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.
You should've checked the page for genghis khan first, it's actually very neutral lol.
Which is the point I'm making - it's possible to write unbiased articles about bad people. Wikipedia just isn't doing that for modern-day politicians. Which is fine! But not unbiased.
It all boils down to whatever adjectives you can use or not. You can say some politician is a racist in the first paragraphs of their Wikipedia article, but you can’t say some politician filled a country with immigrants from the third world. That implies a bias, because one thing is seen by the editors as damning enough to warrant a mention whilst the other isn’t, despite both things being considered somewhat equally bad by different sides of the political aisle.
(I know the answers to this comment will be “oh but it’s not the same…”. Spare me. You missed the point of my comment.)
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
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.
To give context, it seems like what happened is WMF did two separate things:
- Fired one of the original developers of MediaWiki (the open source project that powers wikipedia) - Brooke. This person was at one point in contention to basically be BDFL of MediaWiki. She is somewhat less publicly prominent now compared to back in the day, but to a lot of oldhands this is shocking.
- Laid off community tech team. This is a team that basically did development work by popular demand (literally people voted to decide on what they would work on). In many ways the existence of this team was a band-aid on the problem that many Wikipedians felt WMF was not being responsive to their needs or working on things that were important. The team was extremely popular, and disbanding it felt like a middle finger to many. In particular to many people (including me) it seems extremely cold to lay people off during a reorg instead of reassigning them.
On top of that both were involved with unionization activities, which further fueled concerns that this might be some sort of retalitory step.
Maybe good will come out of this. Sometimes you get a team that become entrenched and everything follows from there with little give to other ways. New blood may be an opportunistic change for a new direction. Maybe better maybe worse -time will tell. Renewal is not bad.
Some English Wikipedia (enwiki) editors are striking. They are predominantly non-technical that are forced to maintain their own shadow IT-style infrastructure that Wikimedia (nonprofit owners of Wikipedia) doesn't provide. It is very difficult to be a productive editor without custom tooling at this point.
The reason why is because the laid off team maintained the Community Wishlist, the main way for editors to feature request for "professional" solutions.
The Wikimedia Foundation also deweighted popularity as a metric for tackling feature requests on the Community Wishlist. This pisses off enwiki as the largest editor base.
From the WMF's perspective, though, enwiki is a cash cow on the BCG matrix.[1] It has been in seemingly terminal decline for over a decade[2], accelerated by LLMs, yet still drives the majority of donations/clicks.
As a result, WMF prioritizes investing in emerging markets over enwiki. This means outreach to indigenous languages in the Global South and developing supporting infrastructure. e.g. "Abstract Wikipedia" which aims to use a language-neutral syntax that can be automatically translated into any language.
These currently form a tiny segment of the editor population but have much larger potential TAM and are growing. So it's the correct strategy even if it pisses off editors.
> As a result, WMF prioritizes investing in emerging markets over enwiki. This means outreach to indigenous languages in the Global South and developing supporting infrastructure. e.g. "Abstract Wikipedia" which aims to use a language-neutral syntax that can be automatically translated into any language.
I'd disagree that there is a causal relationship here. I think most of the outreach to indigneous languages has more to do with politics and ideology than anything else (Wikimedia sees itself as a global movement to collect all knowladge. Can't exactly claim that if its all english).
As for abstract wikipedia. I think that is more a moonshot project driven by people wanting to make the next wikidata. I suspect a major part of support for it is that they can use alternative sources of funding for it (grants).
The "abstract Wikipedia" just seems like a solved problem with LLMs.
However sceptical of "AI" you are, "give me the information on this page in my preferred language" is the kind of task they excel at. (I won't use the word translate). It wouldn't even require prioritising the English Wikipedia: any agent today could one shot a task like "check the Wikipedia pages in all languages for X, summarize the results and note any disagreements between them".
Abstract wikipedia is taking a symbolic AI approach instead of an LLM or other statistical approach. The hope is (as i understand it) that this will provide reliability, predictability and better extend to languages that don't have a large corpus of text to train things on.
