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Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA

wikiworkersunited.org

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Re: Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA

#131

Post by PorciiVorbesc »

20after4 wrote: post #119
PorciiVorbesc wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Anyone can edit Wikipedia Hasn't been true in a very long time. Plenty of politically charged articles are locked so that only Wikipedia's editors can edit them, and you can guess which side they're taking. It's not a democracy.

> only Wikipedia's editors can edit them Anyone can be a Wikipedia editor, assuming you haven't done something egregious and gotten a lifetime ban. It takes no time at all to set up an editor account and you don't even have to divulge your real identity to do so. The Wikimedia Foundation appears to go to great lengths to defend their editors and has gone to court to defend their editors' rights to pseudo-anonymity. N…

>Anyone can be a Wikipedia editor, assuming you haven't done something egregious and gotten a lifetime ban.

Firstly, not all articles are open to editing by gen-pop. See: Extended confirmed protection on many.

Secondly, some pages that are hot on the political side can then become subject to broader Wikipedia contentious topics / discretionary sanctions rules, so even eligible editors who qualified for extended confirmed protection edits, must fall in line with the approved narrative or risk sanctions and have their edits reverted to what the WMF staff admins and Arbitration Committee or ArbCom decide who gets to have the objectively correct viewpoint in certain cases and who doesn't.

>The Wikimedia Foundation appears to go to great lengths to defend their editors and has gone to court to defend their editors' rights to pseudo-anonymity.

OK, but why are you bringing this up? I never claimed otherwise. All I said wikipedia is very selective with who gets to edit some topics and what its admins and arbcom consider as "valid sources" and which not, leading to entrenched biases on political topics. Wikipedia defending editors is a good thing but an offtopic derailment addition to what I was originally talking about which had nothing to do with this.

Re: Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA

#132

Post by AndrewKemendo »

aliasxneo wrote: post #115
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like a healthy extended family where resources are shared towards a common goal of health and liberty.

What if health and liberty to someone looks like them not providing any net positive to society? What compels someone to work 12 hours a day to share those resources with such a person?

Sounds like an unhealthy person and situation such that 12 hours of labor is mandatory

Step one would be to help them get into a situation where that wasn’t true

Re: Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA

#133

Post by AndrewKemendo »

PorciiVorbesc wrote: post #129
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like a healthy extended family where resources are shared towards a common goal of health and liberty.

>It looks like a healthy extended family where resources are shared towards a common goal of health and liberty. In the Europe, like several rich western countries, we mostly replaced the extended family with the government welfare state, for better but mostly for worse. So current young workers are contributing to a failing state ponzi pension system that will leave them in poverty by the time they retire in several…

Doesn’t sound very much like a healthy family to me

Re: Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA

#134

Post by hunterpayne »

Grombobulous wrote: post #59
OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half of that goes to wages and salary for ~650 staff members. Of the ~114M that goes to wages, 90M goes to people working directly on projects, 15M goes to admin/management, and the other 9M goes to people in fundraising/financials. 9M goes to paying donation processing fees. 3.5M goes towards network infra. ~2M of in-kind services were donated (i.e. doing free work or donating goods) and that shows up as a dedicated…

Thank you for breaking this down. Every time Wikipedia comes up the exact comment parent to yours is posted in some form. This comment and all its flavors is posted by a contingent of people out there who: 1. Think that Wikimedia is a wasteful, corrupt organization full of greedy employees (I guess that could be true? Doesn't seem that greedy to me given that they've never run an advertisement or enshittified their p…

I doubt most people have put that much thought into it. However, a $100M a year for a website with an amount of traffic that isn't absurd, pages which are largely static, and doesn't have to secure financial transactions, seems a bit high to many people. Its that coupled with the constant requests for donations that doesn't match in most people's heads. For that amount of money, I expect most people think they can accomplish a lot more than the wiki foundation does. I expect that's most of where the criticism comes from, not the ideological attacks you are claiming.

