Separating crowd-sourced encyclopedia-building from #WMF / #WikimediaFoundation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Userboxes/Ideas#Request_-_June_2,_2026

Well, this is disappointing.
Canceling my donations until this is resolved correctly.
If you're an editor, sign the petition linked here.

Big Tech’s Anti-Labor Playbook Has Come for Wikipedia https://medium.com/@jakeorlowitz/wikipedia-is-doing-the-capitalist-thing-56a393232943
#UnionBusting #WikimediaFoundation #Wikipedia #Labor #BrookeVibber #WikiWorkersUnited #WWU #Unions #JakeOrlowitz

RE: https://wikis.world/@tamzin/116664987393810286

Some of you who have cancelled donations to the #WikimediaFoundation have posted the responses you have received from fundraising staff. The #Wikipedia community is now having their say at the Village Pump. (For those who are unaware, many English Wikipedia editors have very strong feelings and opinions about those damn fundraising banners.)

När ledare i projekt som drivs i form av tusentals frivilliga och ett fåtal anställda hämtas från storföretagen innebär det att det som är bra med dessa projekt och ger dem trovärdighet utsätts för risken att bli förstört och korrumperat. VI har sett tendenser till detta i Mozilla Foundation som leder utvecklingen av Firefox med mera.

Editores da Wikipédia ameaçam greve inédita após demissões na fundação

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://tecnoblog.net/noticias/editores-da-wikipedia-ameacam-greve-inedita-apos-demissoes-na-fundacao/

A good write-up by Mia Sato in The Verge about what's been going on on #Wikipedia the past week. https://www.theverge.com/report/939442/wikipedia-editors-protest-wikimedia-layoffs-strike

As of this post, the petition of editors willing to go on strike is at 737 signatures. This makes it the 3rd-most supported petition or proposal in English Wikipedia history. Combined, signatories have made >10,000,000 edits and written ~42,000 articles, including >1,200 recognized as "good" or "featured".

#wikimedia #wikimediafoundation #labor #union #solidarity #wmf #wwu

I've seen many posts about cancelling financial donations to the #WikimediaFoundation, and arguments for and against doing so. I won't comment on financial donations because I've never given a cent to the Foundation, but have given hundreds of hours of volunteer time to #Wikimedia projects. That's my point here – #Wikipedia and its sister projects are built by an enormous community of volunteers. 25 years on, it is still the encyclopaedia that anyone can edit, with no one at the door checking for qualifications or memberships. You don't even need to register an account! (But there are benefits to registering, and pseudonyms are welcome.)

If you've cancelled or are thinking of cancelling a donation, you might want to consider substituting it by joining the community. Volunteering is often a win-win situation: you can give direct support to a project you care about, make new friends, and learn new skills (or practise rusty ones) in the process. On Wikipedia, I've seen autodidacts learn information literacy and research skills for free instead of undertaking years of study like me, and I see lifelong academics learning to communicate their expertise for general readers. In the last year, I've spent more time than I'd like learning to identify LLM-generated text ☹️ but I've also been mentoring new editors and seeing some of them surpassing my achievements 🙂.

I think anyone who can navigate the fediverse will have little trouble learning to edit Wikipedia. If you're interested, visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Introduction or ask me anything. (Or go to https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3945 to find the Introduction page on another language Wikipedia.) If an editorial strike does go ahead, there are still talk pages, the fediverse, and other places where Wikipedians chat and organise.