I appreciate that this article actually cites some of the relevant discussions. Wikipedia community processes are unusual in that they are largely public, including that foundation staff members respond to community questions in public, so you can read a lot of the backstory yourself. Here are a few links.
The 24 May statement includes "I know many of you asked why we cannot just guarantee people new roles...we have 4 countries represented, with a wide variance in required actions. I want to note one specific requirement that came from these laws: we could not pre-select certain staff for new roles, as that would appear to be circumventing legally required processes in some countries."
I use eb.com and so should everyone. The argument that Wikipedia is up to date doesn't fly anymore. There's much better info on Bluesky, mastodon and even X.
They seem to be specialized forks though, not actual recreations of the entire Wikipedia. We should have like an actual Mediawiki instance that forks the current Wikipedia content and maybe also leeches contributions off of it for some time to keep it up to date.
There are various reasons to avoid a fork. Having the resources to maintain such a site, spreading resources thin, and moving over or rebuilding a community of trusted editors are among them.
That said, I am one of the people who downloaded a copy of Wikipedia. It wasn't with the intent of working it. Rather, it was to wait out any political strife (since that is bound to happen with such a large and diverse audience).
Whether they are paid or not, this represents an existential threat to Wikipedia. Without an army of competent editors, Wikipedia just becomes garbage propaganda like Grokipedia.
There are a bunch of research papers that compare Wikipedia and Grokipedia in some depth, and they've found and interpreted a lot of interesting differences. A couple of recaps from the Wikipedia Signpost, which is the internal newsletter for Wikipedians:
Since we’ve all forgotten media literacy, what makes Wikipedia trustworthy is that sources are cited and you can inspect those sources yourself to make a judgement call on the topic at hand.
There was never any such thing as blind trust. We learned in grade school how to evaluate sources and what types of sources are out there (primary and secondary sources, etc).
There is some level of trust in being open, transparent, and without a profit motive. But we recognize as educated people that truth is a matter of perspective, and we can build a complete picture by compiling different perspectives.
But then people like you roll in tossing casual accusations around and I guess your intention is to steer people to far less trustworthy sources than Wikipedia.
The user isn't arguing in good faith here is one of his other comments
>Wikipedia could shut down permanently tomorrow and the world will be a better place.
Wikipedia is a vital resource for the internet and one of humanities supreme achievements. He can certainly have whatever opinion he likes but when has opinions like this he can't be trusted.
>The union Wiki Workers United, which has not yet been recognized, declined a request for an interview.
So, how can they strike when they're all volunteering? What exactly is their Trump-card secret strategy against full replacement? The article didn't even bother addressing the fundamental problem here.
> So, how can they strike when they're all volunteering?
I fail to see the difficulty? Editors striking would mean them not doing the volunteer work they normally do.
How much vandalism do you reckon will go undetected if they do go on strike? How much more time will it take to get articles updated to reflect current affairs?
I would like to see some numbers on it. What exactly is their overall leverage here? What about a lengthy strike? Does anybody really know until it happens?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding but I thought the Wiki Workers United were made up of employees not volunteer editors? Their website says, "We are Wiki Workers United, a global union for the staff of the Wikimedia Foundation. We are the people who do the work to provide a platform, services, and funds to support the Wikimedia movement." https://www.wikiworkersunited.org/
> how can they strike when they're all volunteering?
Volunteering for what exactly? And if what they all are volunteering for went away one day, what exactly would happen to Wikipedia? Is it possible what they are doing, actually has a large impact for Wikipedia?
Striking is less about "us employees are angry" and more about "us who are actually doing things, aren't reaping the same amount of rewards", where "doing things" can be anything from being a salaried employee to a volunteer firemen, they can still strike because of unfairness.
Why would people who haven't contributed up to this point to Wikipedia contribute now? To save Wikipedia? People don't contribute because most users of volunteer/distributed media are leechers, not seeders. People view no value in contribution and even mock volunteers.
Yes, they literally put up banners that take half of your screen asking for random people to "contribute" all the time. They'll just swap out the money banner to an editors banner and change the color to blue or something.
Edit: They literally have this, the color is even blue. I was truly guessing, but it is a thing:
"There are no small contributions: every edit counts, every donation counts. Thank you."
