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