Link: https://www.quippd.com/writing/2026/08/04/wikipedia-turned-on-its-volunteers-now-its-coming-for-its-workers.html

Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/technology@beehaw.org/t/4224376

TL;DR: In the last year, the Wikimedia Foundation has fired several union organizers, including those that worked on the Community Tech team - a team dedicated to building features for the volunteer community that edits Wikipedia.
As the Wiki Workers Union tries to get the Wikimedia Foundation to recognize their union, it is worth remembering that this is not the first time that the Foundation has worked against the community.
Wikimedia Enterprise is a betrayal of the volunteer movement community of Wikipedia editors, as the Wikimedia Foundation is providing privileged access to big tech AI companies to the Wikipedia corpus - a body of work that the Foundation does not own.
Movement volunteer communities contributed to Wikipedia under copyleft licenses - licenses that work to ensure that the work remains free (as in speech). The big tech AI companies do not license derivative works under copyleft licenses and often do not even attribute where the works came from.
This means that volunteers are working for big tech for free, and the Wikimedia Foundation is selling privileged access to that free labor.
It is against that backdrop that the current unionization struggle unfolds.

Can't have shit on the internet :(

Same for openstreetmap. Volunteers provide and add the data and the osm guys built their own companies and sell the derivative work. osm is even worse than wikimedia. At least wikimedia is officially non profit.

It's our own fault that it doesn't use a free license like GPL. Derivative work should be released under the same license. You can make money, but contribute back.

OSM doesn't require you to open derivative works, though - they just require attribution. Kind of a different situation.

Wait... Didn't Wikipedia ban AI shit a while back? What the fuck?

They did, but that was for contributions. They still sold access to the encyclopedia to big tech so they could train on it to create slop (in violation of the licenses that Wikipedia is licensed under).

Amazing that Wikipedia has crapped the bed despite holding out against forces trying to break or corrupt it...

I've contributed to open projects that required attribution before. None of it's ever been attributed.

It's what always happens. People never learn. Discogs, crowdsec, google maps, all of the things that have ever benefitted from crowd sourcing inevitably end up locking up the information and it becomes polluted with junk when they have to start using poorly sourced and moderated commercial data.

Why does everything, and I mean everything, have to be terrible now

The world ended in 2012 and we're just hanging around in the endlessly awful entropic aftermath.

Are you fucking kidding me.

We are a species that seeks unexploited niches for resource optimization. In the past those resources were things that made us directly happy like food and shelter but now we’ve moved on to more abstract concepts like “wealth”. That drive and ability to abstract and outthink our competitors is how we got to the top of the food chain on this planet.

There is no off switch.

Realistically how were they going to stop them? I mean, practically speaking.

They offer the entire thing free to download and no slop company has ever hesitated to steal literary work from actual publishing companies and authors that are currently suing them.

Seems to me like their options were get paid or not get paid.

Capitalism ran out of easy exploitable profits, and now it is coming for whatever is left.

I guess holding an offline copy is becoming more attractive by the day.

Potentially, this is not about stopping them. Can Wikimedia provide this copyleft-licensed data to AI companies when it knows they will ingest it and reproduce it without any copyleft? Lawfully? Morally? Maybe the act itself legitimizes the transformation into non-copyleft form?

If the authors, the contributors to Wikipedia, feel like their work is being stolen, the managing org should not sell and benefit from these acts but at the very least stay neutral or represent and act upon their contributor's values.

I don't know how they all feel about it, but the article makes a valid argument saying that copyleft is not retained. And the org actively participating in these activities with the other context provided by the article, it seems malicious/toxic/high discrepancy to the community values.

You're attributed as long as the downstream intermediaries and users/developers provide some traceable reference to your original work. Even your package's name in their dependency manifest can serve that purpose. Anyone who wants to know the original source has a way to find trace it back to you. Some projects like SPDX can largely automate it too. It can spit out the entire dependency tree, their authors and even licence compatibility information from the data.

Whenever I use some information that requires attribution, like discussions on stackoverflow, I leave the reference links in the comments in my source code. But I rarely use their code. I learn their approach. So I'm technically not required to attribute. But that's still the honorable thing to do.

Needles to say, AI stays true to the nature of those who peddle it. They don't like attribution and they completely strip it.

I don't think they foresaw this level of corporate exploitation when they chose a permissive license. But that's our own stupidity. Always expect the worst from crony capitalists.

Wikipedia is just… facts. The Wikimedia Foundation collected and collated those facts using unpaid community members funded in large part by charitable donations over the course of decades. Arguably they have even less right to withhold access to the data they’ve been entrusted with than anyone else in this situation considering the other parties are private entities.

I understand the desire to label anyone supporting the beast that is these AI companies as complicit… but let’s try not to cut off our noses to spite our collective face. It’s not the librarian’s job to make morality decisions about who’s checking out the books, it’s their job to distribute the knowledge and keep the library open.

Also technological innovation kinda halted in the recent years. That's why you see everything being filled with unnecessary AI in the name of technological advancement. If there's no innovation for growth, all that remains is to extract more value from existing platforms, hence the current enshittification of everything.