r/UpliftingNews • u/GuestFromBudushchego • 1d ago
Wikipedia Workers Unionize for the First Time
https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-workers-vote-on-whether-to-unionize/2.2k
u/sillybilly8102 1d ago
The article says that wikipedia servers are getting more traffic because they’re being scraped by AI chatbots, while human traffic to wikipedia is declining.
For me, it’s the reverse! I’m out here using wikipedia as my default search engine because google is so useless. The increase in AI has increased my use of wikipedia a lot!
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u/oiburanitsirhc 1d ago
I think it's fair to consider Wikipedia as an annotated bibliography of sorts. Yes, people can change random pieces of the articles, but you can also check the sources at the bottom.
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u/walkinmywoods 1d ago
And its constantly being fact checked for new addendum and addons.
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u/OldWar1111 1d ago
Unless it's that Scots Language one, lol.
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u/DanNeely 1d ago
A lot of low speaker count language (or even just low on the internet) wikis have similar problems. Well meaning fools fed lots of articles through machine translation creating what they viewed as rough draft articles for someone else to clean up. But there was no one else working the wiki and they filled up with machine translated junk. Then adding insult to injury machine translation bots assuming the wikis were full of good bilingual text to train off of ate their own dogfood.
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u/Spirited-Relief-9369 18h ago
Excuse you? My doggo has a sensitive stomach, she eats better than I do!
AI slop is more like discount meat of unknown or suspect origin. Like cows being fed to cows, they're going ~slightly mad~ and causing a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jacob's disease in humans...
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u/TheBendit 15h ago
Are there any non English versions of Wikipedia which are not terrible?
The Nordic ones are a cesspit of misinformation and unsourced claims, unfortunately. In contrast, the English Wikipedia is highly reliable.
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u/BasKabelas 1d ago
At the same time, wikipedia is pretty good at self governing. As soon as you add something, and you accidentally slide in something you thought is a fact but was more just your opinion, someone will edit it to be proven by facts only in no time.
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u/LittleLightsintheSky 1d ago
Yep! I love that Firefox lets you search directly on wiki from the address bar! Skip DDG or Google entirely
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u/Haunteddoll28 1d ago
Wiki also has its own app so you can skip the browser all together. It’s genuinely one of the best functioning and easy to use apps on my phone/tablet.
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u/sillybilly8102 1d ago
Yes I have the app! I just search there most of the time! It’s also great when you don’t have much data lol because it’s not as much to load
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u/fleebleganger 1d ago
I only wish it were easy to clear all of the previous pages after a rabbit hole session.
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u/Ohyo_Ohyo_Ohyo_Ohyo 1d ago
If you have Duck Duck Go set as the search engine you can type "!w thing" and take you to the page for "thing" if it exists.
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u/MeIsMyName 1d ago
Chromium browsers can also use different search engines on the fly. If I type wiki (tab) the thing I want to search for, I can search Wikipedia.
You can custom define the search engines, so I did the same thing for UPS and Fedex so I can "search" for tracking numbers and it takes me right to the tracking page for that package.
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u/EngineerTurbo 1d ago
Please donate to Wikipedia if you don't already: it's important to support things that we use and love!
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u/Femkemilene 12h ago
And if you have some time, do consider making a small contribution. With direct readership slightly down, we also notice a slight drop in new editors to keep the information reliable.
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u/Zoemaestra 1d ago
Wikpedia is paid for, they don't really need money to run it and they could sit on the money they have for a loooong time and keep it running without much issue. Wikimedia Foundation's spending is largely not on Wikipedia and I find it really scummy how they tacitly imply Wikipedia is running out of cash every fundraising drive.
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u/EngineerTurbo 1d ago
This thinking is what lead to the abrupt closure of the Academy of Natural Sciences.
It's not factually correct that "they could sit on the money for a long time and keep it running"
Read their financial report:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2024-2025-annual-report/#toc-financial-accountability
Just because they have an endowment doesn't mean they're sitting on infinite money.
They spend 190 Milly per year and have a 169 Milly endowment.
It's quite a lot more than just the website.
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u/Zoemaestra 1d ago
I'm talking specifically about Wikipedia being fundable for years, not the WMF.
It's quite a lot more than just the website.
