alt.hn

5/29/2026 at 12:20:26 PM

Prolific Wikipedia editors are threatening to go on strike

 https://www.theverge.com/report/939442/wikipedia-editors-protest-wikimedia-layoffs-strike

by doener

5/29/2026 at 1:37:26 PM

I appreciate that this article actually cites some of the relevant discussions. Wikipedia community processes are unusual in that they are largely public, including that foundation staff members respond to community questions in public, so you can read a lot of the backstory yourself. Here are a few links.

Main discussion about Community Tech team on the Village Pump (discussion board): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#W...

* Response from the WMF (21 May): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#R...

* Note from the Wikimedia Foundation on unionization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#N...

* Response from the WMF (22 May): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#R...

* WWU statement (May 23): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#W...

* Response from WMF 24 May: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#R...

The 24 May statement includes "I know many of you asked why we cannot just guarantee people new roles...we have 4 countries represented, with a wide variance in required actions. I want to note one specific requirement that came from these laws: we could not pre-select certain staff for new roles, as that would appear to be circumventing legally required processes in some countries."

Discussion about proposed direction for Community Wishlist: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist#Prop...

by britta

5/29/2026 at 1:06:33 PM

>The union Wiki Workers United, which has not yet been recognized, declined a request for an interview.

So, how can they strike when they're all volunteering? What exactly is their Trump-card secret strategy against full replacement? The article didn't even bother addressing the fundamental problem here.

by 1970-01-01

5/29/2026 at 1:20:27 PM

> So, how can they strike when they're all volunteering?

I fail to see the difficulty? Editors striking would mean them not doing the volunteer work they normally do.

How much vandalism do you reckon will go undetected if they do go on strike? How much more time will it take to get articles updated to reflect current affairs?

by pdpi

5/29/2026 at 1:33:26 PM

I would like to see some numbers on it. What exactly is their overall leverage here? What about a lengthy strike? Does anybody really know until it happens?

by 1970-01-01

5/29/2026 at 2:07:25 PM

The solidarity petition is public (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Workers_United_...), and it includes a section with statistics summarizing the contributions of editors who have signed the petition, which suggests the impact of signatories deciding to withhold their volunteer labor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Workers_United_...

A couple highlights:

"5 oversighters [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Oversight] ... who collectively performed 587 of the 1,463 (~40%) suppression actions in April 2026"

"5 checkusers [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CheckUser] ... who collectively performed 876 of the 5,419 (~19%) checkuser actions in April 2026"

by britta

5/29/2026 at 1:46:39 PM

What kind of units would you like on the "numbers on overall leverage" that make sense for a nonprofit and volunteers?

by margalabargala

5/29/2026 at 2:01:35 PM

Exactly. There's nothing here. They will need to strike to find out. Might work. Might not.

by 1970-01-01

5/29/2026 at 1:22:46 PM

Maybe I'm misunderstanding but I thought the Wiki Workers United were made up of employees not volunteer editors? Their website says, "We are Wiki Workers United, a global union for the staff of the Wikimedia Foundation. We are the people who do the work to provide a platform, services, and funds to support the Wikimedia movement." https://www.wikiworkersunited.org/

by jccalhoun

5/29/2026 at 1:22:35 PM

Wiki Workers United is the union for the paid staff of the Wikimedia Foundation, not volunteer Wikipedia editors.

by unleaded

5/29/2026 at 1:17:21 PM

> how can they strike when they're all volunteering?

Volunteering for what exactly? And if what they all are volunteering for went away one day, what exactly would happen to Wikipedia? Is it possible what they are doing, actually has a large impact for Wikipedia?

Striking is less about "us employees are angry" and more about "us who are actually doing things, aren't reaping the same amount of rewards", where "doing things" can be anything from being a salaried employee to a volunteer firemen, they can still strike because of unfairness.

by embedding-shape

5/29/2026 at 11:12:14 PM

Don't you think it might be harder to replace the people who work for free, as opposed to replacing paid employees? The unpaid labor is...unpaid.

by water-data-dude

5/29/2026 at 1:08:25 PM

> What exactly is their Trump-card secret strategy against full replacement?

