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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

#301

Post by cassepipe »

vintermann wrote: post #289
fsflover wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please provide examples for "the most respectable wrong beliefs". Do you consider, e.g., the climate crisis as one?

Yes. It's a contentious topic. It shouldn't be a contentious topic, but it is. If you decide to go with the Wikipedia "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" opinion on climate, you won't be well-informed. For that you'll have to do a lot more of that reading you don't have time for. But as it happens, you'll be on the whole right , because (last time I checked) the people trying to deny the climate crisis on Wikipe…

If all the people who are uninformed and ignorant are on your side, I am sorry but it's your job to distantiate themselves from them and show what you actually care about is being integrated back into the scientific consensus (which is never perfect, terrible I know)

It seems that climate change denialists have failed to do that

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

#302

Post by vintermann »

cassepipe wrote: post #296
vintermann wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure they're effective at maintaining the appearance of objectivity, so I agree that things will look terribly biased if they take a collective leave. That it will actually be worse on contentious topics, I'm not so sure if. My assumption for Wikipedia on any contentious topic, is that professionals have been gaming the system for so long that you're going to see very competent propaganda. Basically I think it's…

I find that the type of person who think themselves very smart for noting how objectivity is never absolute, microbiases experts if you will, will give a pass to most obvious propaganda when it goes in the direction of their contrarian beliefs. The argument seems to always be "Since it's not perfect we may as well do away with it". > Basically I think it's good if people stop trusting Wikipedia on contentious topics.…

The alternative, is to "do your own research" yes. No matter how much they sneer at it, no matter how many people who say they do it suck at it. You have to put in work if you want to be well-informed about anything.

There doesn't have to be an alternative to Wikipedia as a short-cut to being well informed on contentious topics, because there isn't a short cut, and the sooner people realize, the better.

You can still use Wikipedia for non-contentious topics, if you wish. I do, sometimes. I'm still not going to invest into it though - I'm way too disgusted at the Wikipedia sausage making process for that. That process is made for the contentious topics, it poisons the non-contentious topics, and it doesn't even work well for the contentious topics.

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

#303

Post by [deleted] »

vintermann wrote: post #297
Wikipedianon wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The more organized and professional they are about shilling, the better they do. This is incorrect. Shills do well when they contribute outside of the topic area, memorize wiki-law, and only coordinate to !vote in contentious high-impact discussions. e.g. requested moves, reliable sources noticeboard discussions, and RfCs. They are seen as "normal" Wikipedia editors. Professionally organized shills are unable to do…

> Professionally organized shills are unable to do this since they must ensure most of their time is "on-task" Haha, it'd be funny if they sabotaged themselves with red tape around hours billing. I could see it happening - sometimes. But not generally. I assume professional manipulators understand that gaining trust in the Wikipedia bureaucracy is part of the job. I have a low opinion of spy agencies - but not THAT l…

[deleted]

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

#304

Post by jcattle »

I can't with these AI generalizations for big effect.

> This is the standard tech playbook. Fire the engineers who know how the system works, fire the ones organizing labor, hope nothing catastrophic breaks before you can ship something splashy. Twitter did it. Meta did it. Salesforce did it. Google did it. We have all seen this movie.

Just fluff without any substance.

Is that the standard tech playbook? What did Twitter, Meta etc do? "Ah you know, didn't you hear? They did that thing. With that splashy release."

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

#305

Post by vintermann »

cassepipe wrote: post #301
vintermann wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. It's a contentious topic. It shouldn't be a contentious topic, but it is. If you decide to go with the Wikipedia "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" opinion on climate, you won't be well-informed. For that you'll have to do a lot more of that reading you don't have time for. But as it happens, you'll be on the whole right , because (last time I checked) the people trying to deny the climate crisis on Wikipe…

If all the people who are uninformed and ignorant are on your side, I am sorry but it's your job to distantiate themselves from them and show what you actually care about is being integrated back into the scientific consensus (which is never perfect, terrible I know) It seems that climate change denialists have failed to do that

I'm not sure you understood me. The people who are uninformed and ignorant and go to Wikipedia for their takes, get the right take on climate in my opinion.

But lots of uninformed and ignorant people don't go to Wikipedia for their takes on contentious topics, do they? It seems to me that the climate change denialists are capitalizing on that.