Personally i think its a bit of a wild bet, that seems especially surprising in the modern context. Guess we'll have to see if it pans out.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>"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"
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.
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 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.
As others have said, there's even more at stake with a nonprofit. Charities famously milk their employees dry by emphasizing what good and important work they're doing, to justify overworking and underpaying them. If someone chooses to work for a nonprofit, that should not be interpreted as "willing to be a human doormat".
Wikipedia owners are free to not have any employees, to prefer employees who donate some of their pay back to the organization, or solicit only volunteers. Workers are free to ask to be paid for their work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
The vulnerabilities and strong incentives are there.
• People contribute to Wikipedia with the intension of sharing value freely, but without retaining any rights or control over what they contribute.
• The community has created so much coordinated, networked and compounding value, invested so much time, that it can't sensibly walk away, or start over.
• Centralized leadership ends up in control of an increasingly valuable and unique asset, they didn't have to pay to produce (at anything like market rates). They have increasing opportunities to extract value by means unanticipated by contributors. And they have no requirement to consult with external contributing individuals, representatives, or organizations.
That situation rarely ends well.
Wikipedia, and similar community content efforts, need a standardized license that does for community produced/shared content what open source licenses do for community produced/shared code.
What is decisive is how the public responds, including the core public for this service here on HN:
Lots of people have objected to most Archive Today links because of their behavior. Will people insist on using other links besides Wikipedia? What will they post? (What would it take to fork and serve Wikipedia's content, without all the editing, etc. infrastructure?)
And will other organizations act? For example, search engines that default put Wikipedia results in infoboxes at the top? Will Mozilla and other non-profits say something?
Wikipedia is a public resource, not a private business, and even businesses bow to public pressure (recently, especially pressure from the right, but that's irrelevent here - the point is, it works). If we don't act, nobody will.
Wikipedia hasn't been Wikipedia in a decade. I gave up on Wikipedia when the Deletionists started running the shop, editorially. I learned the hard way that it was run by cliques and not egalitarian ideals.
My suspicion here is that there are deeper issues for which union-busting is a symptom and not the main issue. There's a battle to control what information gets recorded and distributed, an effort to silence anything that contradicts US foreign policy, basically.
Wikimedia Foundation CEO Bernadette Meehan has very much a Beltway insider, working for the the US foreign service, the Obama administration (NSC), the Obama foundation and the Biden administration (Ambassador to Chile). Personally, I deeply distrust anyone having a lot of influence over what is essentially the world's actively recorded history book.
There's history here too, specifically the 2016 secret project to essentially label infomration on the Internet as "reliable" [1]. It became controversial because it violated the Foundation's transparency rules so there's cause for concern over transparency.
We're all familiar I'm sure with some of the lamest edit wars [2]. But this stuff matters. STates actively interfere with Wikipedia to whitewash or outright falsiy the record or reputation of states or people.
Not Wikipedia, but the Turkish government fairly famously was caught manipulating Google search results to surface propaganda as the first link on the Aremanian genocide [3].
Wikipedia has been the target of these influence campaigns too eg [4][5].
> There's a battle to control what information gets recorded and distributed, an effort to silence anything that contradicts US foreign policy, basically.
The Wikimedia foundation does not exercise editorial control over Wikipedia. Neither the people fired nor the people doing the firing have any control over article contents.
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.
Not everyone shares the delusion that men can become women or vice versa. What's lazy and uninspired, is expecting everyone to share the same set of beliefs that you do.
A benefit of sites like Grokipedia is that you don't have to worry about editors going on strike and acting malicious towards the encyclopedia. Humans are not safe to trust with such power.
>They can afford six engineers.
This is a common misconception. Just because a company has millions or billions dollars, that doesn't mean it makes financial sense to spend it on hiring people.
