You must log in or # to comment.
Fuck yeah! Solidarity!
Great! I wish there were more tech unionization efforts like this in Canada, not that I imagine any such efforts would be able to make any progress at my regressive, toxic, American-owned, boomer-run employer within my lifetime. But maybe I’d be able to eventually find a new job at a union shop somewhere. I’m not holding my breath. Is there anything a senior-level peon like me can do to support these kind of things without trying to convince me there is any realistic hope of my current evil empire workplace ever unionizing?
A rising tide lifts all boats, is the way I see it. Often places that unionize are where the conditions are the shittiest. My impression is that workers are generally faring better in Canada than they are in the US, but workplaces unionising can have ripple effects even on the international level.
My favourite example of this is something I learned from the Data Workers Iniative which supports research from countries like Kenya, Venezuela, Syria and more. Whilst there’s some harrowing stuff documented by workers in this project, there’s also plenty of good news about workers organising.
For instance, data workers in Kenya contracted to the company Sama were being horrifically exploited in their data labelling work for tech giants like Meta. This led to the formation of the African Content Moderator’s Union, which had impact far beyond Kenya. For instance, when Sama began to open more offices in other African countries, there was much more active worker resistance straight away because of this precedent.
It’s very much a case of “none of us are free until all of us are free”, and I think that in many cases, our own battles are going to rely on workers organising many many miles away from us. In the meantime, we just have to do what we can to help both the local fight, and the wider fight.
Inspiring to see. Well done!
[union needed]
Nice
So can I start donating again? I’d like to contribute
yes
There’s no need. They have enough money to run Wikipedia for many many decades.
As of June 30, 2025, the Foundation’s net assets were $296.6 million, which represents 17.1 months of operating expenses
lol not decades and mostly donations
Revenue: The Foundation’s total revenue increased by $23.2 million, to $208.6 million during fiscal year 2024-2025. The vast majority of this revenue came from donations (including grants from the Endowment), as well as investment income, Wikimedia Enterprise revenue, and other revenue primarily related to a cost sharing agreement with the Wikimedia Endowment, which, to keep the Endowment’s costs down, allows the Endowment to leverage staffing and other resources from the Foundation and reimburse the Foundation for this usage. Donation revenue increased $14.8 million, from $174.7 million to $189.5 million.
How much do you think payroll is? Major layoffs would likely begin in a year if people stopped donating i’d imagine.
Expenses: Our expenses totaled $190.9 million, of which 77.4% went to programmatic activities
That includes their data centers engineering and security payroll from what I read. The bulk of expenses is literally just to run the application smoothly, and keep these employees paid.
The only way to make their funds lasts decades would be to shut down a ton of shit and lay off employees, which would not be something anyone wants.
They don’t have to shut it all down but they should absolutely split off all their bloated non-Wikipedia endeavors from the rest of the organization. If they were actually honest to people about where the donations get spent a lot fewer people would donate.
Okay so I’m not too familiar with Wikimedia’s other offerings so I decided to look it up
https://wikimediafoundation.org/what-we-do/wikimedia-projects/
WikiBooks free ebooks, cool I should go through what they have
wikisource: freely licensed historical texts and docs, cool don’t need but sounds good to have
Wikiversity: free education via learning resources and projects, fucking awesome and wish I knew about it before
wikivoyage: free travel guide, cool stuff
…
You’re really arguing that all this is unnecessary bloat? There’s a lot of cool shit here that seems like it’s totally made with awesome intentions, to provide all sorts of free resources from a certified non profit org that is literally just trying to crowd source information and provide it back to the community for 100% free with no ads.
That’s like saying your city library takes up too much space and should downsize because fuck free stuff. Except your taxes don’t even go to this… just donations, and you’re literally telling people online to not donate to them because they have too much money and lying about how long they can survive on it…
Honestly, what the fuck is wrong with you?
The best breakdown I have seen on this matter was this op-ed by a long-time and quite prominent Wikipedian on Wikipedia Foundation (WMF) spending patterns.