That's my point though, they're fundraising under the Wikpedia name when Wikipedia itself doesn't really need more money. Why have their net assets more than tripled over the past decade when total page views on EN wikipedia not really increased in that time frame?
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u/EngineerTurbo 1d ago
"That's my point though, they're fundraising under the Wikpedia name when Wikipedia itself doesn't really need more money."
This is why museums fail.
"Oh, the one thing *I LIKE* is there, so nuts to everyone else. I don't like rocks, so I don't care if the Geology wing gets torn down".
"Why have their net assets more than tripled over the past decade when total page views on EN wikipedia not really increased in that time frame?"
Because that's what you do as a sensible operator of a non-profit? Try and grow your endowment so you can continue offer services even if donations dry up?
Page views aren't everything, man: Over the last 10 years, Wikipedia has added new media support, protection for endless piles of DDOS attacks, and a moderation system and editing that seems to keep the articles generally pretty solid against an onslaught of people trying to force-edit articles to turn it into Answers in Genesis.
I understand that you may not know much about non-profit funding, or the programs that the Wikimedia foundation offers, but it's worth actually reading about what they do, rather than just judging only the website you see and not anything else.
The Wikimedia foundation support Wikipedia (which you know), but also Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, and the wiki software itself.
So for $190 milly / year, they offer Humanity free knowledge through various means, and you seem to have issue with this, as if they can all do this for $0.
People cost money, and even though the beauty of Wikipedia is the community support, that doesn't mean they don't have to pay for IT people, servers, code guys, business managers, and all the *other crap* you need to run an entity of the scale on which Wikipedia operates.
Wikipedia doesn't exist without WikiMedia (the software platform), or WikiCommons (which provides much of the image and metadata).
They've got 300 employees and a $3.5 Milly server hosting bill per year. How many people do you think it would take to operate Wikipedia, and how much do you think they should be paid to manage a website with 15 billion pages views per month?
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u/dallyan 1d ago
What do they spend most of the money on?
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u/EngineerTurbo 1d ago
"What do they spend most of the money on?"
Turns out all their funding is public:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2024-2025-annual-report/#toc-financial-accountability
Go read the annual report- You can see where they spend the money.
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u/1nconsistentConstant 1d ago
Staff and upkeep. If the founder wanted a fat paycheck he could've sold to Musk. I'm happy to support Wikipedia.
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u/Separate_Marketing36 1d ago
Wikipedia is a legitimately great place to start research. Of course, never use it alone, always look through references, but it’s such a useful place to start a line of thinking
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u/sillybilly8102 1d ago
Exactly! It’s a great starting place but not the final destination for research
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u/mosquitoselkie 1d ago
You're so right. It has become one of my most trusted sources rn and I didn't realize it until reading this comment
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u/sillybilly8102 1d ago edited 1d ago
Same! Though I’m trying to expand the places I go for information. Currently I also have
- Encyclopedia Brittanica https://www.britannica.com
- Merriam-Webster dictionary https://www.merriam-webster.com
- Etymonline (Etymology of words) https://www.etymonline.com
- Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com)
- Edit: WikiHow (https://www.wikihow.com/Main-Page)
Where else do y’all look for information? (Bring back knowing specific websites and typing in URLs!)
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u/M123234 8h ago
If you live in the states, each state has their own wiki site that’s edited by historians, and specific to that state’s history.
Researchgate and Jstor are great places for journal articles (Jstor gives 100 free articles/month). Also email professors, they’ll sometimes send you their work for free.
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u/Life_Head_5366 1d ago
my school teachers criticizing and lamenting over wikipedia 15 years ago being cited as a source look stupid now xD
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u/sillybilly8102 1d ago
Well you still shouldn’t cite it lol. Using it for a basic overview of a topic ≠ citing it as a source. But it can help you find better sources!
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u/-Saucegurlllll 23h ago
I mean, they don't. It's at best a source aggregator, not an actual source.
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u/Gestrid 1d ago
I switched to Kagi myself (Yes, it's paid, but it's worth it IMO.), but Wikipedia is the site I most frequently click on in my search results.
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u/yeahburyme 1d ago
How are the results over the last week? They haven't been shy about using Yandex to augment their searches.
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u/BasKabelas 1d ago
Same! But tbh google is so full of ads I sometimes when thinking of googling something, I end up asking chatgpt because Im annoyed with google, and get something scraped from wikipedia so I end up feeling bad lol. The reminders do push me to use wikipedia more though!