They are the value. Good luck finding volunteers to replace them.

by guerrilla

5/29/2026 at 1:14:21 PM

I'm sure there are plenty of reddit moderators ready to take it up if needed.

by paleotrope

5/29/2026 at 1:26:24 PM

There are no points to be earned on Wikipedia, so redditors surely aren't interested until it gets completely gamified.

by embedding-shape

5/29/2026 at 6:53:39 PM

It's a different type of game on wikipedia.

by paleotrope

5/29/2026 at 1:19:05 PM

Well, it's not exactly the same. It's not a forum (not that a forum is easy, but it's completely different). If you just substitute most Wikipedia editors, with no handover process, I assure you it's going to be a mess.

by tecleandor

5/29/2026 at 1:30:14 PM

It’s a mess already. Just look up their definition of NPOV and compare it to what passes for neutrality in articles.

by kapluni

5/30/2026 at 2:58:36 AM

Well, they've mostly left reddit as well, afaik. It's a few stragglers, people being paid to push agenda, and auto-moderation now. I was reading / moderating reddit for over 4 hours a day, every day, for close to a decade. Heavy handed pro israeli censorship and propaganda has seen me pick up and leave, as i know many others have done. I was already wavering, over reddit's support of astroturfing and shill bots which were obvious, detectable, and reddit refused to do anything about it. Even actively supported it. So with the whole denying /actively supporting genocide thing, it was time to hang it up and leave.

If wikipedia is shutting off avenues for community input, maybe that is running it's course as well.

Its been nice internet, I loved you, and I will never forgive google for what they put into motion.

by Grimblewald

5/29/2026 at 1:16:13 PM

Billions of people on the planet, and not a single one of them would offer to do it?

by RALaBarge

5/29/2026 at 1:35:30 PM

Why would people who haven't contributed up to this point to Wikipedia contribute now? To save Wikipedia? People don't contribute because most users of volunteer/distributed media are leechers, not seeders. People view no value in contribution and even mock volunteers.

by hootz

5/29/2026 at 1:45:35 PM

Yes, they literally put up banners that take half of your screen asking for random people to "contribute" all the time. They'll just swap out the money banner to an editors banner and change the color to blue or something.

Edit: They literally have this, the color is even blue. I was truly guessing, but it is a thing:

"There are no small contributions: every edit counts, every donation counts. Thank you."

https://www.wikipedia.org/#:~:text=We%20ask%20you%2C%20since...

by 1970-01-01

5/29/2026 at 2:24:19 PM

If it were that easy to recruit new dedicated volunteers who would contribute a non-trivial amount of constructive work and stick with it over time, I'd be delighted and relieved, but it's not. Contributing to Wikipedia, at the level of many of the contributors who signed the petition, requires a lot of patience, enthusiasm, and time, and it requires building quite a lot of specialized skill. If you're doing it right, you get really quite good at a certain kind of research, writing, and reasoning. I've been an editor for 25 years, with 12k edits, and have not yet written an article that qualifies as a "featured article" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles) - it's super tough!

The foundation's 2026-2027 draft annual plan explains a bit of their current strategy for recruiting more editors, including by deepening engagement among readers in meaningful ways: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...

by britta

5/29/2026 at 8:54:32 PM

money is an easy thing to contribute, and they make it frictionless.

volunteering to edit / update / battle / ameliorate wiki pages requires far more time and friction and often drama

by red-iron-pine

5/29/2026 at 2:07:44 PM

But money contributions have no commitment, being a regular editor does. The editors striking here aren't doing trivial edits, and if they are then they are doing it in a large volume.

Wikipedia depends on people doing repetitive and semi-thankless work, such as vandalism patrolling. If no one patrols edits, then the entire wiki devolves into vandalism, edit battles and slop.

by hootz

5/29/2026 at 1:18:13 PM

I'm sure some russians will immediately volunteer.

by M95D

5/29/2026 at 1:47:10 PM

I'm sure many already have

by bigfishrunning

5/29/2026 at 8:55:59 PM

they're not volunteers, it's their day job, via the Internet Research Agency, et al

ditto for the Indian / Nigerian / S African folks they outsource to -- they're gettin paid, ain't no volunteers

by red-iron-pine

5/29/2026 at 4:27:22 PM

The fire people doing real work. Without those 6 people, what paid people work at wikipedia ? Just fund raisers and managers ?

That seems to be how non-profits evolve these days, fund raisers and management get most of the $ raised. So it looks like the WF is going in that direction to me.