If it were that easy to recruit new dedicated volunteers who would contribute a non-trivial amount of constructive work and stick with it over time, I'd be delighted and relieved, but it's not. Contributing to Wikipedia, at the level of many of the contributors who signed the petition, requires a lot of patience, enthusiasm, and time, and it requires building quite a lot of specialized skill. If you're doing it right, you get really quite good at a certain kind of research, writing, and reasoning. I've been an editor for 25 years, with 12k edits, and have not yet written an article that qualifies as a "featured article" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles) - it's super tough!
But money contributions have no commitment, being a regular editor does. The editors striking here aren't doing trivial edits, and if they are then they are doing it in a large volume.
Wikipedia depends on people doing repetitive and semi-thankless work, such as vandalism patrolling. If no one patrols edits, then the entire wiki devolves into vandalism, edit battles and slop.
Well, it's not exactly the same. It's not a forum (not that a forum is easy, but it's completely different). If you just substitute most Wikipedia editors, with no handover process, I assure you it's going to be a mess.
“Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of trust on the internet.”
This immediately cast the entire article into serious doubt. Sources ranging from the Manhattan Institute to co-founder Larry Sanger have found bias in Wikipedia.
Bastion is pretty high praise. A lot of bias riding on the trust for the brand is the problem . Because the lies there have a much higher impact than lies on a Reddit post.
I think you're going to need to elaborate a fair amount on that take... That runs contrary to the general concensus that having freely and easily accessible information is good for people.
I think the problem that GP is referring to is that Wikipedia is currently treated as a primary source of truth with probably more trust then it should have. When it started (in the '00s) every high-school librarian incessantly warned paper-writing students to verify anything you found on Wikipedia. Eventually, we all got complacent and I believe that general attitude has mostly evaporated. Wikipedia's requirement for citations absolutly helped with this (and is a good thing) but I don't know how well those citations are vetted.
I agree that Wikipedia is good for society, and I hope it continues to exist, but I think some skepticism of it is healthy.
I don't think this is what the OP claimed up here. Anyway, you're absolutely right, and also I don't see any message on this page claiming we should take Wikipedia without skepticism.
I appreciate that this article actually cites some of the relevant discussions. Wikipedia community processes are unusual in that they are largely public, including that foundation staff members respond to community questions in public, so you can read a lot of the backstory yourself. Here are a few links.
Main discussion about Community Tech team on the Village Pump (discussion board): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#W...
* Response from the WMF (21 May): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#R...
* Note from the Wikimedia Foundation on unionization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#N...
* Response from the WMF (22 May): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#R...
* WWU statement (May 23): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#W...
* Response from WMF 24 May: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#R...
The 24 May statement includes "I know many of you asked why we cannot just guarantee people new roles...we have 4 countries represented, with a wide variance in required actions. I want to note one specific requirement that came from these laws: we could not pre-select certain staff for new roles, as that would appear to be circumventing legally required processes in some countries."
Discussion about proposed direction for Community Wishlist: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist#Prop...
Discussed before at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48285592
I use eb.com and so should everyone. The argument that Wikipedia is up to date doesn't fly anymore. There's much better info on Bluesky, mastodon and even X.
Or Substack for that matter
Can Wikipedia be forked?
It has been a few times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_forks_of_Wikip...
They seem to be specialized forks though, not actual recreations of the entire Wikipedia. We should have like an actual Mediawiki instance that forks the current Wikipedia content and maybe also leeches contributions off of it for some time to keep it up to date.
People often download it into offline storage, i dont see why we couldnt just make our own.
There are various reasons to avoid a fork. Having the resources to maintain such a site, spreading resources thin, and moving over or rebuilding a community of trusted editors are among them.
That said, I am one of the people who downloaded a copy of Wikipedia. It wasn't with the intent of working it. Rather, it was to wait out any political strife (since that is bound to happen with such a large and diverse audience).
Who's this "we" exactly? Who's going to host the infrastructure? I don't think it would be so trivial to "just make our own."
Kiwix and Protocol Labs have a mirror hosted on IPFS: https://ipfs.kiwix.org/
There's Internet In a Box and various other offline self hosted interfaces.
