...
Absolutely. I usually see this type of posts on twitter where people are simply mad that they can't shit on imigrants like that in there.
Language as a whole is subjective.
This feels rather hand wavy and reductive. The bar isn’t “Wikipedia is completely unbiased and objective” - that’s a fool’s errand, it can’t be done. But we still strive to account for biases and reach for objectivity as best we can, and there are situations where language (with its subjectivity taken into due consideration) and claims clearly are not an attempt at that.
Correct. All language is subjective, but not all language is equally subjective.
This just reads to me like you have an ax to grind and are mad Wikipedia won’t give you the surface for it.
Those aren’t the same thing. I’m saying that and I did not miss the point of your comment. You can’t just declare the opposite opinion invalid like that
Have you considered the differences are because those are different people who have done much different things? I don't see a strong slant either way in these articles.
Agreeing with the negative portrayal does not make it an unbiased article.
If you think about the most salient or well covered things by the news in each of their presidencies, they're right there in the header. I'd say it's difficult to write in an unbiased sense about these issues, and given the difficulty, Wikipedia has done a decent job.
What exactly do you see as a "negative portrayal"?
And disagreeing with the supposed "negative portrayal" or disapproving/approving of the actions of one does not make an article biased.
I'm not seeing what's biased about Donald Trump's article?
It's all accurate info citing legal cases where he was literally convicted of things. A president being convicted of the things he's been convicted of is the story. Not mentioning it in the intro and elsewhere would be biased.
Your issue seems to be not with "bias" but with how topicality of Donald Trump's actions require them to be prominent within an encyclopedia entry. Which has nothing to do with bias of the editors.
It is sometimes said that reality has a liberal bias. But it is literally the case that historians rank these two presidents at nearly opposite ends of the spectrum, and the article's tone seems to reflect that. Which isn't really an example of bias in Wikipedia - it is supposed to reflect what reliable sources say.
OP’s chosen example was terrible. I’d agree with the premise, based anecdotoly but what a terrible selection of articles to prove a point. Better to link the discussion articles where the editors actively slant the articles
People become more conservative as they age, so maybe the reality quote is about the young and the young edit Wikipedia more
I think people become more conservative as they get wealthier. Getting older just correlates with increasing wealth.
I think it's more about the way things are vs the way things "should" be.
e.g "teens are going to experiment with sex, so comprehensive sex education is the best way to keep them safe"
vs
"Teens should not have sex, so abstinence-only education is the best way to keep them safe"
"The purpose of a system is what it does". Dangerous principle to apply too literally but almost always worth considering. In this case, the purpose of abstinence-only education is to increase teenage births and the purpose of modern sex education is to decrease it.
It is an extremely weak argument to just post the links.
Please supply actual instances of the supposed bias.
If you think these are biased, have a load of this one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate
https://grokipedia.com/page/Gamergate
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Reality has a well known liberal bias¹ - Steven Colbert
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Reality_has_a_well_known_lib...
From his 2006 speech/routine at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, speaking to then president George Bush:
> Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32 percent approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in reality. And reality has a well-known liberal bias...
His whole thing was phenomenal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ-a2KeyCAY
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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
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.
This is a bit of a naive response.
Unfortunately, with the NLRA as it currently exists, it is more or less impossible to form cross-sector unions like they have in Scandinavia. Which is why unions and industry are so hostile in the US in the first place.
If you're paying union dues, I would expect you want your union to fight to keep your job and make you more money above promoting the employer's values
> In places with strong functioning unions (e.g. Scandinavia) they can often function as a moderating force, keeping salaries low when times are bad
But this isn't a Scandinavian union now, is it? It is an American union with all the problems which comes with that.
Is there anything particular about Americans which makes them incapable of forming a rational, constructive union?
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.
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?
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)
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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
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, however, my point is that the vast majority of people working for non-profits do not receive that sort of recognition. So what does "social status" mean?
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.
feeling better because your job fits better in your moral framework that you get from society is a status-mediated effect and i feel you can usually find social scaffolding under things that are articulated as purely intrinsic.
If words don’t mean what they mean, absolutely
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.
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.
I agree. For a decade Wikipedia has squandered it's substantial income on frivolous outreach and community projects when they should have been building up a large endowment so that they could be financially independent. They could have amassed a billion dollars by now and not need any donation begging at all.
