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.

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.

  • yoasif@fedia.ioOP
    21·
    7 days ago

    All contributors agree to release their content in perpetuity under CC-BY-SA (or similar licences that preceded it), meaning that all content is free for anyone to use, including commercial uses and derivatives, with the only restrictions being requiring attribution (credit the original contributor) and releasing under an equivalent license. The WMF can’t restrict access to any use complying with that license.

    The Wikipedia community (its editors) could decide not to allow its content to be used by AI, but it has not. It would be very legally complicated, anyway, given the content’s license.

    Why do you think the license allows for big tech to produce derivative works that are not licensed CC-BY-SA?

    The WMF negotiating paid privileged access to data streams for these large clients is a win for everyone. The purpose of Wikipedia is to disseminate information, not gatekeep it, and the WMF has literally no right to decide who can access it and who cannot.

    If WMF has no right to decide who can access it and who cannot, how can they sell privileged access to who can access it? Frankly, that assertion fails on its face.