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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

#181

Post by hackyhacky »

portmanteur wrote: post #174
hackyhacky wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can’t say some politician filled a country with immigrants from the third world. You can absolutely say that, if it's true. As it stands, I don't know of country " filled with immigrants", so it's possible your edits are getting revoked for being incendiary hyperbole. I'm also not aware of any politician described as racist in the first paragraph of their article. Can you indicate who you have in mind? More rea…

“Filled with immigrants” will always be a subjective term. Does it need to be 100% immigrants to count as “filled”? 50%? 25%? Canadian residents, for example, as of 2021 [1], were 23% foreign-born, and further 2.5% non-permanent residents. In the five year period from 2016 to 2021, the number of foreign-born Canadians increased by 18% alone, which to me is significant growth. The number of non-permanent residents dou…

> “Filled with immigrants” will always be a subjective term.

An encyclopedia is no place for subjectivity. [1]

> Canadian residents,

I don't care. I'm not here to discuss immigration. We're talking about Wikipedia and its standards. You can like immigration or be against it, but it's not Wikipedia's job to allow you to express your opinion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_vie...

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

#182

Post by bberenberg »

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…

I have a hard time with the idea that Wikipedia is unbiased when the main source in most cases is news reporting. Wikipedia is a societal form of Gell-Mann Amnesia.

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

#183

Post by skeeter2020 »

roenxi wrote: post #170
eikenberry wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are behind the times... Big Tech lost that luster more than a decade ago when they turned into your standard cookie-cutter enterprise types.

So... what's actually changed? Is the pay no good now?

it's still ridiculously good compared to the alternatives, IME it's that a huge cohort of people came into tech during COVID and that was not a normal market. Now things are tightening up and the sense of entitlement is on display.

I've been doing this for a long time, and I remembering quiting my sales job to make 50% less as a developer, but I loved the work, the growth opportunities were amazing and playing the long game worked out.

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

#184

Post by emodendroket »

bawolff wrote: post #130
dmurray wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd kind of expect that they do better with translation if one of the languages on either end is English due to the amount of input they get in it compared to this abstract language (even in the world of human translation, translating stuff into English as a "pivot language" and then doing every translation from the English translation rather than the original text is not an uncommon practice).

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

#185

Post by skeeter2020 »

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…

Her exact comp hasn't been filed yet (watch for next year's IRS filings) but I'd suspect she'll make around 500K. That's a lot of money, but it's obvious she could make more in some of those other roles. This is not "Big Tech CEO" money.

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

#186

Post by idiotsecant »

LewisVerstappen wrote: post #175
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…

[flagged]

I need you to think real hard about the second order implications of this...

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

#187

Post by philistine »

LewisVerstappen wrote: post #175
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…

[flagged]

Where does OpenAI take its information?

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

#188

Post by glaslong »

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…

The organization mitosing from the product

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

#190

Post by ninkendo »

LewisVerstappen wrote: post #175
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…

[flagged]

Yeah.

Also, I basically stopped visiting my building’s first floor because all the amenities I need are on my level now. I’m not sure I agree with the whole “buildings need foundations” stuff anymore.

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