The fact that they have a couple of hundred million at least is a great thing. (Firing developers isn't of course.)
> 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.
> A non-zero amount.
So you don't know and we can assume its not relevant.
> 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?
That's a matter for law enforcement and organizations shouldn't have their own badly implemented versions of it.
> 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).
They don't need to be organizing events in the first place. That's already itself a completely unnecessary money sink.
> 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.
Making unauthorized requests 100% static is not rocket science. This doesn't need an ongoing tens or hundreds of millions per year.
> That's a matter for law enforcement and organizations shouldn't have their own badly implemented versions of it.
Theoretically, yes.
Practically? Law enforcement can be ignorant, incompetent or slow as molasses, or a combination of all three of them. Besides, some places like the EU impose specific requirements on what happens with certain kinds of speech, especially anything glorifying or calling for violence, so as an organization, you have to have people and procedures to deal with it.
> They don't need to be organizing events in the first place. That's already itself a completely unnecessary money sink.
It was a core factor, other than Jimbo Wales wanting to distance himself/his company that hosted Wikipedia (Bomis) from it a bit, why Wikimedia got founded in the first place.
> Making unauthorized requests 100% static is not rocket science.
The problem is the bots are not respecting robots.txt and instead do stuff like load the source diff pages. It does not make any sense for AI training and likely pollutes the database, but unfortunately the diff pages are among the most expensive to render, the worse the older the requested diff is.
You need $140 million/yr for the rest of it?
But that's not the pretense under which they have been asking donations for.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Neither do most tech jobs.
When my dad worked as a butcher, he would cut himself all the time and the company was obligated to provide him mesh gloves to prevent such things, even though he was too stupid to use them.
Meanwhile in tech, we all sit in a chair 8 hours a day, something well known to cause real harms, and a creature that was never ever built to do Knowledge work is encouraged to run that system full bore for most of the day, even off hours, and when that inevitably harms you, burns you out, you get kicked to the curb.
When meat packing plants did this kind of thing 100 years ago, unionization was prominent and extremely effective at making sure my dad would be provided those gloves decades later. When unionization comes up for tech workers, a bunch of morons who are apparently incapable of reading history books insist that they negotiate better than any union could (laughable) because they make $300k a year while their employer pulls in millions a year per head.
It's truly astonishing just how little you have to trickle down to some code monkey to get them to think they are winning, and be willing to work against their own interests.
That union sure would have been helpful dealing with AI bullshit.
What does that have anything to do with what I said. We're talking about big tech here (which does pay half a million for mid level). If you can get a job at big tech then you can get a job elsewhere so if you think its unethical (which it probably is) then you can just move. The fact is that most people today are amoral and would gladly accept a big tech job so they can golf on the weekends; you'd be naive if you think that is against their interests. And if you are a history enjoyer then you should know that real change is predicated on violence and that some mesh gloves on software engineers will not stop meta from turning trillions of hours of human attention into ad revenue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> and that encompasses functionality easily broader than "running Wikipedia" in scope and scale.
I highly doubt that the totality of your corporate employers output is even close to the scope and scale of wikipedia. I’m pretty sure you and I both know that if your employer was gone tomorrow, most would not notice, and only the most severely bookish scholasts (they are likely to be wikipedia editors) will be able to recall what exactly was done there 5 years after the books are closed.
Wikipedia gets far more traffic, use, and dependence than any of the multiple 3000 person companies I've worked for.
Like orders of magnitude. Wikipedia gets more traffic than Amazon.
My employer's website is higher traffic than both Amazon and Wikipedia, if that assuages your concerns about my ability to judge scale.
Your regular reminder that OpenStreetMap has something like two or three FTEs and anchors $1bn of value.
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.
>"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.
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".
On the other hand, charities also need to protect themselves from those that are only there to enrich themselves at the expense of the cause - that goes first for the leadership but also applies to regular employees. It's different if you're overpaying someone from profits that would otherwise go to shareholders compared to when you're overpaying someone from donations that people much worth off have spared for your cause.
Wikipedia owners are free to not have any employees, to prefer employees who donate some of their pay back to the organization, or solicit only volunteers. Workers are free to ask to be paid for their work.
