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."
>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.
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.
Well, they've mostly left reddit as well, afaik. It's a few stragglers, people being paid to push agenda, and auto-moderation now. I was reading / moderating reddit for over 4 hours a day, every day, for close to a decade. Heavy handed pro israeli censorship and propaganda has seen me pick up and leave, as i know many others have done. I was already wavering, over reddit's support of astroturfing and shill bots which were obvious, detectable, and reddit refused to do anything about it. Even actively supported it. So with the whole denying /actively supporting genocide thing, it was time to hang it up and leave.
If wikipedia is shutting off avenues for community input, maybe that is running it's course as well.
Its been nice internet, I loved you, and I will never forgive google for what they put into motion.
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.
The fire people doing real work. Without those 6 people, what paid people work at wikipedia ? Just fund raisers and managers ?
That seems to be how non-profits evolve these days, fund raisers and management get most of the $ raised. So it looks like the WF is going in that direction to me.
WMF has over 600 staff, and 6 were recently laid off from a specific team. The criticism isn’t that no one is doing work at WMF but instead
a) The team affected by the layoff was responsible for implementing ideas from the community, and this historically has not had much traction. This decision sends a signal that WMF does not care about community input.
b) Most of the people laid off were prominent in a union, and the community thinks this is unfair retaliation that a mission focused non profit shouldn’t stoop to.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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