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Inspiring to see. Well done!
Great! I wish there were more tech unionization efforts like this in Canada, not that I imagine any such efforts would be able to make any progress at my regressive, toxic, American-owned, boomer-run employer within my lifetime. But maybe I’d be able to eventually find a new job at a union shop somewhere. I’m not holding my breath. Is there anything a senior-level peon like me can do to support these kind of things without trying to convince me there is any realistic hope of my current evil empire workplace ever unionizing?
A rising tide lifts all boats, is the way I see it. Often places that unionize are where the conditions are the shittiest. My impression is that workers are generally faring better in Canada than they are in the US, but workplaces unionising can have ripple effects even on the international level.
My favourite example of this is something I learned from the Data Workers Iniative which supports research from countries like Kenya, Venezuela, Syria and more. Whilst there’s some harrowing stuff documented by workers in this project, there’s also plenty of good news about workers organising.
For instance, data workers in Kenya contracted to the company Sama were being horrifically exploited in their data labelling work for tech giants like Meta. This led to the formation of the African Content Moderator’s Union, which had impact far beyond Kenya. For instance, when Sama began to open more offices in other African countries, there was much more active worker resistance straight away because of this precedent.
It’s very much a case of “none of us are free until all of us are free”, and I think that in many cases, our own battles are going to rely on workers organising many many miles away from us. In the meantime, we just have to do what we can to help both the local fight, and the wider fight.
let’s go!! this makes me incredibly happy to see
[union needed]
Nice
Congrats! This is how it should be if people voted based on what really will benefit them, data-backed and all that, and prevent the excuses so many have about lazy workers won’t get fired in unions or whatever they use as excuses to go along with their team’s wide stance.
So can I start donating again? I’d like to contribute
There’s no need. They have enough money to run Wikipedia for many many decades.
As of June 30, 2025, the Foundation’s net assets were $296.6 million, which represents 17.1 months of operating expenses
lol not decades and mostly donations
Revenue: The Foundation’s total revenue increased by $23.2 million, to $208.6 million during fiscal year 2024-2025. The vast majority of this revenue came from donations (including grants from the Endowment), as well as investment income, Wikimedia Enterprise revenue, and other revenue primarily related to a cost sharing agreement with the Wikimedia Endowment, which, to keep the Endowment’s costs down, allows the Endowment to leverage staffing and other resources from the Foundation and reimburse the Foundation for this usage. Donation revenue increased $14.8 million, from $174.7 million to $189.5 million.
How much do you think payroll is? Major layoffs would likely begin in a year if people stopped donating i’d imagine.
Expenses: Our expenses totaled $190.9 million, of which 77.4% went to programmatic activities
That includes their data centers engineering and security payroll from what I read. The bulk of expenses is literally just to run the application smoothly, and keep these employees paid.
The only way to make their funds lasts decades would be to shut down a ton of shit and lay off employees, which would not be something anyone wants.
They don’t have to shut it all down but they should absolutely split off all their bloated non-Wikipedia endeavors from the rest of the organization. If they were actually honest to people about where the donations get spent a lot fewer people would donate.
Okay so I’m not too familiar with Wikimedia’s other offerings so I decided to look it up
https://wikimediafoundation.org/what-we-do/wikimedia-projects/
WikiBooks free ebooks, cool I should go through what they have
wikisource: freely licensed historical texts and docs, cool don’t need but sounds good to have
Wikiversity: free education via learning resources and projects, fucking awesome and wish I knew about it before
wikivoyage: free travel guide, cool stuff
…
You’re really arguing that all this is unnecessary bloat? There’s a lot of cool shit here that seems like it’s totally made with awesome intentions, to provide all sorts of free resources from a certified non profit org that is literally just trying to crowd source information and provide it back to the community for 100% free with no ads.
That’s like saying your city library takes up too much space and should downsize because fuck free stuff. Except your taxes don’t even go to this… just donations, and you’re literally telling people online to not donate to them because they have too much money and lying about how long they can survive on it…
Honestly, what the fuck is wrong with you?
[citation needed]
https://wikimediafoundation.org/who-we-are/financial-reports/
If you poke around there you will see a million line items that can be accurately summarized as “not Wikipedia”. The wikimedia foundation is massively bloated because they have an infinite source of funding. I don’t even think all the projects they are doing are bad or anything, it’s just that they aren’t Wikipedia.
It’s highly unethical the way they solicit for donations and heavily imply that the donations are to run Wikipedia. They aren’t. They are spending all that money on other pet projects and pinkertons to do union busting.
Thanks! I can’t really make much sense of it, do you know if there’s an example you can point me to?
I read through it and they have roughly 17 months of runway left to cover all their services. They don’t have “decades”.
Whoever this is claiming they have decades of pay is full of shit, and just saying they spend too much and have too much “bloat” when the non wikipedia stuff is like wikiversity and wikibooks, actual decent 100% free services with great intentions. Literally they are a non profit that survive on donations and spend 70% on payroll and data center services to offer us free shit.
yes
Woah, this is a huge victory! That’s awesome!!!
hurrah!
TIL there are people being paid to write wikipedia articles.
These are not the people writing the articles - that’s you and me. The people who work for the WMF are server admins, programmers, HR people, fundraisers, lawyers, lobbyists, finance people, etc.
The staff are there to do things that volunteers can’t do, or won’t do consistently enough to keep the movement going well. In principle, volunteers could write the code, and at the start that was the case, but volunteers wouldn’t have created the Visual Editor, for example.
I think it’s more like engineers and accountants and such:
We are the people who do the work to provide a platform, services, and support that enable the Wikimedia communities to create and share Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects with the world.
It’s the server maintaineers. Also wikipedia writes textbooks too.