I wish the editors good luck.

by jmclnx

5/29/2026 at 4:33:30 PM

WMF has over 600 staff, and 6 were recently laid off from a specific team. The criticism isn’t that no one is doing work at WMF but instead

a) The team affected by the layoff was responsible for implementing ideas from the community, and this historically has not had much traction. This decision sends a signal that WMF does not care about community input.

b) Most of the people laid off were prominent in a union, and the community thinks this is unfair retaliation that a mission focused non profit shouldn’t stoop to.

by frenchtoast8

5/29/2026 at 12:25:51 PM

Can Wikipedia be forked?

by hootz

5/29/2026 at 1:23:53 PM

It has been a few times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_forks_of_Wikip...

by jccalhoun

5/29/2026 at 1:28:15 PM

They seem to be specialized forks though, not actual recreations of the entire Wikipedia. We should have like an actual Mediawiki instance that forks the current Wikipedia content and maybe also leeches contributions off of it for some time to keep it up to date.

by hootz

5/29/2026 at 12:53:36 PM

People often download it into offline storage, i dont see why we couldnt just make our own.

by Taronar

5/29/2026 at 2:16:47 PM

There are various reasons to avoid a fork. Having the resources to maintain such a site, spreading resources thin, and moving over or rebuilding a community of trusted editors are among them.

That said, I am one of the people who downloaded a copy of Wikipedia. It wasn't with the intent of working it. Rather, it was to wait out any political strife (since that is bound to happen with such a large and diverse audience).

by II2II

5/29/2026 at 1:35:06 PM

Who's this "we" exactly? Who's going to host the infrastructure? I don't think it would be so trivial to "just make our own."

by pickleglitch

5/29/2026 at 1:45:17 PM

Kiwix and Protocol Labs have a mirror hosted on IPFS: https://ipfs.kiwix.org/

There's Internet In a Box and various other offline self hosted interfaces.

But of course there's a big difference between a mirror of the content and the whole community which updates and creates the content.

by jazzyjackson

5/29/2026 at 1:44:30 PM

keywords : miraheze, wikioasis

by altilunium

5/29/2026 at 12:39:15 PM

It should be.

We should do a hard fork of Wikipedia and call it Openpedia or Openwiki probably.

by colesantiago

5/29/2026 at 1:29:38 PM

Whether they are paid or not, this represents an existential threat to Wikipedia. Without an army of competent editors, Wikipedia just becomes garbage propaganda like Grokipedia.

by josefritzishere

5/29/2026 at 1:32:54 PM

[flagged]

by SanjayMehta

5/29/2026 at 1:49:32 PM

There are a bunch of research papers that compare Wikipedia and Grokipedia in some depth, and they've found and interpreted a lot of interesting differences. A couple of recaps from the Wikipedia Signpost, which is the internal newsletter for Wikipedians:

2026-03-10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

2026-01-15: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

by britta

5/30/2026 at 6:21:54 AM

Circular references back to Wikipedia? No thanks.

by SanjayMehta

5/29/2026 at 1:43:53 PM

Sure but one is a lot less trustworthy than the other.

by speedgoose

5/29/2026 at 1:45:30 PM

> Neither are trustworthy.

Since we’ve all forgotten media literacy, what makes Wikipedia trustworthy is that sources are cited and you can inspect those sources yourself to make a judgement call on the topic at hand.

There was never any such thing as blind trust. We learned in grade school how to evaluate sources and what types of sources are out there (primary and secondary sources, etc).

There is some level of trust in being open, transparent, and without a profit motive. But we recognize as educated people that truth is a matter of perspective, and we can build a complete picture by compiling different perspectives.

But then people like you roll in tossing casual accusations around and I guess your intention is to steer people to far less trustworthy sources than Wikipedia.

by dangus

5/29/2026 at 1:50:44 PM

The user isn't arguing in good faith here is one of his other comments

>Wikipedia could shut down permanently tomorrow and the world will be a better place.

Wikipedia is a vital resource for the internet and one of humanities supreme achievements. He can certainly have whatever opinion he likes but when has opinions like this he can't be trusted.

by s_dev

5/29/2026 at 8:57:13 PM

good faith arguments, on HN? bro you know what this site is for, right?

by red-iron-pine

5/30/2026 at 6:20:40 AM

If the argument doesn't fit the majority narrative then it's not in good faith. Aka democracy in action.

I've linked in the past to a paper which shows how wikipedos use circular arguments to push a narrative.

by SanjayMehta

5/29/2026 at 2:41:56 PM

I use eb.com and so should you.

So when the cofounder of Wikipedia calls it compromised, is he also arguing in bad faith?

by NordStreamYacht

5/29/2026 at 7:00:58 PM

I have no idea what you’re talking about. Maybe some context would help. Is this a cofounder who currently works there?

I don’t think this is directly relevant.

by dangus

5/30/2026 at 1:35:55 AM

Look up Larry Sanger but not on Wikipedia.

by NordStreamYacht

5/29/2026 at 6:17:42 PM

[flagged]

by SanjayMehta

5/29/2026 at 8:45:03 PM

Wikipedia doesn't "ban viewpoints". I'm guessing you're referring to their considering some sources as more reliable than others?

by thunderfork

5/30/2026 at 1:25:25 AM

Yes. Exactly. They have a list of sources which cannot be referenced directly or indirectly.

