In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki and disbanded the team whose entire job was to listen to volunteers. Most of the people they fired were union organizers. Wikipedia’s editors are now threatening to strike in solidarity. The Foundation is sitting on $296 million in reserves and a freshly profitable AI revenue stream. This is a confrontation with global implications.
I wonder what the ostensible excuse for the firings were? The article didn’t mention it, but I suppose that’s not public information.
…It should be, though. I feel like there’s not a lot of reason for the WMF to keep decisions secret.
I mean, it’d be pretty harsh for them to publicly publish that the teams commit velocity was down and they were all PIP’d, lol. Not that I think that’s likely, but there are lots of possible for cause reasons that shouldn’t be shared.
If anything, I suspect the reason is the more pedestrian “moving in a different direction” from the wish list process.
That’s true.
I asked because it makes me wonder if there’s a grain of justification. The circumstances sure look suspicious from the outside, but who knows what happened within.