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Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia

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Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia

#71

Post by Wikipedianon »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #67
Wikipedianon wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the English Wikipedia community in a nutshell. The WMF knows it's an issue but can't do anything about it. There isn't enough work anymore in a monopolized but declining market. A shrinking pie forces cliquey political slugfests. It happened to IBM and can happen to StackOverflow/Wikipedia. I hate it now. There's so much doxxing and meanness. There's also sizable contingents of propagandists in anything contro…

> There isn't enough work anymore in a monopolized but declining market. What's the relevance? Wikipedia contributors aren't employed by Wikipedia. Their work is volunteered, and nobody asks them to do it. A lot of people do ask them not to do it.

> What's the relevance? Wikipedia contributors aren't employed by Wikipedia. Their work is volunteered, and nobody asks them to do it.

Yet, there's tons of people that love having control over articles and what people see. I was one of them.

It's exciting seeing news outlets quote your arguments in an onwiki dispute, or paraphrase an article that you wrote. Or having millions of people look at an article. It's much easier than starting a blog.

Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia

#72

Post by benmusch »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #66
benmusch wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what does "private equity" mean to you

Individual people who own shares of an organization that they do not produce value for, as a wage based laborer

and who exactly owns shares of the 501(c)3 wikimedia foundation?

Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia

#73

Post by benmusch »

elevation wrote: post #63
benmusch wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what does "private equity" mean to you

The US Federal Government spends twice as much as it collects in taxes, borrowing the difference. The mounting debt requires that we set interest rates as low as possible to keep interest payments feasible. For depositors, this means you can't make money in the bank. And the stock markets gains look good on paper but inflation erases much of the real value. So people with giant pools of capital have learned to make t…

and which part of this makes any sense at all when applied to the wikimedia foundation

Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia

#74

Post by OsrsNeedsf2P »

I spent ~2 years actively editing Wikipedia for multiple hours every day. I remember taking my laptop out at airports for 20 minutes between transfers, just to tweak an article or improve a source. While I originally started because I found some articles lackluster, I quickly realized how vigorous the editing process could be on controversial topics.

For what simple HTML you see on the surface, you would be absolutely shocked to see how many hundreds of thousands of hours are spent to create an encyclopedia that, to be honest, is about as unbiased, astroturf-free, and low barrier of entry as you can get. It's not built with crappy automation but instead hand crafted with love and respect. I would bet my salary on Wikipedia turning to shit within a year if the editors who signed the Editor Strike[0] leave en masse.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Workers_United_...

Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia

#75

Post by foobarchu »

elevation wrote: post #63
benmusch wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what does "private equity" mean to you

The US Federal Government spends twice as much as it collects in taxes, borrowing the difference. The mounting debt requires that we set interest rates as low as possible to keep interest payments feasible. For depositors, this means you can't make money in the bank. And the stock markets gains look good on paper but inflation erases much of the real value. So people with giant pools of capital have learned to make t…

I think the question was intended more as "what does PE have to do with Wikimedia", not "why is PE a problem".

Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia

#76

Post by thaumasiotes »

Wikipedianon wrote: post #71
thaumasiotes wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There isn't enough work anymore in a monopolized but declining market. What's the relevance? Wikipedia contributors aren't employed by Wikipedia. Their work is volunteered, and nobody asks them to do it. A lot of people do ask them not to do it.

> What's the relevance? Wikipedia contributors aren't employed by Wikipedia. Their work is volunteered, and nobody asks them to do it. Yet, there's tons of people that love having control over articles and what people see. I was one of them. It's exciting seeing news outlets quote your arguments in an onwiki dispute, or paraphrase an article that you wrote. Or having millions of people look at an article. It's much e…

Ok, but what are you saying in "there isn't enough work anymore"? What is "work"? How much is there? Enough for what?

Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia

#77

Post by chr15m »

> The point is the Foundation is rich. Seventeen-plus months of operating runway in the bank.

I don't think "rich" is the correct way to describe this. It sounds like a lot of money but there are a lot of expenses and people to pay. Seventeen months sounds fragile - one long-ish recession and they're toast. I hope they survive.

Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia

#78

Post by Wikipedianon »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #76
Wikipedianon wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the relevance? Wikipedia contributors aren't employed by Wikipedia. Their work is volunteered, and nobody asks them to do it. Yet, there's tons of people that love having control over articles and what people see. I was one of them. It's exciting seeing news outlets quote your arguments in an onwiki dispute, or paraphrase an article that you wrote. Or having millions of people look at an article. It's much e…

Ok, but what are you saying in "there isn't enough work anymore"? What is "work"? How much is there? Enough for what?

Most articles on notable AND interesting subjects have already been written and are of a high quality.

"notability" means there are peer-reviewed/editorially controlled articles on the topic.

So, if I wanted to write an article on Gas Town, I couldn't. It got a lot of technical blogs and Arxiv preprints written about it by experts, but it won't be notable.

Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia

#79

Post by DaSHacka »

kleton wrote: post #58

> The Wikimedia Foundation closed last fiscal year with $208.6 million in revenue. It holds $296.6 million in reserves, 17.1 months of operating expenses. The actual physical cost of hosting Wikipedia is < $5 million per year.

[flagged]

Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia

#80

Post by Aurornis »

chr15m wrote: post #77

> The point is the Foundation is rich. Seventeen-plus months of operating runway in the bank. I don't think "rich" is the correct way to describe this. It sounds like a lot of money but there are a lot of expenses and people to pay. Seventeen months sounds fragile - one long-ish recession and they're toast. I hope they survive.

They spend a ton of money on things unrelated to the website. The cost of running the website (including staff) is actually a very small piece of their budget. They could run Wikipedia basically forever on the interest from their money in the bank.

In the event of a recession they could easily scale spending down to match.

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