That is enough to discredit them completely.

by SanjayMehta

5/30/2026 at 2:59:47 AM

What source would you include that they don't allow referencing?

by Schiendelman

5/30/2026 at 8:03:53 AM

Try posting any URL from the Daily Mail. See what happens.

by SanjayMehta

5/30/2026 at 1:23:53 PM

So you would source from Daily Mail?

by Schiendelman

5/31/2026 at 10:53:27 AM

Maybe.

I'm for viewing all sides of every argument and coming to my own conclusions.

Who are these Wikipedo censors?

Not one of them has the circular objects between their legs to stand behind their Orwellian editorship.

by SanjayMehta

5/29/2026 at 1:45:07 PM

> For most topics the results are the same

Sure, it frequently won't deliberately lie to you.

It often does not replace facts with a party line statement.

Wikipedia is far more trustworthy.

by margalabargala

5/31/2026 at 10:55:19 AM

Strongly disagree. Wikipedo editors are allegedly "humans making an impartial judgement call."

Grokipedia is just an algorithm.

Humans without ethics are worse than a badly designed algorithm.

by SanjayMehta

5/31/2026 at 12:59:07 PM

You've now made the claim that wikipedia editors are without ethics.

I see you also included all evidence to back up this baseless claim.

by margalabargala

5/29/2026 at 1:05:50 PM

:thumbs-up:

by ltbarcly3

5/29/2026 at 1:05:17 PM

[dead]

by 948382828528

5/29/2026 at 1:16:06 PM

[flagged]

by sourcegrift

5/29/2026 at 2:47:02 PM

[flagged]

by NordStreamYacht

5/29/2026 at 1:33:58 PM

[flagged]

by SanjayMehta

5/29/2026 at 1:37:31 PM

I think you're going to need to elaborate a fair amount on that take... That runs contrary to the general concensus that having freely and easily accessible information is good for people.

by palijer

5/29/2026 at 1:53:42 PM

I think the problem that GP is referring to is that Wikipedia is currently treated as a primary source of truth with probably more trust then it should have. When it started (in the '00s) every high-school librarian incessantly warned paper-writing students to verify anything you found on Wikipedia. Eventually, we all got complacent and I believe that general attitude has mostly evaporated. Wikipedia's requirement for citations absolutly helped with this (and is a good thing) but I don't know how well those citations are vetted.

I agree that Wikipedia is good for society, and I hope it continues to exist, but I think some skepticism of it is healthy.

by bigfishrunning

5/29/2026 at 3:03:06 PM

I don't think this is what the OP claimed up here. Anyway, you're absolutely right, and also I don't see any message on this page claiming we should take Wikipedia without skepticism.

by soco

5/29/2026 at 1:13:21 PM

[flagged]

by RickJWagner

5/29/2026 at 1:18:58 PM

So "trust" is only possible when it's 100% unbiased? Then nothing is "trustworthy" as nothing can be 100% unbiased in a encyclopedia?

I'd say something could be biased in some ways, unbiased in others, yet still be trustworthy, but that's a lot of nuance all at once.

by embedding-shape

5/29/2026 at 1:33:07 PM

Bastion is pretty high praise. A lot of bias riding on the trust for the brand is the problem . Because the lies there have a much higher impact than lies on a Reddit post.

by kapluni

5/29/2026 at 1:21:40 PM

Who are the Manhattan Institute and Larry Sanger? What are their biases?

I know Elon finds it very biased, so he created Grokipedia, but that says a lot more about Elon than about Wikipedia.

by chadgpt3

5/29/2026 at 1:31:37 PM

Cofounder of Wikipedia. That has to count at least a little bit in the whataboutism

by kapluni

5/30/2026 at 1:51:01 AM

Is he the crazy one that ragequit or the normal one?

by chadgpt3

5/29/2026 at 1:21:57 PM

Bias is impossible to avoid. How perfect does the least imperfect solution have to be before it's not dismissed?

by mpalmer

5/29/2026 at 1:35:57 PM

[dead]

by kapluni

5/29/2026 at 1:21:17 PM

The Manhattan Institute is hardly a non-biased source. It was literally founded by the director of the CIA:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Casey

by lorecore

5/30/2026 at 1:53:55 AM

And this "institute" is currently chaired by Betsy Devos. Good lord.

by slater