Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/wikipedia@lemmy.world/t/4218790

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.

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[–] 5 points 3 months ago

"This means that volunteers are working for big tech for free"

"volunteers"

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  • Elon has clearly stated that he hates Wikipedia and wants to destroy it.

    And here is one of the ways he's working on that.

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  • 19 comments in c/foss@beehaw.org view that post
    [–] 22 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Why does everything, and I mean everything, have to be terrible now

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Capitalism ran out of easy exploitable profits, and now it is coming for whatever is left.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    Also technological innovation kinda halted in the recent years. That's why you see everything being filled with unnecessary AI in the name of technological advancement. If there's no innovation for growth, all that remains is to extract more value from existing platforms, hence the current enshittification of everything.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    We are a species that seeks unexploited niches for resource optimization. In the past those resources were things that made us directly happy like food and shelter but now we’ve moved on to more abstract concepts like “wealth”. That drive and ability to abstract and outthink our competitors is how we got to the top of the food chain on this planet.

    There is no off switch.

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  • [–] 19 points 3 months ago

    Amazing that Wikipedia has crapped the bed despite holding out against forces trying to break or corrupt it...

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  • [–] 35 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (5 children)

    Same for openstreetmap. Volunteers provide and add the data and the osm guys built their own companies and sell the derivative work. osm is even worse than wikimedia. At least wikimedia is officially non profit.

    It's our own fault that it doesn't use a free license like GPL. Derivative work should be released under the same license. You can make money, but contribute back.

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  • [–] [S] 11 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    OSM doesn't require you to open derivative works, though - they just require attribution. Kind of a different situation.

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  • [–] 14 points 3 months ago (1 child)

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

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 20 points 3 months ago

    It's what always happens. People never learn. Discogs, crowdsec, google maps, all of the things that have ever benefitted from crowd sourcing inevitably end up locking up the information and it becomes polluted with junk when they have to start using poorly sourced and moderated commercial data.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    Wait... Didn't Wikipedia ban AI shit a while back? What the fuck?

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  • [–] [S] 29 points 3 months ago* (4 children)

    They did, but that was for contributions. They still sold access to the encyclopedia to big tech so they could train on it to create slop (in violation of the licenses that Wikipedia is licensed under).

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Realistically how were they going to stop them? I mean, practically speaking.

    They offer the entire thing free to download and no slop company has ever hesitated to steal literary work from actual publishing companies and authors that are currently suing them.

    Seems to me like their options were get paid or not get paid.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    Potentially, this is not about stopping them. Can Wikimedia provide this copyleft-licensed data to AI companies when it knows they will ingest it and reproduce it without any copyleft? Lawfully? Morally? Maybe the act itself legitimizes the transformation into non-copyleft form?

    If the authors, the contributors to Wikipedia, feel like their work is being stolen, the managing org should not sell and benefit from these acts but at the very least stay neutral or represent and act upon their contributor's values.

    I don't know how they all feel about it, but the article makes a valid argument saying that copyleft is not retained. And the org actively participating in these activities with the other context provided by the article, it seems malicious/toxic/high discrepancy to the community values.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    Wikipedia is just… facts. The Wikimedia Foundation collected and collated those facts using unpaid community members funded in large part by charitable donations over the course of decades. Arguably they have even less right to withhold access to the data they’ve been entrusted with than anyone else in this situation considering the other parties are private entities.

    I understand the desire to label anyone supporting the beast that is these AI companies as complicit… but let’s try not to cut off our noses to spite our collective face. It’s not the librarian’s job to make morality decisions about who’s checking out the books, it’s their job to distribute the knowledge and keep the library open.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago

    I guess holding an offline copy is becoming more attractive by the day.

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  • 9 comments in c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 39 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    It is worth remembering that the company that fired these 7 workers is ++sitting on $296 million++ in reserves, and that the encyclopedia that they manage is entirely written by volunteers for free. Wikimedia isn’t spending anything to pay people who produce the work that they are fund-raising on, and what they are selling access to. In fact, in the last fiscal year, ++Wikimedia Enterprise++ - the team that provides high speed, high volume access to AI companies - just turned profitable on $8.3 million in revenue.

    i suddenly dont feel so bad for never donating when they pull out the tin cup.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago

    I have a deep respect for the Wikimedia Foundation but this looks like a pattern of behaviour form them. are there any alternatives worth looking into?

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    I honestly think this is a psy-op by Musk who has been actively trying to destroy Wikipedia for years, especially with his shitty Grokpedia

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago

    But also could be AI psychosis of the leadership. Humans are irrational creatures, and some of us really like to cling to tech. A lot of people grew up with the dreams of having their own KITT, JARVIS, HAL9000, or whatever talking computers were promised by sci-fi, and many of them won't give up until they die. Could be the same for Jimmy Wales.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Maybe Wikipedia should be copied safe somewhere before it collapses?

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  • 4 comments in c/aboringdystopia@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 24 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Despite all the legitimate criticism, we should still be wary of powerful interest groups that want to discredit Wikipedia as a whole... and these groups are currently gaining the upper hand. I therefore think we should be careful not to parrot every criticism unquestioningly and write off or demonize the entire project. Because that is exactly what Trump, Musk, and all the other narcissistic, right-wing oligarchs have been hoping for for decades.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago

    Yeah, OP isn't one of the handful of accounts that just shit on Wikipedia though.

    They posted their own blog, and talk about other stuff.

    Like, it's not outright misinformation, and there are some good points in there.

    But my kneejerk reaction to anyone critical of Wikipedia, is that they've fallen for propaganda due to how much the oligarchs hate that they can't control Wikipedia.

    That doesn't mean that we don't have to be vigilant, because it is entirely possible that one day Wikipedia starts being shit. I don't think we're anywhere near that point though.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    If they want the support of the People then they need to recognize and work with the unions to ensure the workers who make and maintain the encyclopedia are able to live a life free of employment anxiety.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago

    Of course, union-busting is completely unacceptable and is rightly condemned.

    My comment was more of a general warning against—despite all the justified criticism—allowing ourselves to be divided and discrediting Wikipedia as a project.

    If we look at how the right wing influences the world, this is exactly how it works: Instead of working from the outside to destroy an institution or movement, they use the media power they’ve bought up over time to deepen existing internal tensions and further polarize the situation.

    That’s very likely not the case with this blog, but I wouldn’t be surprised if actors from the far-right were to seize on this issue to discredit Wikipedia and Wikimedia as a whole. If the project were to end, it would ultimately do far more harm to us as a general public than the problematic handling of workers’ rights… especially in these times, when there are enough fascists for whom Wikipedia is a thorn in their side.

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  • 2 comments in c/unions@sh.itjust.works view that post
    [–] 15 points 3 months ago

    Basically, there are no good guys left anymore. They were either killed, usurped, or they had to change to survive. Our current system does not allow for such deviations at all, and never will.

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  • [–] 13 points 3 months ago

    Sounds like they need to be sued for violating the copyleft licenses.

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