Mastodawn

> 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.

this time it's Wikipedia

https://medium.com/@jakeorlowitz/wikipedia-is-doing-the-capitalist-thing-56a393232943

Big Tech’s Anti-Labor Playbook Has Come for Wikipedia

TLDR: In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki and disbanded the team whose entire…

Medium

George B May 26

And as we can see with twitter especially, everyone got so used to tech getting worse over time that they barely notice the effects of this self sabotage

Bård H. (lvl 49 🇳🇴)May 26

@davidgerard
I guess they won't need my money anyway, then
oh well

David Gerard 6d ago

@baardhaveland be sure to tell them!

@davidgerard
I haven't found another post on it yet to link instead, but jsyk the post is written in part using an LLM

Coming out of the AI Closet

For a while now, I’ve been quietly using AI in my writing. A lot.

Medium

MaddieM4 May 27

@vantiss @davidgerard here I was, giving benefit of the doubt to a substacker 🤦‍♀️

David Gerard 6d ago

@MaddieM4 @vantiss this post is from Jake talking to multiple Wikimedia staff and was also sent to me by multiple WIkimedia staff (because we both know them). It is the source document. If you find an alternate writeup saying the same things, it will be based on this one.

@davidgerard @MaddieM4
yeah, I've come to realize that this is the only post of this sort in it because he is the source here

it's a real shame he chooses to run it through an LLM x.x

@davidgerard fuck's sake, Wikipedia, you were the chosen one

Dan KB6NU 🇺🇦May 26

@davidgerard Hmmmm. They're not getting any more money from me, for sure.

@davidgerard
"The encyclopedia belongs to everyone. The labor that sustains it deserves the same protection."

No, "Big Tech's Anti-Labour Playbook" is not coming for Wikipedia, it's coming for Wikimedia. The editors of Wikipedia never get paid for any of their work. It's Wikimedia employees who get fat salaries in this neo-liberal middle-man gatekeeper company. Screw them, no need to unionize for privileged leechers whose jobs rest on the exploitation of the work of unpaid "volunteers".

flere-imsaho 🇺🇦May 27

@simsa02 i'm sure @davidgerard badly needs this very new knowledge.

Jake in the desert May 27

@davidgerard 🤮

(of course she was)

"The Foundation itself once described her as one of a very small number of people in the world who deeply understand the technical underpinnings of the system. She was also a union organizer."

# Akolita P - Vikompt Prekompt May 27

@davidgerard
This is natural cycle of life
New system will be better minimal with ai

Bob Tregilus May 27

@davidgerard Well, 💩 .

@davidgerard And then the author mentions "the AI that you use every day".

Which means he's a slopper who thinks everyone is a slopper, which means this whole article is most likely AI slop and nothing in it must be believed or trusted.

A different source is needed to report on this.

David Gerard May 27

@yora This one is accurate enough that multiple Wikimedia staff sent it to me, this is a close source

@davidgerard more a decaybook

Dingswart May 27

@davidgerard
somehow got to the following summary:
For a revenue of 8 mil from AI premium sucking fees they risk:
a) fundraising at all,
b) beeing the first view source (why to toggle between AI and wikipedia),
c) beeing attractive to content-contributors (AI knowledge grinding) and by that
d) to shrivel up wikipedia.
They hired a job promiscuous CEO to cure a healthy org by draining.
And the author of the article is using AI cse he's too vain to be falsified by others.

@davidgerard I clearly did not worry enough when I learned that Wales is a friend of Musk.

Come On Giant Asteroid!May 27

>2000 edits and I just stopped. And that was before I read that the Foundation was sucking at the teat of AI.