But of course there's a big difference between a mirror of the content and the whole community which updates and creates the content.
keywords : miraheze, wikioasis
It should be.
We should do a hard fork of Wikipedia and call it Openpedia or Openwiki probably.
Whether they are paid or not, this represents an existential threat to Wikipedia. Without an army of competent editors, Wikipedia just becomes garbage propaganda like Grokipedia.
Grokipedia is trained on Wikipedia. For most topics the results are the same. Neither are trustworthy.
There are a bunch of research papers that compare Wikipedia and Grokipedia in some depth, and they've found and interpreted a lot of interesting differences. A couple of recaps from the Wikipedia Signpost, which is the internal newsletter for Wikipedians:
2026-03-10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
2026-01-15: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
Sure but one is a lot less trustworthy than the other.
> For most topics the results are the same
Sure, it frequently won't deliberately lie to you.
It often does not replace facts with a party line statement.
Wikipedia is far more trustworthy.
> Neither are trustworthy.
Since we’ve all forgotten media literacy, what makes Wikipedia trustworthy is that sources are cited and you can inspect those sources yourself to make a judgement call on the topic at hand.
There was never any such thing as blind trust. We learned in grade school how to evaluate sources and what types of sources are out there (primary and secondary sources, etc).
There is some level of trust in being open, transparent, and without a profit motive. But we recognize as educated people that truth is a matter of perspective, and we can build a complete picture by compiling different perspectives.
But then people like you roll in tossing casual accusations around and I guess your intention is to steer people to far less trustworthy sources than Wikipedia.
The user isn't arguing in good faith here is one of his other comments
>Wikipedia could shut down permanently tomorrow and the world will be a better place.
Wikipedia is a vital resource for the internet and one of humanities supreme achievements. He can certainly have whatever opinion he likes but when has opinions like this he can't be trusted.
I use eb.com and so should you.
So when the cofounder of Wikipedia calls it compromised, is he also arguing in bad faith?
>The union Wiki Workers United, which has not yet been recognized, declined a request for an interview.
So, how can they strike when they're all volunteering? What exactly is their Trump-card secret strategy against full replacement? The article didn't even bother addressing the fundamental problem here.
> So, how can they strike when they're all volunteering?
I fail to see the difficulty? Editors striking would mean them not doing the volunteer work they normally do.
How much vandalism do you reckon will go undetected if they do go on strike? How much more time will it take to get articles updated to reflect current affairs?
I would like to see some numbers on it. What exactly is their overall leverage here? What about a lengthy strike? Does anybody really know until it happens?
The solidarity petition is public (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Workers_United_...), and it includes a section with statistics summarizing the contributions of editors who have signed the petition, which suggests the impact of signatories deciding to withhold their volunteer labor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Workers_United_...
A couple highlights:
"5 oversighters [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Oversight] ... who collectively performed 587 of the 1,463 (~40%) suppression actions in April 2026"
"5 checkusers [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CheckUser] ... who collectively performed 876 of the 5,419 (~19%) checkuser actions in April 2026"
What kind of units would you like on the "numbers on overall leverage" that make sense for a nonprofit and volunteers?
Exactly. There's nothing here. They will need to strike to find out. Might work. Might not.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding but I thought the Wiki Workers United were made up of employees not volunteer editors? Their website says, "We are Wiki Workers United, a global union for the staff of the Wikimedia Foundation. We are the people who do the work to provide a platform, services, and funds to support the Wikimedia movement." https://www.wikiworkersunited.org/
Wiki Workers United is the union for the paid staff of the Wikimedia Foundation, not volunteer Wikipedia editors.
> how can they strike when they're all volunteering?
Volunteering for what exactly? And if what they all are volunteering for went away one day, what exactly would happen to Wikipedia? Is it possible what they are doing, actually has a large impact for Wikipedia?
Striking is less about "us employees are angry" and more about "us who are actually doing things, aren't reaping the same amount of rewards", where "doing things" can be anything from being a salaried employee to a volunteer firemen, they can still strike because of unfairness.
> What exactly is their Trump-card secret strategy against full replacement?
They are the value. Good luck finding volunteers to replace them.
