Wikimedia Foundation refuses voluntary union recognition, hires union-busting law firm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2026-08-02/News_and_notes

WMF is hiring a law firm known for busting unions in other Big Tech companies.

119 points · 13 comments · view on lemmy.world

13 Comments

AnotherWastedHuman@retrolemmy.com · 30 pts · 18h (7 replies)

Time to take an archive & reestablish elsewhere.

wikipediasuckscoop@lemmy.world · 32 pts · 17h (6 replies)

There's now a decentralized encyclopedia.

https://ibis.wiki/

db_null@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 11h

This is great, thanks!

unitedwithme@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 15h (3 replies)

This sounds stupid, no offense. Because Lemmy has people post the same articles across multiple communities, so on ibish, are there going too be dozens of duplicate articles and then huge gaps for other topics??

I think ibis would be beneficial if there "central" database would act more like a RAID of storage where petiole could commit storage space to a redundant database. Make it like a raid 0 but of you had 100 contributors, it would gain additional redundancy for stability and accessibility. It's be like 25 "copies" or pools in raid 1 with another 25 in raid 0 to make 50 each or 100 total if that makes sense.

That would create a highly available database as if there are servers worldide or nationwide.

laut_sprecher@feddit.org · 1 pts · 12h (2 replies)

You are implicitly raising the question of consensus though. If i host an article on my instance and you host the same on yours, who gets to say which one is correct?

unitedwithme@lemmy.today · 3 pts · 11h (1 reply)

Exactly. Could someone get bad information? Yes. If mine is wrong and I don't know yours is right, if the database was shared/redundant, you'd make corrections to your which would update mine too.

laut_sprecher@feddit.org · 2 pts · 10h

What about cases where right and wrong are up to debate 😉

birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 12h

Also AnarWiki and ProleWiki (tho the latter is ML).

stoy@lemmy.zip · 18 pts · 16h

This is why we need sector based unions rather than site based.

They are far more effective than site based unions.

unitedwithme@lemmy.today · 9 pts · 15h (1 reply)

Guess I'll not donate now

db_null@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 11h

You can still contribute to Wiki Foundations outside the US. I reached out to the German WMF and received the following reply. Generally I believe preserving Wikipedia is crucial and it seems donating to the German foundation will in no way contribute to the bullshit they are trying in the US.

"As your criticism relates to reports of changes at the Wikimedia Foundation, we at Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. would like to comment on this.

For Wikimedia Deutschland e. V., working with and for the community remains central to our work. Our Technical Requests team continues to work alongside the German-speaking community on the further development of MediaWiki, and close collaboration with volunteers is also an essential part of our work on projects such as Wikidata and Wikibase.

Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. was not involved in the decisions made by the Wikimedia Foundation and is not involved in the Wikimedia Foundation’s internal staffing or organisational processes. We are therefore unable to influence these developments or make a definitive assessment of them.

According to the Wikimedia Foundation, work on technical requests from the community has not been discontinued, but has been reorganised. The Wikimedia Foundation has also stated that the members of the former team remain employed by the Foundation and are receiving support in applying for internal positions. The Foundation denies any link between this reorganisation and the ongoing trade union organising of its staff."

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

glitchdx@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 11h (1 reply)

Imma put on my tinfoil hat for a sec. Considering how wikipedia exists and survives on the back of public good will, I can't see how this is anything other than an intentional attempt to kill free information.

think about it.

Grease a few palms and some megacorp gets their patsy in charge of the biggest free and open repository of information in existence. Then it's only a matter of time before that institution falls only to be replaced by a worse service that harvests your data while demanding a monthly subscription.

wikipediasuckscoop@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 11h

To be fair and blunt, Wikipedia does have a lot of internal community and structural issues which would only benefit the enshittifiers in the long term. Luckily there's now a decentralized encyclopedia called ibis.wiki which is running on ActivityPub.