One of my mantras is: Bad people sometimes have good points. And it sucks when they do, because then they use that as leverage for all their bad points. Climate denialists have all bad points on climate, but "Wikipedia can't be trusted on contentious issues" is unfortunately not a bad point, because it's entirely true.

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

#306

Post by mistercheph »

loeg wrote: post #235
ryan_lane wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think that's true at all. I have to go pretty far up the Org tree at my corporate job to get to 300 engineers and that encompasses functionality easily broader than "running Wikipedia" in scope and scale.

> and that encompasses functionality easily broader than "running Wikipedia" in scope and scale.

I highly doubt that the totality of your corporate employers output is even close to the scope and scale of wikipedia. I’m pretty sure you and I both know that if your employer was gone tomorrow, most would not notice, and only the most severely bookish scholasts (they are likely to be wikipedia editors) will be able to recall what exactly was done there 5 years after the books are closed.

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

#307

Post by cassepipe »

vintermann wrote: post #302
cassepipe wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that the type of person who think themselves very smart for noting how objectivity is never absolute, microbiases experts if you will, will give a pass to most obvious propaganda when it goes in the direction of their contrarian beliefs. The argument seems to always be "Since it's not perfect we may as well do away with it". > Basically I think it's good if people stop trusting Wikipedia on contentious topics.…

The alternative, is to "do your own research" yes. No matter how much they sneer at it, no matter how many people who say they do it suck at it. You have to put in work if you want to be well-informed about anything. There doesn't have to be an alternative to Wikipedia as a short-cut to being well informed on contentious topics, because there isn't a short cut, and the sooner people realize, the better. You can still…

s/voting/read wikipedia

s/firebomb a Walmart/do your own research

You know which tweet

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

#308

Post by coldtea »

ares623 wrote: post #126
coldtea wrote: post #107

No donated cent should be going to such "foundations" anymore. Projects like Wikipedia should be run strictly by volunteers and paid contributors with moderate pays. Not Wall Street people, big corporate execs, and lavish offices. "Bernadette Meehan became CEO on January 20, 2026, recruited from a career that included Wall Street stints at J.P. Morgan and Lehman Brothers, a spokesperson role at the National Security…

I agree, but to do that you need _something_ and _someone_ (often multiple someones) to manage all that.

A small community driven team could manage all that fine.

Like with Mozilla, it's not let to.

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

#309

Post by shrubby »

slg wrote: post #265
shrubby wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I saw this comment 5 years ago, I would have thought you were some crazy conspiracy nut. Today I read it and worry that you might be right. I wonder what I will think seeing this sentiment 5 years from now. I personally don't know if the world is on some sort of precipice. It seems like that's possibly the case. The strongest piece of evidence is that many of the rich and powerful, including those big tech leaders…

I see this as a line.

Other end is concentrated power (via money, violence, manipulation,...) so something like a dollar per universal vote.

Other end is one vote for each, including the future generations.

Wikipedia is an obstacle for the first one that must be taken down. Perhaps one of the last barriers before the endgame.

And there's no fuzzy middle option, we've (me included) have thought in our comfort for too long that us vs. them scenario that both the left and the right (at least mainstream ones) is possible. But it's now clear that there's no lukewarm at-right or green social democrat version. Only full fascism or full democracy.

We might still have the time but one by one the platforms that would enable this (wiki included) keep being ingested thus making it less and less likely.

But like you said five years ago this level of consciousness would have been out of the question for us both so perhaps there are more of us?

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

#310

Post by maccard »

Wikipedianon wrote: post #275
vintermann wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Astroturf is not the right word, because appearing to be grassroots isn't how you sell your perspective on Wikipedia. Most of the people stopped from editing contentious topics on Wikipedia are in all likelihood more sincere about their beliefs than average. The more organized and professional they are about shilling, the better they do.

> The more organized and professional they are about shilling, the better they do. This is incorrect. Shills do well when they contribute outside of the topic area, memorize wiki-law, and only coordinate to !vote in contentious high-impact discussions. e.g. requested moves, reliable sources noticeboard discussions, and RfCs. They are seen as "normal" Wikipedia editors. Professionally organized shills are unable to do…

> Essentially, you're given free rein to edit as you see fit with an encouragement to make many uncontroversial edits & befriend normal editors. You do not know who else is part of the project and do not interact with them on Discord. It is very antisocial in that sense.

Genuine question - where does the line between “group of people who are interested in a topic” and “shilling” lie? I don’t envy the arbitration group for having to try answer that.

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