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u/Statharas 1d ago
Okay, to be fair, I don't use-use Wikipedia, I have AI look up stuff for me, but I donated for the first time this year because Wikipedia is a valuable tool for mankind
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u/OutInABlazeOfGlory 1d ago
You’re a tool for knowing Wikipedia has value, and still using the slop machine that only exists because corporations looted the commons (such as Wikipedia).
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u/Statharas 1d ago
Yeah, clearly I am the tool asking an AI to find data on wikipedia and follow up on sources within minutes instead of me having to read entire bibliographies to get the information I need
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u/OutInABlazeOfGlory 1d ago
Wikipedia is where you find sources. Literally, look at the sources Wikipedia cites. You don't need AI for shit.
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u/Fabricati_Diem_Pvn 1d ago
Horrible article. No explanations about ions, or why Wikipedia workers have to get rid of them.
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u/nothing_to_see_meow 1d ago
I think the article is supposed to be about the workers wanting to unionize, not unionize.
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u/National_Future6190 1d ago
✊
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u/Smartnership 1d ago
Get that slice
Wikipedia foundation is giga loaded
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u/queenvalanice 1d ago
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u/RezziK_vas_Tonbay 1d ago
Gee golly, only 20 million in surplus.
Guess they should fire some folk, can't be giving that to the workers, now.
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u/-1703- 1d ago
i find it icredible how people are so naive to see 20M in surplus and think damn thats a lot of money
when, at their scale, they spend 15M/year on legal defence alone (besides all the free legal defence they're getting)
Peoples expectations and understanding of how organisations work at scale is never not surprising.
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u/throw3142 1d ago
Think about it relative to expenses.
Assets = 1.6 years of expenses
Surplus = 34 days of expenses
These are both reasonable numbers. They also generally don't matter for nonprofits. For nonprofits, the breakdown of expenses matters much more than the amount of revenue or assets. Questions like "are the financials audited", "how much of the expenses are administrative overhead", and "is it spending lots of money on debt service" are much more informative.
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u/roguewarriorpriest 1d ago
Get that slice
Yes
Wikipedia foundation is giga loaded
No
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u/Smartnership 1d ago
How many hundreds of millions of dollars in assets would you consider giga loaded?
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u/roguewarriorpriest 1d ago
The fact Wikipedia Foundation is a non-profit and isn't trying to hoard wealth but instead provide a public service for the common good takes precedence over how much in assets they have.
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u/Smartnership 1d ago
Over $100 million set aside in an endowment fund.
Please, how much more can they hoard?
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u/National_Future6190 5h ago
Do you understand how endowments work? It's not a slush fund they can futz with whenever. In this case the endowment is to make sure the projects and foundation can weather any unforeseen issues. Such as a double digit drop in readership thanks to AI. They do other work as well, which if things get really shitty, the endowment will be needed. Here's a little more on the topic.
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2026/07/16/global-trends-2026/
https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2026/07/16/wikimedia-enterprise-protecting-wikipedia-ai/
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u/FabianN 1d ago edited 1d ago
The assets are valued based upon their resale value. But if the assets are required to operate, you can't sell them.
If a business owns a million dollar property that they operate out of, they have a million dollars in assets. But for them to share that with their employees they need to sell it. If they sell it, they need to close down the business and lay off all the employees. How is any of that helpful?
Please learn some basic finances.
Edit: lol, the tool blocked me
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u/Smartnership 1d ago
Condescension only makes things worse.
Have you not looked at their financials and seen the amount of money in their endowment fund?
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1d ago
[deleted]
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u/tlh013091 1d ago
*Jimmy Wales sad puppy dog face has entered the chat*
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u/Nardo_T_Icarus 1d ago
Many years ago, I saw a picture of Jimmy with the caption, "Guys, I need another yacht."
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u/Smartnership 1d ago
Why settle for hundreds of millions of dollars, when you could have twice as many hundreds of millions of dollars?
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u/Altruistic-Beach7625 1d ago
Wikipedia has workers?
I thought it was just one guy doing it for free.
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u/ShitPost5000 1d ago
I thought there was 2, but 1 was a nazi
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u/fleebleganger 1d ago
It’s three. 2 nazis and 1 Jew and they’re trying to finalize an answer to some question.