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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.
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I apologize for being a lizard person.
you can disagree with that comment but its clearly not PR speak lmao. not everyone who disagrees with you is astroturfed
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.
https://www.eff.org/pages/internet-still-works-wikipedia-def...:
"A decade ago, Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, received 304 requests to alter or remove content over a two-year period, not including copyright complaints. In 2024 alone, it received 664 such takedown requests. Only four were granted. As complaints over user speech have grown, Wikimedia has expanded its legal team to defend the volunteer editors who write and maintain the encyclopedia."
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...:
"Protect our projects: Sustain and defend our model. Wikipedia's volunteers and values are increasingly under threat. We will provide volunteers with the safety and legal support they need, and defend neutral point of view in a world where facts are increasingly contested and politicized. We will strengthen protection for Wikimedia infrastructure from bot abuse, and lean into responsible reuse that drives value back to Wikipedia, not just traffic away."
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.
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.
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...
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.
If you are looking for VC funding then you are already on the wrong track for an org to run something like Wikipedia.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
"The content is free. The labor is not."
ewww
Nice follow up to "Big tech's hierarchical organisation has come for Wikipedia"
Was that before or after "Big tech's organizational bloat has come for Wikipedia"
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.
> Why do you want to help fund Wikipedia?
Because it's a very valuable resource that I use every day.
Without a solid base of grassroots funding, nonprofits are vulnerable to takeover by entities with ulterior motives.
> It is in no danger at all.
Given what's going on at WMF right now, it sure seems like it is!
I feel like my Wikipedia-boosting bona fides are pretty solid on HN. I think it's not just a very valuable resource but also one of the great intellectual achievements of the last 100 years. My point isn't that the project is unworthy; it's that they don't need your money.
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.
So who is actually in charge at Wikimedia? I always assumed it was a grassroots project and not an industry association like say Linux Foundation.
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 "anti-labor" a "Big Tech" thing, or a "every employer" thing?
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.
I agree, but to do that you need _something_ and _someone_ (often multiple someones) to manage all that.
A small community driven team could manage all that fine.
Like with Mozilla, it's not let to.
> A small community driven team could manage all that fine.
Are there any examples of small community driven teams responsible for managing $200 million revenue?
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.
>That's a lot of money, but it's obvious she could make more in some of those other roles.
She should be told "thank you" then, and let go to make more in some of those other roles.
Such corporate/political world/etc non-community-arising execs just mess with the goals of such projects as Wikipedia or Mozilla.
Is Wikimedia going to go IPO?
Don't give Sam Altman any ideas.
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
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
Never been a better time to stop or not donate to Wikipedia.
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.
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.
I can't with these AI generalizations for big effect.
> This is the standard tech playbook. Fire the engineers who know how the system works, fire the ones organizing labor, hope nothing catastrophic breaks before you can ship something splashy. Twitter did it. Meta did it. Salesforce did it. Google did it. We have all seen this movie.
Just fluff without any substance.
Is that the standard tech playbook? What did Twitter, Meta etc do? "Ah you know, didn't you hear? They did that thing. With that splashy release."
I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed this. A similar section offers an apparently contradictory take with similar language:
> A smart executive welcomes the union, signs a generous contract, and uses the goodwill to consolidate authority for the difficult AI-era decisions ahead. That is the textbook play. Meehan and her team chose the opposite. They picked a fight.
The "standard tech playbook" fires union organizers, but a "textbook play" welcomes them?
Yea that part also stood out to me.
Everything else is also chock-full of plausible sounding but baseless claims and generalizations devoid of any nuance.
> For the people inside the Foundation: this is not a moment to manage. It is a moment to decide.
What does that even mean? Moment to manage what? Decide on what?
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?
Enshitification at the cost of your employees. Great.
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They're not saying Wikipedia is Big Tech, just that they are using the same tactics as big tech companies.
I don't read the article as implying wikipedia is "big tech" in any meaningful way
If the New England Patriots copied the San Francisco 49er's playbook, and the headline read "Patriots are starting to use 49er's playbook", that does not imply the Patriots are now the 49ers.
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Employees being loyal and well paid are in the company’s interests.
And “the right to protect its interests” doesn’t actually include firing people for organizing. That’s illegal most places.
