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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

#321

Post by fsflover »

vintermann wrote: post #305
cassepipe wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So your argument is basically "since it's not perfect, it shouldn't exist" aka Nirvana fallacy.

Concerning doing your own research, are you reading all research paper on all topics in the world? Or do you sometimes rely on an authority or scientific consensus, exactly as Wikipedia does?

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

#322

Post by Forgeties79 »

portmanteur wrote: post #174
hackyhacky wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can’t say some politician filled a country with immigrants from the third world. You can absolutely say that, if it's true. As it stands, I don't know of country " filled with immigrants", so it's possible your edits are getting revoked for being incendiary hyperbole. I'm also not aware of any politician described as racist in the first paragraph of their article. Can you indicate who you have in mind? More rea…

“Filled with immigrants” will always be a subjective term. Does it need to be 100% immigrants to count as “filled”? 50%? 25%? Canadian residents, for example, as of 2021 [1], were 23% foreign-born, and further 2.5% non-permanent residents. In the five year period from 2016 to 2021, the number of foreign-born Canadians increased by 18% alone, which to me is significant growth. The number of non-permanent residents dou…

This just reads to me like you have an ax to grind and are mad Wikipedia won’t give you the surface for it.

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

#323

Post by mossTechnician »

jcattle wrote: post #304

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 Twi…

I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed this. A similar section offers an apparently contradictory take with similar language:

> A smart executive welcomes the union, signs a generous contract, and uses the goodwill to consolidate authority for the difficult AI-era decisions ahead. That is the textbook play. Meehan and her team chose the opposite. They picked a fight.

The "standard tech playbook" fires union organizers, but a "textbook play" welcomes them?

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

#324

Post by farfatched »

coldtea wrote: post #308
ares623 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> A small community driven team could manage all that fine.

Are there any examples of small community driven teams responsible for managing $200 million revenue?

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

#325

Post by account42 »

glaslong wrote: post #188
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…

The organization mitosing from the product

Wikimedia is already way past that if you look at their expenses.

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

#326

Post by account42 »

ryan_lane wrote: post #220
20after4 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gets at one of the biggest flaws in Wikipedia, IMO. I think the notability standard is way too strict and gives way too much weight to main stream media sources as the blessed arbiters of what is notable.

The alternative is that the Daily Stormer is usable as a source. There has to be some mechanism of determining what should and shouldn't be usable as a source.

[flagged]

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

#327

Post by Pay08 »

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…

I can. They're oftentimes rather random, but the talk pages on contentious topics are rather illuminating. One of the more interesting ones I have encountered was about the descendants of Genghis Khan.

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

#328

Post by jcattle »

mossTechnician wrote: post #323
jcattle wrote: post #304

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 Twi…

I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed this. A similar section offers an apparently contradictory take with similar language: > A smart executive welcomes the union, signs a generous contract, and uses the goodwill to consolidate authority for the difficult AI-era decisions ahead. That is the textbook play. Meehan and her team chose the opposite. They picked a fight. The "standard tech playbook" fires union organi…

Yea that part also stood out to me.

Everything else is also chock-full of plausible sounding but baseless claims and generalizations devoid of any nuance.

> For the people inside the Foundation: this is not a moment to manage. It is a moment to decide.

What does that even mean? Moment to manage what? Decide on what?

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

#329

Post by account42 »

hsuduebc2 wrote: post #194
bberenberg wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Articles where almost everyone agrees on the facts are not interesting for discussing whether a particular encyclopedia is unbiased - it's precisely the contented topics where that distinction matters.

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

#330

Post by account42 »

bawolff wrote: post #169
fc417fc802 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm skeptical. How much do they actually spend on necessary legal work? What do you mean by "trust and safety"? We're talking about a public community edited website here not a bank or a healthcare provider, I wouldn't expect there to be any PII. How much software maintenance is really required and could that not be left largely to the community at this point? It seems like an extremely mature stack. Am I missing som…

> I'm skeptical. How much do they actually spend on necessary legal work? A non-zero amount. This isn't like a huge part of their budget, but people sue wikipedia constantly. Someone has to deal with that. We're also seeing a more complicated regulatory environment with new privacy laws, new nsfw laws, new social media laws. Someone has to keep track of those developments, figure which apply, and figure out what need…

> A non-zero amount.

So you don't know and we can assume its not relevant.

> And what happens when someone in an edit war makes death threats to another editor. What happens when they figure out where that person lives and show up at their house?

That's a matter for law enforcement and organizations shouldn't have their own badly implemented versions of it.

> Its also important to keep in mind, last year at a wikipedia event someone brought a gun and attempted to commit suicide on stage (traumatizig most of the attendees).

They don't need to be organizing events in the first place. That's already itself a completely unnecessary money sink.

> I'm mostly just claiming the amount is not zero. There is a lot of room to debate specifics. However stuff does pop up. Security vulns happen. Software needs to be updated to work with updates dependencies (php has been making a lot of breaking changes lately). The AI boom has made access patterns shift causing caches to be less effective then before. Sometimes servers die and you need to swap out a replacement. Etc etc. There is always something.

Making unauthorized requests 100% static is not rocket science. This doesn't need an ongoing tens or hundreds of millions per year.

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