Nice follow up to "Big tech's hierarchical organisation has come for Wikipedia"
Was that before or after "Big tech's organizational bloat has come for Wikipedia"
Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia
341–350 of 389 posts
Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia
#342Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 wikiped…
> That's a matter for law enforcement and organizations shouldn't have their own badly implemented versions of it.
Theoretically, yes.
Practically? Law enforcement can be ignorant, incompetent or slow as molasses, or a combination of all three of them. Besides, some places like the EU impose specific requirements on what happens with certain kinds of speech, especially anything glorifying or calling for violence, so as an organization, you have to have people and procedures to deal with it.
> They don't need to be organizing events in the first place. That's already itself a completely unnecessary money sink.
It was a core factor, other than Jimbo Wales wanting to distance himself/his company that hosted Wikipedia (Bomis) from it a bit, why Wikimedia got founded in the first place.
> Making unauthorized requests 100% static is not rocket science.
The problem is the bots are not respecting robots.txt and instead do stuff like load the source diff pages. It does not make any sense for AI training and likely pollutes the database, but unfortunately the diff pages are among the most expensive to render, the worse the older the requested diff is.
Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia
#344So who is actually in charge at Wikimedia? I always assumed it was a grassroots project and not an industry association like say Linux Foundation.
Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia
#345Some 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"?
Maybe I'm special, but as someone who doesn't have an account and just occasionally fixes errors or adds more context I've never had that happening for me. Or actually, once where I correct a fact to something that did not seem obvious, and it got reverted, but by adding it back with a long explanation and references it stuck. Ever since then I kept writing good "commit messages" just like for code and made sure to have reference to back up my claims and it works.
To be fair I try to stay away from pop culture and politically sensitive topics.
Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia
#346Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that everyone deserves to be paid according to their contribution, and have their employer follow all relevant laws. I am not aware of anyone being murdered, enslaved, or even tortured by the Foundation. This group seems to be trying to ‘cash in’ on Wikipedia’s AI windfall, and I think that will cause long-term damage to the organization.
So, what you’re saying is you believe the bar for starting a union is being murdered, tortured, or enslaved? Why? Why would the bar not be: we feel our contributions are undervalued. Because that’s what you’re calling a “cash in” attempt. If they made the company work up to this point, and the company got a windfall because of its position, why do they not deserve a piece of that windfall?
>”So, what you’re saying is you believe the bar for starting a union is being murdered, tortured, or enslaved?”
No, I’m not saying that, and if I were, I’d clearly state it.
Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs are great with minority languages compared to almost anything else. Including better than the by the natural language generation employed to use Abstract Wikipedia, which whiffs at relatively large languages like Zulu and Xhosa, let alone many of the rarer languages that popular LLMs speak fluently.
LLMs are really bad at smaller European languages even, e.g. scandinavian ones, or Finnish. Much worse than the NLP situation before LLMs.
My experience with their Norwegian has been fantastic, I'd be shocked if the other Scandanavian languages aren't at least as good.
Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US Federal Government spends twice as much as it collects in taxes, borrowing the difference. The mounting debt requires that we set interest rates as low as possible to keep interest payments feasible. For depositors, this means you can't make money in the bank. And the stock markets gains look good on paper but inflation erases much of the real value. So people with giant pools of capital have learned to make t…
and which part of this makes any sense at all when applied to the wikimedia foundation
their point, if I distill it correctly, is that Meehan comes with an agenda of enshittification. Given the events we're talking here... it's not that far-fetched.
Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But in that case, there is still the option to edit the page or start a discussion. Honestly, I think on any politicised topic, that’s a waste of time - there’s a large contingent of Wikipedia editors with a shared deeply ingrained perspective that will reliably back each other up. There are better uses of one’s time than fighting such a losing battle. > Personally, I do not know a better alternative. I have a frie…
> I have a friend who told me Wikipedia is biased, so he refuses to use it. When I asked him what he uses instead, he said, completely seriously, “X is my main source of information.” I guess that was a few years ago? Because now he also has Grokipedia ("from the guy that brought you X")...
It was few years ago indeed. I honestly do not give Grokipedia much credibility because it was created solely after Musk got political and someone edited wiki saying that he aligned with "right" or "far-right" politics. He saw that and created it as an "facts based" alternative purel out of spite.
Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
feeling better because your job fits better in your moral framework that you get from society is a status-mediated effect and i feel you can usually find social scaffolding under things that are articulated as purely intrinsic.