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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

#221
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.

You need $140 million/yr for the rest of it?

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

#222
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It is not a lie. Wikipedia does not need 300-325 engineers to run the website.

300 employees is an extremely low number of employees for a project of this scope.

I think some of yall need to think about how this would be run if it was a company. There would be thousands of employees, realistically.

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

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

Unironically an excellent analogy

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

#225

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]

See: Spanish Flu

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

#226
post #216

Surely the purpose of Wikipedia is not to pay Wikipedia employees except where it serves Wikipedia's purpose of collecting knowledge. If a team is no longer required or is not fulfilling a function required of the organization, it makes sense that it should be eliminated. It doesn't seem that the correct structure of the team is functioning usefully, and it seems that the members of the team are being offered jobs ap…

> except where it serves Wikipedia's purpose of collecting knowledge

Right. Exactly! They should use notepad.exe and be _grateful_ they get to participate at all. What more do you need to "collect knowledge?"

> a function required

It's a non-profit. Very little is actually "required" of them.

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

#227
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not entirely fair. The overwhelming majority of Wikipedia is not meaningless politics, but stated facts backed by decent sources. The phenomenon you are referring to usually happens in areas where there is ideological or political friction. Sure, some articles can be biased, because staying perfectly factual in the middle of an active political debate or social change is difficult for most people. But in that…

[flagged]

The worst part is when they cite an article that says the opposite of the citing sentence.

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

#228

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.

"Gell-Man" is an unfounded toy theory invented by an author without any research, using a colleague's name without permission to make it sound more authorative. It's hokum.

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

#229

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…

Wikipedia is a threat to the technofeodalist AI mind shaping consortium.

As long as it's reasonably decent, the AI can't go full biased without consequences, but once it's gone there's nowhere normal people can easily to go and get a good enough sanity check.

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