Re: Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA

#135

Post by hunterpayne »

bluegatty wrote: post #40
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is 95% of all NGOs and their ilk. Related: "We now have evidence of how at least $7.7 billion for homelessness was spent on salaries. They created a jobs program that grows at the expense of the actual homeless who need help instead of helping the homeless." https://x.com/Twolfrecovery/status/2095661343215141026

Levels of waste in NGOs are a fully fair subject for debate but without context an arbitrary number is only misleading and therefore sadly cynical. Also - you have no evidence for '95% of NGO's and their ilk'. This is not Twitter.

Please remember that NGOs are not charities. And the entire point of an NGO is to get around restrictions on what governments can do. I think most of the grips about NGOs comes from the selling of NGOs as charities which they very much are not. They are however, taxed in the same way as charities and donate significant amounts to political campaigns (mostly local and state level).

So they get around centuries old restrictions on governments, get taxed like charities and donate heavily to political campaigns. That set of properties can and should draw significant criticism. When you act like they are charities, it just makes you seem naive. If they were charities, they would call themselves charities.

Re: Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA

#136

Post by gopher_space »

colechristensen wrote: post #92
OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Right? If your logo[1] is going to be a fist raised in defiance you'd better at least have something you're trying to fight about. And if you're going to brag about succeeding in your vote at least give an idea about WHY you want a union in the first place. The raised fist is union iconography. It is commonplace among all kinds of trade union, union, and other labor orgs. And this is one of the things that's really…

>The raised fist is union iconography. It is commonplace among all kinds of trade union, union, and other labor orgs. >And this is one of the things that's really annoying about trying to explain the appeal of unionising. You don't need to have a bad workplace first to have a union. Some reflection is in order. If you're annoyed about constantly having to explain what you REALLY mean, perhaps your message and your sy…

You learned about none of this in high school? That sucks. No child left behind kid I’m assuming.

Re: Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA

#137

Post by hunterpayne »

cm2012 wrote: post #20
hobofan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions are not just for bad employers.

Yes nowadays new unions are basically for employers who have a very ideologically liberal workplace - coffee shops, open source, etc

The people you are describing are not liberal. They are progressive which is very much anti-liberal. This is why terms like left and right are so loaded. You can have people who do not agree on almost anything being lumped together. For fun, you can take old Clinton or Obama quotes, post them on progressive forums and watch them call you (them) every name in the book. This is because progressives actually hate liberal policies but will do anything to not admit it because they want to wear the Dem brand as a suit.

Re: Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA

#138

Post by hunterpayne »

therouwboat wrote: post #107
NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but if you don't allow corporations to lay off people when it makes sense you end up with low salaries, meaningless jobs, and economic stagnation (like Europe). Europe is nice to visit but a giant pain in the ass to do business in. Certainly don't even consider aspiring to anything. If you can manage that, then yeah...France, Spain, and Italy are cheap and have good food and weather :-)

You can fire people when it makes sense, for example if there is not enough work, but you cant lay off half of your workers and demand that the rest work twice as hard. In my country we don't have minimum pay in law, but union contract defines minimum pay and they also negotiate collective salary increases. So everyone (even non-union workers) gets higher pay because of unions.

"So everyone (even non-union workers) gets higher pay because of unions."

The median per capita GDP numbers say otherwise. I have watched Europe get noticeably poorer in my lifetime. Even the tourists can see it.

Re: Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA

#139

Post by aliasxneo »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #132
aliasxneo wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if health and liberty to someone looks like them not providing any net positive to society? What compels someone to work 12 hours a day to share those resources with such a person?

Sounds like an unhealthy person and situation such that 12 hours of labor is mandatory Step one would be to help them get into a situation where that wasn’t true

If enough people decide they want to spend their liberty not working, then the 12 hours is a necessity, not something "unhealthy" about the person.

Re: Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA

#140

Post by aliasxneo »

MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #120
aliasxneo wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if health and liberty to someone looks like them not providing any net positive to society? What compels someone to work 12 hours a day to share those resources with such a person?

Some people look to the nice things they have and think to themselves "I want everyone to have these things."

No argument there. The question is whether history shows us that that represents a majority or minority of people.
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