> 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.
Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia
221–230 of 389 posts
Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia
#222Earlier 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.
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
#223Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia
#224ewww
Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia
#225I 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
#226Surely 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…
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
#227Earlier 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…
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Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia
#228I 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
#229I 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…
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.