Here’s an excerpt:
“The modern Wikipedia has 11-12 times as many page views than it had in 2005,[23] but the WMF is spending 33 times as much to serve up these pages to the readers.[24] This seems reasonable given that they have improved reliability, redundancy and backups. More concerning is the fact that since 2005 the WMF has hired hundreds of extra employees and is now spending 1,250 times as much overall,[25] which seems rather excessive considering that the actual amount of work they have to do is pretty much the same. WMF’s spending has gone up by 85% over the past three years.[26]”
The point that this Guy is making is that the rate of spending increase is concerningly high, and that it isn’t showing signs of levelling off (at least, as far as the data in the article, which goes up to 2025, shows). He’s concerned that if spending continues to increase at such a high rate, then it may overtake donations, causing WMF to have to dip into their endowment.
Now, that wouldn’t be a huge problem by itself, but what Macon fears is that, should this happen, WMF wouldn’t adapt appropriately and they’d just end up in a spending death loop that would lead to the loss of Wikipedia as we know it (and imperil all the other cool stuff they do, like those you list).
I don’t have much personal experience editing Wikipedia myself, but I have plenty of friends who do, and what I’ve heard from them leads me to take Guy Macon’s warning seriously. Apparently Wikipedia is quite bad on the software development side of things, as well as spending transparency.
"If [WMF] had [followed standard software engineering principles], we would be seeing things like requirements documents and schedules with measurable milestones. This failure is almost certainly a systemic problem directly caused by top management, not by the developers doing the actual work.
I remember the development and deployment of the Visual Editor causing particular hubbub amongst my nerdy Wikipedia friends, and Macon cites this as an example:
“Take as an example the way Visual Editor was developed. There are many pages of documentation on the WMF servers and mailing lists, but no evidence that any developer had any serious discussions with the actual editors of Wikipedia who would be using the software. Instead, the role of “customer” was played by paid WMF staffers who thought that they knew what Wikipedia editors need better than the editors themselves do. Then they threw the result over the wall, and the community of Wikipedia editors largely rejected it.”
When I dug into this further though, the biggest concern for me was the lack of spending transparency. This article by Guy Macon blew up because a lot of people shared his concerns, and those people naturally wanted a clearer accounting on how money was being spent. The fact that that has continually resulted in little, if any improvement or fulfillment of promises made is a bad look for an organisation that claims to pride itself on radical transparency.
Because this essay is hosted on Wikipedia, there’s a heckton of other discussions on the talk page for that essay too, if you want to check it out.
[citation needed]
https://wikimediafoundation.org/who-we-are/financial-reports/
If you poke around there you will see a million line items that can be accurately summarized as “not Wikipedia”. The wikimedia foundation is massively bloated because they have an infinite source of funding. I don’t even think all the projects they are doing are bad or anything, it’s just that they aren’t Wikipedia.
It’s highly unethical the way they solicit for donations and heavily imply that the donations are to run Wikipedia. They aren’t. They are spending all that money on other pet projects and pinkertons to do union busting.
Thanks! I can’t really make much sense of it, do you know if there’s an example you can point me to?
I read through it and they have roughly 17 months of runway left to cover all their services. They don’t have “decades”.
Whoever this is claiming they have decades of pay is full of shit, and just saying they spend too much and have too much “bloat” when the non wikipedia stuff is like wikiversity and wikibooks, actual decent 100% free services with great intentions. Literally they are a non profit that survive on donations and spend 70% on payroll and data center services to offer us free shit.
Woah, this is a huge victory! That’s awesome!!!
Congrats! This is how it should be if people voted based on what really will benefit them, data-backed and all that, and prevent the excuses so many have about lazy workers won’t get fired in unions or whatever they use as excuses to go along with their team’s wide stance.
let’s go!! this makes me incredibly happy to see
hurrah!
TIL there are people being paid to write wikipedia articles.
These are not the people writing the articles - that’s you and me. The people who work for the WMF are server admins, programmers, HR people, fundraisers, lawyers, lobbyists, finance people, etc.
The staff are there to do things that volunteers can’t do, or won’t do consistently enough to keep the movement going well. In principle, volunteers could write the code, and at the start that was the case, but volunteers wouldn’t have created the Visual Editor, for example.
I think it’s more like engineers and accountants and such:
We are the people who do the work to provide a platform, services, and support that enable the Wikimedia communities to create and share Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects with the world.
It’s the server maintaineers. Also wikipedia writes textbooks too.
