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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

#81

Post by Nevermark »

An enshittified Wikipedia would be a sad thing.

The vulnerabilities and strong incentives are there.

• People contribute to Wikipedia with the intension of sharing value freely, but without retaining any rights or control over what they contribute.

• The community has created so much coordinated, networked and compounding value, invested so much time, that it can't sensibly walk away, or start over.

• Centralized leadership ends up in control of an increasingly valuable and unique asset, they didn't have to pay to produce (at anything like market rates). They have increasing opportunities to extract value by means unanticipated by contributors. And they have no requirement to consult with external contributing individuals, representatives, or organizations.

That situation rarely ends well.

Wikipedia, and similar community content efforts, need a standardized license that does for community produced/shared content what open source licenses do for community produced/shared code.

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

#83

Post by trollbridge »

dyauspitr wrote: post #38
roenxi wrote: post #29

Maybe I'm behind the times, but isn't Big Tech known as one of the best employers on the planet? I thought most of the tech workers were in the industry because the work is light, the conditions pretty relaxed compared to most jobs and the pay was high. Especially for an industry where anyone anywhere can just get involved and become a great coder.

I don’t know where you’re getting the work is light part. It’s long hours and incredibly stressful work. You’ll probably never hit this level of stress in years of trades work.

I would invite you to come experience the trades for a bit, particularly in senior positions.

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

#84

Post by mc32 »

bawolff wrote: post #45

To give context, it seems like what happened is WMF did two separate things: - Fired one of the original developers of MediaWiki (the open source project that powers wikipedia) - Brooke. This person was at one point in contention to basically be BDFL of MediaWiki. She is somewhat less publicly prominent now compared to back in the day, but to a lot of oldhands this is shocking. - Laid off community tech team. This is…

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

#86

Post by SkinTaco »

OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #74

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 absolutel…

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

#87

Post by dmurray »

bawolff wrote: post #53
Wikipedianon wrote: post #34

Some English Wikipedia (enwiki) editors are striking. They are predominantly non-technical that are forced to maintain their own shadow IT-style infrastructure that Wikimedia (nonprofit owners of Wikipedia) doesn't provide. It is very difficult to be a productive editor without custom tooling at this point. The reason why is because the laid off team maintained the Community Wishlist, the main way for editors to feat…

> As a result, WMF prioritizes investing in emerging markets over enwiki. This means outreach to indigenous languages in the Global South and developing supporting infrastructure. e.g. "Abstract Wikipedia" which aims to use a language-neutral syntax that can be automatically translated into any language. I'd disagree that there is a causal relationship here. I think most of the outreach to indigneous languages has mo…

The "abstract Wikipedia" just seems like a solved problem with LLMs.

However sceptical of "AI" you are, "give me the information on this page in my preferred language" is the kind of task they excel at. (I won't use the word translate). It wouldn't even require prioritising the English Wikipedia: any agent today could one shot a task like "check the Wikipedia pages in all languages for X, summarize the results and note any disagreements between them".

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

#88

Post by afh1 »

I hope it collapses, the Foundation has long cared more about begging for money while sitting on millions, paying for unrelated events, than for the well being of its site editors - even before recent news, it offered zero protection or aid against constant legal threats, for example. And most editors care more about politics than facts, the political bias on Wikipedia is ever increasing. Or at least was, since I have last used it years ago. Nowadays does anyone even read it? I think most people stop at the AI overview. I hope it faces the same future as StackOverflow. It built great value, but has declined into a mostly toxic community at the admin/power user levels who control most of the content. AI has already swallowed what was there and there are plenty of archives and alternatives for the trove of knowledge that was built in the past.

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

#89

Post by mulmen »

SkinTaco wrote: post #86
OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #74

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 absolutel…

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

#90

Post by jfengel »

SkinTaco wrote: post #86
OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #74

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 absolutel…

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If you think that's bad, you should compare the pages for Genghis Khan and Mr. Rogers.
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