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.
“Maybe its time for wikipedia to die and for the copyleft corpus of data to evolve into something new” Was not on my bingocard and yet feels appropriate for the times.
Information would not be lost but the public image of the web if Wikipedia stops existing would scatter overnight.
This is all part of the plan for techno fascists. They need the Internet to fracture and become a place where everyone is trapped in a bubble of personalised propaganda that they control.
That’s why they’re acquiring/consolidating and destroying all non-fascist sources across the media/web, after multiple decades of constructing pro-fascist alternatives.