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.

Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/[email protected]/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.

    • yoasif@fedia.ioOP
      25·
      2 days ago

      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).

      • canthangmightstain@lemmy.today
        3·
        20 hours ago

        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.

        • Kissaki@beehaw.orgEnglish
          1·
          1 hour ago

          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.