These employees trying to organize seem to be ignoring that they don't actually provide the majority of the value that Wikipedia benefits from, volunteers do.
What a horrible take.
The janitor deserves to be paid well, work in safe conditions, and have stable hours. They may not provide “the majority of the value” but without them work would grind to a halt.
Same applies to every other job. If it needs to be done, then it should be treated with respect and dignity.
I agree that everyone deserves to be paid according to their contribution, and have their employer follow all relevant laws. I am not aware of anyone being murdered, enslaved, or even tortured by the Foundation. This group seems to be trying to ‘cash in’ on Wikipedia’s AI windfall, and I think that will cause long-term damage to the organization.
So, what you’re saying is you believe the bar for starting a union is being murdered, tortured, or enslaved?
Why?
Why would the bar not be: we feel our contributions are undervalued. Because that’s what you’re calling a “cash in” attempt.
If they made the company work up to this point, and the company got a windfall because of its position, why do they not deserve a piece of that windfall?
>”So, what you’re saying is you believe the bar for starting a union is being murdered, tortured, or enslaved?”
No, I’m not saying that, and if I were, I’d clearly state it.
Then why bring that up, if it’s not relevant to the topic?
misgendering people in 2026 is lazy and uninspired
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you mentioned alice bailey elsewhere in this thread, i didnt do research into theosophy before listening to the words of j. krishnamurti, this is now making me think that the concepts i absorbed might be vehicles to demonic activity ... may i ask whether you have researched the connection between these individuals, if so may i ask you to explain your viewpoint
The Gnostics were essentially a mystery school, but they are often framed as a heresy of Christianity led by St. Thomas. They taught that the material world was fundamentally flawed and created by a deity (not God) that they referred to as the Demiurge. They posited that salvation is achieved through Gnosis and that would allow one's soul to escape this flawed realm and enter the divine realm. The moves The Matrix and The Truman Show are very heavily influenced by Gnosticism.
Theosophists brought reincarnation and karma into the fold, but were also essentially a mystery school. Helena Blavatsky is probably the most famous person related to the Theosophy movement, and she was also rumored to be an intelligence asset.
I haven't done much research into the relationship between Alice Baily and J. Krishnamurti, but they are both a part of the same Luciferian new-age movement, and were members of Masonic secret societies, which date back to antiquity (in the forms of different mystery schools / orders / socities / etc...)
Without going too deep down the rabbit hole - yes I believe both of these people were Luciferians and while they do I believe speak some truth, ultimately I believe they are attempting to steer people down the wrong path. You clearly have some discernment based on your question, and I think that's the most important quality a person can possess and hone on their spiritual journey. If you'd like to chat more, or if you have any questions regarding my reply, please feel free to email me at fragworks@proton.me
my way of sitting this fence is that a very tiny fraction of transgender people do exist, but nowadays there are probably more people who simply think they are transgender, an effect spurred by the trajectory of western society (because westerners live disconnected from life therefore disconnected from themselves)
I would agree with you. I think people are searching for something and attempt to find it in all sorts of forms. The truth is, nothing was missing all-along it just takes some self-realization / actualization to realize that, and that takes time and lived experience. In the West, with all of the materialism that is shoved down our throats from a young age, we very much grow up disconnected from ourselves.
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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.
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The person writing the article isn’t in the wiki union.
So… i guess anytime someone else describes your demands as reasonable, they’re unreasonable?
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
their point, if I distill it correctly, is that Meehan comes with an agenda of enshittification. Given the events we're talking here... it's not that far-fetched.
ok and it's worth discussing on its merits. but "wikipedia is private equity" is a dumb thing to say and it matters to actually make concrete criticisms instead of throwing around buzzwords. the agenda of private equity is driven by profit incentives that make absolutely zero sense here.
> the agenda of private equity is driven by profit incentives that make absolutely zero sense here.
well, that also makes a bit of sense. like, why focus on cashing in from AI crap or on continuously expanding the cash bunker like a PE firm would, instead of actually investing money into coordinating with the communities when it comes to stuff like a new theme?
probably the same reason they put banners on the site asking for money
Yeah nobody said Wikipedia is private equity so maybe read for comprehension
The person above you seemed to be able to figure it out without much issue
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.