Jake Orlowitz3d ago
"The Foundation has spent twenty years telling donors it is not like other tech companies. The union drive is the moment when that claim either becomes true or admits it was always marketing." I spent six years on WMF staff, founded The Wikipedia Library in 2011, and have been editing for nineteen years. I wrote this piece because the people I worked with deserved someone willing to speak plainly. The response suggests the public is listening. https://medium.com/@jakeorlowitz/wikipedia-is-doing-the-capitalist-thing-56a393232943 #Wikipedia
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
Show threadyoasif3d ago

@JakeOrlowitz Jake, I'm writing on this topic (thank you for this post!) and I'm a little surprised to see you say that the revenue from AI companies is good.

In my mind, it seems obvious that the big tech companies are paying #Wikipedia for a license to the corpus that they cannot grant - one that allows them to opt out of reciprocal licensing of the encyclopedia.

Why am I off base here?

Isn't it the case that Wikipedia is simply ripping off the community as it is its employees?

Show threadJake Orlowitz
@yoasif Without getting into licensing, law, or ethics, they have ALREADY scraped it. So we might as well get paid. I think that's the nub of it.
May 28 at 12:26amWeb
Show threadAline Blankertz2d ago

@JakeOrlowitz @yoasif
Wikimedia Enterprise is built on false assumptions even before the “AI” hype. This is not “paying for access”, it is legitimacy-washing for a deeply extractive and unequal relationship with Google & others.

(Wrote about it here in more detail: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5238447)

<p>Interoperability and openness between different governance models: the dynamics of Mastodon/Threads and Wikipedia/Google</p>

Governments, businesses and civil society representatives, among others, call for “alternatives” to compete with and possibly replace big tech platforms. These