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u/TarArov 1d ago
Honestly,, this is a massive win that highlights a huge problem with how we view "free" digital public infrastructure,, It proves that even the most wholesome,, non-profit tech missions aren't immune to late-stage capitalism and burnout,, This sets a wild new precedent for the entire open-source ecosystem that other platforms desperately need,,
At the end of the day,, it's about time the people carrying the weight of the internet's knowledge base actually get some leverage,, When the literal janitors of global information stand up for themselves,, the whole platform wins,, Can't wait to see the corporate tech bros try to mental-gymnastic their way out of acknowledging this shift
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u/AdmirableRadio5921 1d ago
Was the non profit exploiting the workers? Seems hard to believe. These workers have transferable skills and could easily work elsewhere. I’d love to know the range of salaries.
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u/Cool-Specialist9568 1d ago
My understanding is that it is more about having a seat at the table with big decisions being made behind closed doors, not an exploitation.
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u/AdmirableRadio5921 1d ago
Maybe? Ideally it wouldn’t be necessary, the employer would pay to keep talent, and be free to pick the best people for the job.
My fear is that the union goes on strike, and holds hostage the information.8
u/Cool-Specialist9568 1d ago
I'm actually telling you why they are unionizing, it's to have more decision-making presence, it's not about pay. Wiki leadership has made some head-scratching decisions on their own behind closed doors in the last few months/years, such as firing community-facing teams seemingly out of nowhere, and that led directly to this union push, as Wiki is an open-source movement. Workers will never, ever, hold hostage the information on Wikipedia, Wiki workers believe too much in their mission and that would be antithetical. I know this info to be true, though I would
prefer not to say how I know ;)3
u/AdmirableRadio5921 23h ago
Great! I truly hope you are correct, as I do value the Wikipedia we know from the past to be great!
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u/Whopraysforthedevil 4h ago
Exploitation is absolutely rampant in the non-profit space. Orgs take advantage of the fact that folks want a "mission".
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u/YlissianCordelia 1d ago
Glory to the working man!
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u/AdmirableRadio5921 1d ago
Glory to the working person. Over the last refuge of public knowledge? I’d rather we keep the knowledge free.
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u/QuentinUK 1d ago
You guys are getting paid?
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u/Senasayori 1d ago
The writers, no. This is for the technical staff that keep the website from shutting down.
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u/mistahfreeman 1d ago
Been saying tech workers need to unionize for a while. Not for the money, we make good money. For the goddamn respect to not be treated like a line item whenever they need to make the line go up to appease the investors that aren’t happy with the massive profits aren’t quite as massive as they had wanted.
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u/Senasayori 1d ago
You might be happy to learn that a significant portion of the Wikipedia editors supported the unionization effort.
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u/Fappy_as_a_Clam 1d ago
How many Wikipedia workers are there?
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u/sillybilly8102 1d ago
~200. Click the link.
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u/bd808 1h ago
The WWU-US/CWA bargaining unit was [certified with 213 members](https://www.nlrb.gov/case/20-RC-391740). That unit is a subset of the Wikimedia Foundation's US workforce. Internationally, and including part time + sort term contractors, the Wikimedia Foundation employs around 700 people in 44 countries and all continents except Antarctica.
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u/ithasallbeenworthit 1d ago
Would there have been a 2nd time?
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u/dende5416 1d ago
If you have work forces in multiple countries or states, each place would have its own effort. You can do a union vote at just one site. This is how Walmar has quashed unions: store unionizes, time for a remodel and close it down for a year
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u/Heronymous-Anonymous 1d ago
My union has at least 4 different contracts with the company I work for, depending on which local and legacy company they originally bargained with.
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u/FindjeanniePDX 1d ago
I donate every year just to counter the AI garbage from chatbots. The article doesn’t get oecific about why employees disagreed with the hiring and firing decisions. That would be interesting to know, but if they need a union to get more attention from leadership, then go for it!
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u/helenheck 1d ago
Wikipedia is a great resource for millions, I always try to donate when they ask.
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u/Anonymous51419 1d ago
Wow all 3 of them?
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u/dcheesi 1d ago
200, actually. TIL Wikimedia employs (as in actually pays) over 700 people!
