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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

#131

Post by bawolff »

Aurornis wrote: post #80
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.

> The cost of running the website (including staff) is actually a very small piece of their budget.

This is a lie. The only way to make this true is if you don't count programmers, and managers of those programmers as part of running the website.

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

#132

Post by whimsicalism »

wsve wrote: post #112
whimsicalism wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, workers in non-profits are status-compensated as well as monetarily compensated. I don't think this is an argument for non-profit unionization.

"status-compensated"?

people enjoy doing high-status things and will trade off pay for status. asking for equal pay as low-status work is essentially asking to have your cake and eat it too

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

#133

Post by 20after4 »

Wikipedianon wrote: post #78
thaumasiotes wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

This gets at one of the biggest flaws in Wikipedia, IMO. I think the notability standard is way too strict and gives way too much weight to main stream media sources as the blessed arbiters of what is notable.

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

#134

Post by __david__ »

20after4 wrote: post #106
SkinTaco wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Reality has a well known liberal bias¹ - Steven Colbert 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Reality_has_a_well_known_lib...

From his 2006 speech/routine at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, speaking to then president George Bush:

> Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32 percent approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in reality. And reality has a well-known liberal bias...

His whole thing was phenomenal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ-a2KeyCAY

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

#135

Post by 20after4 »

briandear wrote: post #68
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…

It would be great if editors had some kind of terms limits to avoid the WikiMafia stuff we commonly see.

Given that editors are pseudo-anonymous, there are some limitations on enforcing this. Sure you could term-limit a given account but the same person could have several accounts. I know sock puppets are not technically allowed but it's not entirely possible to prevent without sacrificing the anonymity of account ownership.

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

#136

Post by bawolff »

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.

> The actual physical cost of hosting Wikipedia is This is always a silly point. What do you plan to do with the servers if you don't hire people to plug them in or software engineers to maintain the software?

I think there are things to criticize WMF budget about, but the website wouldn't exist if you only paid for the web server. Legal is important. Trust and safety is important. Having people maintain the software is important. Having people on call in case the site goes down at 1am is important. Having people write new software features is important to stay relavent.

That's not to say i agree with everything WMF spends money on, but there is a lot more to running a major website then just buying a bunch of servers.

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

#137

Post by wilg »

slg wrote: post #48
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.

Whether the average Big Tech job is better than the average job overall has no real relationship to whether Big Tech workers are being exploited. I think we can simply look at the number of billionaires that Big Tech has created as evidence that even those workers making relatively high salaries are being underpaid compared to the value they are actually creating.

The obvious rebuttal to that framing would be that if those workers are not able to create that value on their own (such as by starting their own business or bringing their expertise to a firm with more favorable terms) then they aren't actually contributing that outsized value, the company itself is. And if they are able to do so but choose not to, then they are not being exploited.

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

#138

Post by 20after4 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #132
wsve wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"status-compensated"?

people enjoy doing high-status things and will trade off pay for status. asking for equal pay as low-status work is essentially asking to have your cake and eat it too

Is working for Wikipedia somehow a higher status job than working for Google?

edit: I'm asking because my 7 year stint as an engineer at Wikipedia hasn't provided me with an endless stream of lucrative job offers.

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

#139

Post by whimsicalism »

20after4 wrote: post #138
whimsicalism wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people enjoy doing high-status things and will trade off pay for status. asking for equal pay as low-status work is essentially asking to have your cake and eat it too

Is working for Wikipedia somehow a higher status job than working for Google? edit: I'm asking because my 7 year stint as an engineer at Wikipedia hasn't provided me with an endless stream of lucrative job offers.

absolutely and i'm surprised that you don't think so.

e: and to your edit, i'm talking about social/moral status

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

#140

Post by dotancohen »

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…

  > give me the information on this page in my preferred language
I'm sure that works great for European languages and other languages with huge corpus. Those are not the target languages of the program in question.
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