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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

#201

Post by harimau777 »

mc32 wrote: post #84
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…

[flagged]

I think it might be worth remembering that we are talking about human beings not spare parts.

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

#202

Post by AnthonyMouse »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #41
Wikipedianon wrote: post #34

Some English Wikipedia (enwiki) editors are striking. They are predominantly non-technical that are forced to maintain their own shadow IT-style infrastructure that Wikimedia (nonprofit owners of Wikipedia) doesn't provide. It is very difficult to be a productive editor without custom tooling at this point. The reason why is because the laid off team maintained the Community Wishlist, the main way for editors to feat…

>> Why is Wikipedia losing contributors Perhaps because their message to new contributors is a consistent "stop trying to make corrections, and go away"?

I've made a significant number of edits to Wikipedia over the years. I probably have an account but generally don't even bother to sign in because I don't care about credit or a dynamic IP that will change in a week being recorded in the edit history, which they've apparently stopped doing anyway.

My most recent edit (a minor addition to a technical article) was instantaneously reverted as "suspected vandalism" by a bot, an unambiguous false positive. The bot seemed to think I was going to follow its instructions if I thought it was a false positive instead of finding that irritating and concluding that I should stop making edits if having them actually go through requires me to fight with a broken AI.

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

#203

Post by harimau777 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #132
wsve wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"status-compensated"?

people enjoy doing high-status things and will trade off pay for status. asking for equal pay as low-status work is essentially asking to have your cake and eat it too

I'd love to live in a world where working for a non-profit was high status. Unfortunately that's just not the world we live in. Maybe if you are someone high up at a well known charity, but the bulk of the people keeping non-profits running do not get status from their work.

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

#204

Post by harimau777 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #139
20after4 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is working for Wikipedia somehow a higher status job than working for Google? edit: I'm asking because my 7 year stint as an engineer at Wikipedia hasn't provided me with an endless stream of lucrative job offers.

absolutely and i'm surprised that you don't think so. e: and to your edit, i'm talking about social/moral status

Can you explain what you mean by social/moral status? I haven't seen a big run of non-profit workers marrying movie stars or becoming Pope.

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

#205

Post by harimau777 »

komali2 wrote: post #168
lux-lux-lux wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one thinks non-profit work is ‘high-status.’ People do it because making the world better in some way is more personally motivating than figuring out how to put video ads on refrigerators or whatever.o

Ok, I don't necessarily disagree, but it is thus living your values, which at the very least increases ones self confidence and self perception of status. Whether one thinks that improves one's status in the eyes of others imo depends on one's cynicism. "Whatever, I'm living my values, they just don't get it. Maybe others will one day." That's how I see it for myself anyway, if I'm being honest. But in the end I don'…

Sure, but happiness and fulfillment isn't status. Not because there's anything wrong with them but because that's not what "status" means.

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

#206

Post by skissane »

philistine wrote: post #187
LewisVerstappen wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Where does OpenAI take its information?

I’ve seen cases where Wikipedia is completely missing any coverage of some topic, but AIs can cover it easily, because they are capable of doing a few web searches and pulling up relevant news articles or journal articles.

Admittedly this is mainly an issue for the long tail of more obscure topics. And of course AI is still reliant on some human to produce those articles it is using as input. But Wikipedia isn’t in the picture.

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

#207

Post by slg »

wilg wrote: post #137
slg wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether the average Big Tech job is better than the average job overall has no real relationship to whether Big Tech workers are being exploited. I think we can simply look at the number of billionaires that Big Tech has created as evidence that even those workers making relatively high salaries are being underpaid compared to the value they are actually creating.

The obvious rebuttal to that framing would be that if those workers are not able to create that value on their own (such as by starting their own business or bringing their expertise to a firm with more favorable terms) then they aren't actually contributing that outsized value, the company itself is. And if they are able to do so but choose not to, then they are not being exploited.

There is no such thing as exploitation with that mindset. That sweatshop worker isn't being exploited, they just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and open their own sweatshop.

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

#208

Post by arjie »

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?

My friends who have been there for many years are overall very wealthy and continue to earn enormous amounts. So the pay continues to be good.

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

#209

Post by slg »

scottyah wrote: post #56
slg wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether the average Big Tech job is better than the average job overall has no real relationship to whether Big Tech workers are being exploited. I think we can simply look at the number of billionaires that Big Tech has created as evidence that even those workers making relatively high salaries are being underpaid compared to the value they are actually creating.

Or because the logistics behind scaling are much much much easier than any physical product.

Why do the benefits of logistics go to people at the top of the food chain rather than being spread out evenly among everyone? That type of democratization of the benefits is the exact type of thing unions are meant to achieve.

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

#210

Post by harimau777 »

roenxi wrote: post #29

Maybe I'm behind the times, but isn't Big Tech known as one of the best employers on the planet? I thought most of the tech workers were in the industry because the work is light, the conditions pretty relaxed compared to most jobs and the pay was high. Especially for an industry where anyone anywhere can just get involved and become a great coder.

Heck no! Working in tech is an absolute nightmare! The pay is excellent which is why people do it, but the actual work environment sucks. Agile and modern performance review culture means that you are constantly pressured to work faster and churn out more code to keep your job (quality of course is never a priority). The "shift left" movement means that more and more work (testing, infrastructure, product management) gets heaped on developers plates. The burnout rate is sky high.

Tech is an awful industry to live in. It just happens to be one of the few jobs in America that can reliably provide enough money for a decent quality of life. Whether you can actually enjoy that life is more up in the air.

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