Billions of people on the planet, and not a single one of them would offer to do it?
Why would people who haven't contributed up to this point to Wikipedia contribute now? To save Wikipedia? People don't contribute because most users of volunteer/distributed media are leechers, not seeders. People view no value in contribution and even mock volunteers.
Yes, they literally put up banners that take half of your screen asking for random people to "contribute" all the time. They'll just swap out the money banner to an editors banner and change the color to blue or something.
Edit: They literally have this, the color is even blue. I was truly guessing, but it is a thing:
"There are no small contributions: every edit counts, every donation counts. Thank you."
https://www.wikipedia.org/#:~:text=We%20ask%20you%2C%20since...
If it were that easy to recruit new dedicated volunteers who would contribute a non-trivial amount of constructive work and stick with it over time, I'd be delighted and relieved, but it's not. Contributing to Wikipedia, at the level of many of the contributors who signed the petition, requires a lot of patience, enthusiasm, and time, and it requires building quite a lot of specialized skill. If you're doing it right, you get really quite good at a certain kind of research, writing, and reasoning. I've been an editor for 25 years, with 12k edits, and have not yet written an article that qualifies as a "featured article" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles) - it's super tough!
The foundation's 2026-2027 draft annual plan explains a bit of their current strategy for recruiting more editors, including by deepening engagement among readers in meaningful ways: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...
But money contributions have no commitment, being a regular editor does. The editors striking here aren't doing trivial edits, and if they are then they are doing it in a large volume.
Wikipedia depends on people doing repetitive and semi-thankless work, such as vandalism patrolling. If no one patrols edits, then the entire wiki devolves into vandalism, edit battles and slop.
I'm sure some russians will immediately volunteer.
I'm sure many already have
I'm sure there are plenty of reddit moderators ready to take it up if needed.
Well, it's not exactly the same. It's not a forum (not that a forum is easy, but it's completely different). If you just substitute most Wikipedia editors, with no handover process, I assure you it's going to be a mess.
It’s a mess already. Just look up their definition of NPOV and compare it to what passes for neutrality in articles.
There are no points to be earned on Wikipedia, so redditors surely aren't interested until it gets completely gamified.
:thumbs-up:
[dead]
Lol must be musk paying them to come over to grokipedia
First sentence:
“Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of trust on the internet.”
This immediately cast the entire article into serious doubt. Sources ranging from the Manhattan Institute to co-founder Larry Sanger have found bias in Wikipedia.
So "trust" is only possible when it's 100% unbiased? Then nothing is "trustworthy" as nothing can be 100% unbiased in a encyclopedia?
I'd say something could be biased in some ways, unbiased in others, yet still be trustworthy, but that's a lot of nuance all at once.
Bastion is pretty high praise. A lot of bias riding on the trust for the brand is the problem . Because the lies there have a much higher impact than lies on a Reddit post.
Who are the Manhattan Institute and Larry Sanger? What are their biases?
I know Elon finds it very biased, so he created Grokipedia, but that says a lot more about Elon than about Wikipedia.
Cofounder of Wikipedia. That has to count at least a little bit in the whataboutism
Bias is impossible to avoid. How perfect does the least imperfect solution have to be before it's not dismissed?
[dead]
The Manhattan Institute is hardly a non-biased source. It was literally founded by the director of the CIA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Casey
Wikipedia could shut down permanently tomorrow and the world will be a better place.
I think you're going to need to elaborate a fair amount on that take... That runs contrary to the general concensus that having freely and easily accessible information is good for people.
I think the problem that GP is referring to is that Wikipedia is currently treated as a primary source of truth with probably more trust then it should have. When it started (in the '00s) every high-school librarian incessantly warned paper-writing students to verify anything you found on Wikipedia. Eventually, we all got complacent and I believe that general attitude has mostly evaporated. Wikipedia's requirement for citations absolutly helped with this (and is a good thing) but I don't know how well those citations are vetted.
I agree that Wikipedia is good for society, and I hope it continues to exist, but I think some skepticism of it is healthy.
I don't think this is what the OP claimed up here. Anyway, you're absolutely right, and also I don't see any message on this page claiming we should take Wikipedia without skepticism.