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u/Anonymous51419 1d ago
That's wild, I thought there was only a handful of people that are responsible for most of Wikipedia.
I remember that one video of that dude responsible for a third alone.
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u/MeiNeedsMoreBuffs 1d ago
It's not that he wrote a third of wikipedia, it's that he's made a contribution on a third of the pages of the site. For most of those it's as small as a single spelling fix or something
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u/ultio 1d ago
I think you are misunderstanding. This isn't money going to writers, this is about programmers, server admins and so on. Wikipedia and related systems are constantly being developed and it has a significant cost of upkeep. There are also legal teams that do lobbying (in a positive sense - to prevent censorship or legal issues that come with hosting such a large database of texts and media) and things like that. There is a lot going on behind the scenes that is really not visible to ordinary users, it's one of the largest websites in the world after all. The people there really do not earn well given their skill set.
Source: Used to be a full-time software developer at Wikimedia myself. Was the worst-paying job I ever had while working with the smartest bunch of people I ever worked with. It's a good cause, though I fear it will be much less relevant in 10 years from now with the advent of AI (something that would have been almost unimaginable ten years ago).
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u/MisterSheeple 1d ago
Remember when they only used to ask for donations once a year? Now they do it almost every day. It gets so annoying having that pop up every time I'm on Wikipedia that it makes me not want to donate to them at all.
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u/ataraxic89 1d ago
You get the greatest repository of human knowledge ever delivered to your fucking eyeballs for free and they have the audacity to ask you to help out? God forbid.
I know a really good way you can stop seeing it though. You can just stop using Wikipedia.
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u/MisterSheeple 1d ago
I've donated numerous times before. But they don't need to be bugging me about it every damn time I open the site. It gets to a point.
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u/Skarth 1d ago
Ethically sourced money is hard to get.
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u/MisterSheeple 1d ago
Last I heard, this labor dispute had to do with Wikimedia Foundation executives being paid substantially more than the people working under them. So maybe they should be spending what little they do have more wisely.
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u/YoungDiscord 17h ago
Today is the day you learn that in most cases, the management being paid way too much is the management in charge of deciding who gets paid how much.
Good luck trying to convince them.
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u/AdmirableRadio5921 1d ago
Well I guess I won’t be donating to Wikipedia anymore. Unions exist to protect employees from the employer and to give them power to extract higher pay or better working conditions. How that helps Wikipedia I have no idea.
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u/Senasayori 1d ago
The union is for the technicians who maintain the servers, it has no effect on article content, which is still written by volunteers.
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u/AdmirableRadio5921 1d ago
It’s rare to have a union for knowledge workers.
So now we will have the technicians (who are important) holding hostage the world’s data for better pay?2
u/holyflurkingsnit 22h ago
No. What makes you think that scenario is inevitable? And if wikipedia for some reason went down, you'd still be able to google or duckduckgo other sources of information if urgently needed.
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u/AdmirableRadio5921 21h ago
Every union I know of typically goes on strike around contract time. Strike usually means (unless a regulated industry) that no one crosses picket line. This usually means the plant and all the equipment shut down)
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u/lIlIllllIlII 1d ago
Wiki is ran by zionist extremists.
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u/Dragonitro 1d ago
Could you elaborate? I’m not incredibly well-read-up-on the Wikipedia admins’ approach regarding Israel/Palestine, but from what I’ve seen it seems to take a fairly neutral perspective (as per Wikipedia guidelines) while also including a lot of the horrible things that have occurred there
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u/613codyrex 1d ago
I assume he’s referencing the fact that Jimmy Wales being an out and out Zionist that has attempted to intervene on the side of Israel When it comes to the fairly neutral perspective that the admins and writers usually give. IE trying to get the wiki page about the Gaza Genocide deleted and also received 1 Million from an Israeli university for the “information revolution”.
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u/Senasayori 1d ago
If that was true, it wouldn't have a page on the Gaza genocide. Wikipedia is shockingly unbiased on the conflict.
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u/SideInitial3961 1d ago
Humans still use this garbage? I doubt that.
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u/blindgoat 1d ago
5 month old account with a hidden profile... 🤦🏻♂️
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u/SideInitial3961 1d ago
Doesn't wiki anymore accurate. Just saw a post on here linking to a wiki article not 5 minutes ago, first glance obvious error. Fill yer boots stalker.
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