Mastodawn

Asta v. Schröder

Wikipedia went from "do not cite" to "the last trustworthy source on the internet" in the past 25 years and now it looks like they want to throw it all away because they want to break a union.
The largest community driven project in the world, relying directly on volunteers, and they still do not see the value of their own people.

I hate capitalism

Big Tech’s Anti-Labor Playbook Has Come for Wikipedia | by Jake Orlowitz | May, 2026 | Medium
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

stuart yeates 5d ago

It's come for the WMF, which is significantly younger than the editor community that drives wikipedia.

Many of the older crop of editors were recruited from competing projects ~20 years ago and many of us will be more than happy to be recruited to a better alternative should one arise.

Deb Nam-Krane 5d ago

@AvSchroeder Of course they did. Because I *just* deleted my Kagi account and made Wikipedia my default search engine.

Ambulocetus 4d ago

@AvSchroeder
Oh no.Wikipedia is the only thing we have left. Even Duckduckgo is becoming enshittified. Unreal.

@Ambulocetus DuckDuckGo is a company based entirely in the United States. This is significant for the legal status

@Ambulocetus download wikipedia if you have an extra ssd.

Ambulocetus 3d ago

@return0media
Yes, I've been thiniking about that. Maybe it's time to do it.

Shaun McDonald 4d ago

@AvSchroeder I wonder what it would take to fork Wikipedia to create a new organisation that is better?

@smsm1 @dilmandila @AvSchroeder A number of people have tried forking Wikipedia to make something worse, so we could start by studying their failures

Kierkethumbs up convincingly 4d ago

@AvSchroeder They should be located in a nation with union traditions

This is similar to what is happening to Mozilla.

What we should learn from it, is that lawyers, finance and corporate people should always be kept in consulting roles only, but never be left near the helm.

Kevin Trainor 4d ago

@AvSchroeder Thanks for posting this. I had missed this news completely. In a world with increasingly unequal wealth and power, we need unions more than ever.

@AvSchroeder Fuck.

neocat_floof_sad

@AvSchroeder Important thing here: Wikipedia is pretty anal about copyright and thus pretty much everything is either CC-BY-SA or more permissively licensed.

The only thing the foundation really controls is the current infrastructure, but it is easy enough to set up a copy elsewhere (and even to sync between then two).

So there is a (very) credible exit with everything, except the trademarks at least…

Juɦo̞ Mæn̪t̪yˈs̠ɑ̝lo̞4d ago

@Fiona @AvSchroeder

They control the infrastructure, and about 200+ million dollars of money + commited donations and other revenue streams.

Violet Madder 4d ago

This is NOT merely about busting a union.

This is about seizing the the last big motherlode of free information and locking it down for technofascist control.

Look around. They are enclosing the digital commons. This is a coup. We are under attack. Generative slop is a signal-jamming weapon. Journalism and education are being destroyed. Surveillance is invading every facet of our lives, and democracy is getting disemboweled.

Think for one minute about what any megalomanaiacal jerk would do with tech like "AI". Wannabe supervillain billionaires are fighting over who gets to rule the world, and they'll burn the whole thing in the process.

It's not like they were just going to let Wikipedia just keep running around un-enshittified.

@violetmadder @AvSchroeder interesting analogy. We need levellers.

Neil E. Hodges 4d ago

@violetmadder @AvSchroeder Sucks that everyone is going to continue ignoring things happening while chanting "nothing ever happens". There's no hope for people like that. :/

Good call. The 'AI is a financial bubble' rhetoric disguises the fact that AI is a huge punt to create information and processing monopolies that will act as corporate gatekeepers for all human knowledge.

Removing or corrupting alternative sources of truth is a means of forcing people to use those corporate gatekeepers, because if they didn't then AI itself would starve for lack of new data.

Now might be a good time to buy a set of hard copy encyclopaedias.

Violet Madder 4d ago

@ReggieHere @AvSchroeder

Definitely.

And the financial manipulation from this bubble is making it harder and harder to get our own hardware, too-- they're not just hoarding data, but computing power itself so we'll have to go through their gates to their cloud to get anything done.

And when the bubble busts, we can bet those responsible have a plan for how to weather it and collect bailouts while their competitors crumble. Even while the rest of us experience a crash that could be worse than 1929, they'll make bank.

And they expect to control the therapy bots everyone will be crying to about all this once our access to any real mental healthcare is gone, too.

