Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 389 posts

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

#121

Post by ori_b »

ldng wrote: post #100
ori_b wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... and are we pretending that automating tasks is some strange new idea that has just appeared? Of course not. Paying people has always been undesirable for the people paying. Software has been an exceptionally cushy job for an exceptionally long time, so people are exceptionally excited to pay less. Since the act of typing has never been the bulk of a software engineer's time -- the act of understanding has been…

Except it does not work ex-nihilo and the bubble busrt is going to be painful

It doesn't have to; it just has to be good enough for any idiot to operate it, and get good enough results.

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

#122

Post by stirfish »

kenlefeb wrote: post #115
stogot wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP’s chosen example was terrible. I’d agree with the premise, based anecdotoly but what a terrible selection of articles to prove a point. Better to link the discussion articles where the editors actively slant the articles People become more conservative as they age, so maybe the reality quote is about the young and the young edit Wikipedia more

I think people become more conservative as they get wealthier. Getting older just correlates with increasing wealth.

I think it's more about the way things are vs the way things "should" be.

e.g "teens are going to experiment with sex, so comprehensive sex education is the best way to keep them safe"

vs

"Teens should not have sex, so abstinence-only education is the best way to keep them safe"

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

#123

Post by nekzn »

faidit wrote: post #116
SkinTaco wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should've checked those pages first, they're actually very neutral lol.

How is the Trump or Obama article not neutral? You can literally correct them yourself if there is anything untrue or biased.

[flagged]

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

#124

Post by bawolff »

mc32 wrote: post #84
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…

[flagged]

I think a lot of the objections come from the proposed replacement which does not sound very promising.

A friend of mine is fond of the quote "Change happens at the speed of trust". There is not an overwhelming amount of trust between the parties

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

#125

Post by appreciatorBus »

skywhopper wrote: post #44
legitster wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm donating money to fight cancer, and the majority of the money goes to administrative staff, that's inherently a flawed charity. It's exactly what led to the downfall of the Susan G Komen foundation. There's also a death spiral problem. If donations drop and administrative costs stay the same, that charity's ratings only get worse. There's a reason most examples of successful non-profit unions all rely on stead…

What do you think the core purpose of the Wikipedia Foundation is? Do you think the engineers who write the code and operate the site are “administrative staff”?

If a new software or hardware innovation came along that would allow the engineers to operate the site 2x more efficiently, thus saving the foundation and it's donors a significant amount of money, would the union support it or fight it?

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

#126

Post by ares623 »

coldtea wrote: post #107

No donated cent should be going to such "foundations" anymore. Projects like Wikipedia should be run strictly by volunteers and paid contributors with moderate pays. Not Wall Street people, big corporate execs, and lavish offices. "Bernadette Meehan became CEO on January 20, 2026, recruited from a career that included Wall Street stints at J.P. Morgan and Lehman Brothers, a spokesperson role at the National Security…

I agree, but to do that you need _something_ and _someone_ (often multiple someones) to manage all that.

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

#127

Post by AndrewKemendo »

benmusch wrote: post #72
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It doesn’t matter because they don’t control anything tangible - which is the point. Just like the 501(c)3 that openAI was.

Read for knowledge:

Bernadette Meehan became CEO on January 20, 2026, recruited from a career that included Wall Street stints at J.P. Morgan and Lehman Brothers, a spokesperson role at the National Security Council, senior leadership at the Obama Foundation, and most recently a posting as U.S. Ambassador to Chile. Four months in, the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki is fired, the team that personifies community service is dissolved, and the union is in open confrontation.

This person is a loyal PE capitalist and that’s the whole point.

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

#129

Post by appreciatorBus »

troad wrote: post #119
DaSHacka wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Internal DEI initiatives are very helpful for an organisation trying to create a comprehensive knowledge base without falling to any group's bias. That requires diverse perspectives. I don't care about internal DEI if the job is managing sewerage systems, but this is a perfect example of a context where fostering diverse engagement is both rational and improves the end product.

That's a fine goal, but at some point, someone should evaluate if that goal is being achieved, if the purported methods actually work.

It's difficult to look at any remotely contentious Wiki page today and conclude that they have succeeded.

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

#130

Post by bawolff »

dmurray wrote: post #87
bawolff wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 n…

Abstract wikipedia is taking a symbolic AI approach instead of an LLM or other statistical approach. The hope is (as i understand it) that this will provide reliability, predictability and better extend to languages that don't have a large corpus of text to train things on.

Personally i think its a bit of a wild bet, that seems especially surprising in the modern context. Guess we'll have to see if it pans out.

Post reply on HN