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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

#51

Post by tensegrist »

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…

> It is very difficult to be a productive editor without custom tooling at this point

this is extremely reminiscent of the stackexchange situation

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

#53

Post by bawolff »

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…

> As a result, WMF prioritizes investing in emerging markets over enwiki. This means outreach to indigenous languages in the Global South and developing supporting infrastructure. e.g. "Abstract Wikipedia" which aims to use a language-neutral syntax that can be automatically translated into any language.

I'd disagree that there is a causal relationship here. I think most of the outreach to indigneous languages has more to do with politics and ideology than anything else (Wikimedia sees itself as a global movement to collect all knowladge. Can't exactly claim that if its all english).

As for abstract wikipedia. I think that is more a moonshot project driven by people wanting to make the next wikidata. I suspect a major part of support for it is that they can use alternative sources of funding for it (grants).

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

#55

Post by ori_b »

roenxi wrote: post #40
ori_b wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, why do you think there's so much emphasis on automating it from the management folks? It's more profitable if you don't have to treat your employees well.

> Yes, why do you think there's so much emphasis on automating it from the management folks? ... and are we pretending that automating tasks is some strange new idea that has just appeared? Software engineers have always wanted to automate everything. The advice has been "automate it!" for the last 30, 40 years. It is different that the steamroller is heading for our own domain this time, but really. The industry isn…

> ... and are we pretending that automating tasks is some strange new idea that has just appeared?

Of course not. Paying people has always been undesirable for the people paying. Software has been an exceptionally cushy job for an exceptionally long time, so people are exceptionally excited to pay less.

Since the act of typing has never been the bulk of a software engineer's time -- the act of understanding has been -- the way that AI speeds up development is by allowing the shortcutting of understanding. The understanding of details is what has historically made software engineers expensive and difficult to replace. Any idiot can type fast, but typing fast doesn't someone a software engineer. The excitement is about automating the understanding of problems, because understanding is expensive.

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

#56

Post by scottyah »

slg wrote: post #48
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.

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.

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

#57

Post by bawolff »

eaglelamp wrote: post #49
bawolff wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what world is Bernadette Meehan a "wall street finance guy"?

From Wikipedia: >After graduation, she worked on Wall Street, first at JPMorgan Chase and then Lehman Brothers. She later joined the United States Foreign Service. Looks pretty wall street to me.

I wasn't actually aware of that, but key point here is that she quit that job in 2004. I'm not sure i'd describe someone who worked in wall street 20 years ago as a "wall street guy"

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

#60

Post by bawolff »

jmyeet wrote: post #19

My suspicion here is that there are deeper issues for which union-busting is a symptom and not the main issue. There's a battle to control what information gets recorded and distributed, an effort to silence anything that contradicts US foreign policy, basically. Wikimedia Foundation CEO Bernadette Meehan has very much a Beltway insider, working for the the US foreign service, the Obama administration (NSC), the Obam…

> There's a battle to control what information gets recorded and distributed, an effort to silence anything that contradicts US foreign policy, basically.

The Wikimedia foundation does not exercise editorial control over Wikipedia. Neither the people fired nor the people doing the firing have any control over article contents.

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