This whole dystopian hellmess has to be stopped.

This exactly. Stealing the world's data and polluting the remaining sources of primary information is a real super villain flex.

There's no need to create a killer-app if the gatekeepers establish a commercial monopoly over global knowledge, and as hardware and datacentre monopolies start to kick in, client-side compute will become too expensive for ordinary people to own with some grim implications for domestic access to power and water supplies.

Violet Madder 3d ago

@ReggieHere @AvSchroeder

The Nazis would swoon. They could scarcely dream of this.

Agreed. This is Super Villain grade audacious.

.....it's still pretty fragile though, because ultimately any AI will become stale without new data to keep it fresh, and with China and increasingly Europe defecting from the US Big Tech empire, new, primary sources of defended information will gradually become more widely available, and devices running FOSS and old hardware will last for years if not decades to scupper attempts at a hardware monopoly.

Starve them.

Tom Bortels 4d ago

Why do these types of altruistic companies (mozilla also comes to mind) end up allowing leadership that does this sort of bullshit? Was it duplicity, or some inherent weakness in structure?

In any event - time to grab a mirror, and of course anyone donating should stop until this is corrected for the better.

Baloo Uriza 4d ago

@AvSchroeder "Fork Wikipedia" needs to be on the table.

Michael T Babcock 4d ago

@BalooUriza @AvSchroeder you always could. You still can.

Robotistry 4d ago

@AvSchroeder
From the article:

"What to do

Sign the solidarity petition if you edit Wikipedia. Email the board and remind them their fiduciary duty runs to the mission, not the org chart. If you are a journalist, cover this. If you are a researcher or educator who depends on Wikipedia, say so publicly."

Frank Engelhard 4d ago

@AvSchroeder From the looks of this article it is clear that I will stop paying my voluntary yearly contributions .

@AvSchroeder I must say, this is something so typical US American.

Glenn Seto 4d ago

@AvSchroeder Sure would be a shame if the community were to (Libre)off(ice) them...

Juɦo̞ Mæn̪t̪yˈs̠ɑ̝lo̞4d ago

@glennseto @AvSchroeder

The Foundation upkeeps the servers. They have low hundreds of millions dollars of donated money for that purpose. Forking would mean abandoning the money and trying to come up with alternative revenue streams.

The OpenOffice/LibreOffice -split didn't involve money, but was about the mismanagement of the codebase.

TBF, my head went to forking as well, but apparently it isn't feasible.

stuart yeates 4d ago

@iju @glennseto @AvSchroeder

I disagree.

Forking is always an option.

Yes, it'll be very disruptive for a while.

But it'll also be a chance to make some necessary breaking changes and the code level and de-ossify some of the organisational structures.

Juɦo̞ Mæn̪t̪yˈs̠ɑ̝lo̞4d ago

@stuartyeates @glennseto @AvSchroeder

Well, it's a nuclear option. Getting the Foundation to do some spring cleaning would be immensely more preferrable.

Juɦo̞ Mæn̪t̪yˈs̠ɑ̝lo̞4d ago

AFAIK, this has nothing to do with capitalism¹, and more about hierarchial US corporate culture.

_
¹ continuous growth, liberalism, market economy, hoarding of wealth without goal, or any other tangentially linked concept.

Asta v. Schröder 3d ago

@iju same thing

Juɦo̞ Mæn̪t̪yˈs̠ɑ̝lo̞3d ago

Well, there's a distinction in my head, even if you find it meaningless. (As is your right!)

My personal opinion is grounded upon the fact the foundation is a non-profit, and my personal experiences with US-based nonprofits have been immensely stressful.

Meanwhile there are capitalist workplace cultures which assume that you'll get more value out of employees when they're not terrified for losing their job.

TBS, I dislike capitalism categorically, and hierarchial cultures, too.

Asta v. Schröder 2d ago

@iju I think we are closer in agreement as it looks. I just meant that american Corporate Culture is deeply rooted in a very specific, odious flavor of capitalism, and it permeates everything, even nonprofits and NGOs

Jeremy Mallin 4d ago

@AvSchroeder
That is going to suck! I was using them for everything. 💔

oscarfalcon 4d ago

I feel this was always going to be the case for wikipedia, it could not go on forever with daily threats from the US government and bad actors acting within... guess this commons has rot and cannot be cleared so maybe let it die and let's find a new way of protecting knowledge in a new format, with new people and maybe new rules.