Earlier quoted context omitted.
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So paid overtime, vacation, parental and sick leave, and 40 hour work weeks are, in fact, shameless excesses that have made office work worse?
These should be coded in national laws. No need for unions.
Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm
361–370 of 377 posts
Re: Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is when you go to Wikipedia and they are on a funding drive with their very prominent ads for donation requests, they dont mention any of this. They make it sound like wikipedia is very much at risk of dying due to lack of funds when in reality they are looking for more funding for programmes like this, which is where a lot of the mistrust and 'deceptive advertising' opinions come from.
Honestly, I’ve never donated bc “keeping Wikipedia up” could be a solved problem by now. Not just cheaper processing and bandwidth costs, but p2p hosting, etc. Every time I see that ad, I say to myself “it should not be that expensive”. Now, if they had said “We need 200k to send CC photographers to the Olympics”, count me in. That sounds bigger and way more interesting!
P2P hosting doesn't really work in reality, especially for websites that change regularly and require quick propagation of those changes. Its not just Wikipedia. Name a high traffic site that actually uses p2p hosting. I'll wait.
Bandwidth is also the sort of thing that gets way cheaper at scale than most people expect. When you are big enough there comes a point where the telecom companies want to connect to you because all their users want to access your website. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot (not all) of Wikimedia's bandwidth is actually free.
Re: Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, I’ve never donated bc “keeping Wikipedia up” could be a solved problem by now. Not just cheaper processing and bandwidth costs, but p2p hosting, etc. Every time I see that ad, I say to myself “it should not be that expensive”. Now, if they had said “We need 200k to send CC photographers to the Olympics”, count me in. That sounds bigger and way more interesting!
Hosting isn't the expensive part, maintaining mediawiki is. For example, unifying the parser for the markup language: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/Parser_Unification/en
Depends on how you define "hosting". CapEx costs for buying the servers is a non trivial expense (note: in accounting statements this isn't considered part of internet hosting). Not as much as software, but still expensive.
Re: Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
They could tell us which programs.
They could, but if their donation ads said for example 'please help us to take more photos of live events' instead of 'we need your help to keep wikipedia alive' then they would not get half the donations they do currently, which is the point.
If the ads only mentioned a program that gets less than 1% of the budget, that would also be pretty deceptive
Re: Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're unfamiliar with the scale of Wikimedia. Besides Wikipedia, they also host multiple other projects, like Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. Besides that, a huge portion of their budget goes towards grants to organizations that help distribute information for free on the internet. This absolutely isn't a "CRUD PHP site".
Well, that’s what the output looks like. Like a barebones phpMyAdmin query result from 20 plus years ago.
So you're judging the entirety of the Wikimedia Foundation based on the UI of one of their websites? This is an insane way to measure an organization.
Re: Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Child labor now outlawed. For now. Many US states are currently trying to roll back these laws though, aren't they? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/22/child-labor-... https://www.justiceatwork.com/how-are-child-labor-laws-chang... https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/why-several-states-are-pus...
Teens want summer jobs again and you act like they’re sending 8 year olds back to the coal breakers.
It's not teens pushing for it
Re: Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, that’s what the output looks like. Like a barebones phpMyAdmin query result from 20 plus years ago.
So you're judging the entirety of the Wikimedia Foundation based on the UI of one of their websites? This is an insane way to measure an organization.
I am not judging "Wikimedia Foundation", I am "judging" the product. Why is it insane? (btw, strong word you chose). It looks the same as it did on my Blackberry 20 or so years ago. It has less utility to me now than it did then.
I've pledged my $3/5 a few dozen of times over the years, the banners guilted me into it, have you? I am amused by the idea that the thing grew enough to have enough employees to have a union and dysfunctional enough to have an internal dispute. It should be a national treasure on my tax return, or something I don't need to think about, like oxygen.
insane way to measure an organization
What organization and who cares? There are dozens of you?
Re: Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, I’ve never donated bc “keeping Wikipedia up” could be a solved problem by now. Not just cheaper processing and bandwidth costs, but p2p hosting, etc. Every time I see that ad, I say to myself “it should not be that expensive”. Now, if they had said “We need 200k to send CC photographers to the Olympics”, count me in. That sounds bigger and way more interesting!
P2P hosting doesn't really work in reality, especially for websites that change regularly and require quick propagation of those changes. Its not just Wikipedia. Name a high traffic site that actually uses p2p hosting. I'll wait. Bandwidth is also the sort of thing that gets way cheaper at scale than most people expect. When you are big enough there comes a point where the telecom companies want to connect to you bec…
Actually, I think your argument is almost entirely about P2P tech inspired by BitTorrent. We’ve had good be the enemy of great here.
No, no high-traffic sites actually uses P2P hosting but that doesn’t mean we’re not at a point where they can. In fact, I’d say the biggest impediment to P2P sites in 2026 is the absolute unit that is advertiser data. We have P2P databases, and round trip on the earth is ~300ms (aka “quick propagation” can be seconds which is more that enough for 98%). We have VPS and serverless. We also have content addressing and symmetric cert verification, but when a site’s “traffic” is P2P you lose visibility on most of it. And can you imagine the nonsense of advertisers adding client side tracking data to the public db so that they can query it? Woof.
Re: Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm
#369Some people here think Wikimedia Foundation's mission is to keep Wikipedia up. That's a subset of their mission. I attribute nearly all of the blame to WMF, because their donation ads are quite deceptive. The actual, public mission of Wikimedia Foundation: > The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in th…
WikiPortraits organizer here. To give a sense of scope of project, at this point more than 1 out of every 50 pageviews on Wikipedia globally is illustrated with a WikiPortraits photo (and maybe more, we are still trying to digest what the surge from World Cup traffic means). Since our project started in January 2024, WikiPortraits photos have been viewed 5.8 billion times ( https://sightglass.toolforge.org/results/iA…
> It’s easy to emphasize glamorous World Cup coverage (which gave us huge stats!). But a lot of the events photographed are things like AAAS and other academic conference, local book festivals, politicians at an event in Adelaide, Indian artists at a fair in Santa Fe. Volunteers grinding away to fill out wiki coverage in areas they are passionate about.
How does work for major events? I noticed a bunch of the before-after photos were taken at TIFF 2025, where actors were presumably on the red carpet promoting their debuting movie. Did the volunteer get a press pass to be able to be there? Or were they in the 'fan line'?
Re: Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note that I know nothing about the topic but the article, but the article says: > [W]e believe a secret-ballot election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board is the appropriate path forward. Honestly, that was the point where I stopped reading and hid this story. They used a non-secret election! Fuck them tbh. Jimmy Wales is entirely right here.
See, what you are missing is the games that would be played if they did a secret election. "Can you prove that only employees voted in this?" "Can you prove there was no ballot stuffing? " I am not generally pro-union, I believe it has it's place but have also seen downsides but I have seen these games played out before.
You can play games with secret elections. You can play much much worse and much more common games with open elections.
To be honest, they should prove that only employees voted and they should prove there was no ballot stuffing. That's just baseline competence.