The US Federal Government spends twice as much as it collects in taxes, borrowing the difference. The mounting debt requires that we set interest rates as low as possible to keep interest payments feasible.
For depositors, this means you can't make money in the bank. And the stock markets gains look good on paper but inflation erases much of the real value. So people with giant pools of capital have learned to make their own fortunes by buying companies directly. This is "private equity."
Their playbook once they do so is limited to a few extractive techniques. They might buy a few leading competitors in an industry and merge them, double/triple the rates, and shutdown the associated 3rd party services "marketplace" and force people to buy only their services. Or start charging for API access that previously offered to all customers for free.
They might buy a service provider who charges reasonable rates, double/triple the rates, then sell them off again 14 months later.
They might buy a solvent company, saddle it with debt, and sell it off.
These private equity gains drive everyday costs for consumers like me. In a recent 24 months period, every monthly bill I pay went up $$$ as PE firms took over my service providers.
We could slow PE (and inflation in general) by raising interest rates, incentivizing deposits and increasing the cost of capital. But this would require national fiscal responsibility, and nobody wants that. Additionally, we could choose to bootstrap companies with sustainable multigeneration succession planning instead of sudden financialized cash outs. But after tirelessly building a company for a decade most founders would rather cash out so someone else can begin to abuse their customers. "I deserve this."
It doesn’t matter because they don’t control anything tangible - which is the point. Just like the 501(c)3 that openAI was.
Read for knowledge:
Bernadette Meehan became CEO on January 20, 2026, recruited from a career that included Wall Street stints at J.P. Morgan and Lehman Brothers, a spokesperson role at the National Security Council, senior leadership at the Obama Foundation, and most recently a posting as U.S. Ambassador to Chile. Four months in, the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki is fired, the team that personifies community service is dissolved, and the union is in open confrontation.
This person is a loyal PE capitalist and that’s the whole point.
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_...
Which is the point I'm making - it's possible to write unbiased articles about bad people. Wikipedia just isn't doing that for modern-day politicians. Which is fine! But not unbiased.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/how-wikipedia-whitewashe...
(I know the answers to this comment will be “oh but it’s not the same…”. Spare me. You missed the point of my comment.)
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.
People become more conservative as they age, so maybe the reality quote is about the young and the young edit Wikipedia more
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
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Reality_has_a_well_known_lib...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate
https://grokipedia.com/page/Gamergate
Please supply actual instances of the supposed bias.
And disagreeing with the supposed "negative portrayal" or disapproving/approving of the actions of one does not make an article biased.
- 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...
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
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...
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).
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".
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.
this is extremely reminiscent of the stackexchange situation
Perhaps because their message to new contributors is a consistent "stop trying to make corrections, and go away"?
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.
A lot of people do ask them not 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.
"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.
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.
In the event of a recession they could easily scale spending down to match.
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.
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.
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.
The actual physical cost of hosting Wikipedia is < $5 million per year.
[0] https://i.sstatic.net/H35whdaO.jpg
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.
It's difficult to look at any remotely contentious Wiki page today and conclude that they have succeeded.
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.
>"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.
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.
>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 don't have an opinion on how that's used in this situation FWIW, this seems like an extremely reasonable engineering team to employ for that basis.
This may of course be unfair, but that's the background information.
... 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.
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.
It is wild to see she getting fired.
"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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
You need a Wasserman Schultz link just talking about [5] as well?
So… i guess anytime someone else describes your demands as reasonable, they’re unreasonable?
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.
And “the right to protect its interests” doesn’t actually include firing people for organizing. That’s illegal most places.
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.
>They can afford six engineers.
This is a common misconception. Just because a company has millions or billions dollars, that doesn't mean it makes financial sense to spend it on hiring people.
>Wikipedia is not a website.
Yes it is. It operates at https://www.wikipedia.org/
>The encyclopedia belongs to everyone. The labor that sustains it deserves the same protection.
It makes no sense to license labor under the CC 4.0 license.
There’s nowhere left to go.
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."
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.