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.
I made a video if you want to watch instead.
Big Tech’s war on community is aggressively continuing in 2026. Since mass market chatbots came onto the scene, sites that rely on community contributions have been chasing their most valuable community members away by making deals with AI companies to turn community contributions into slop for the masses.
The war has come to Wikipedia, one of the longest running open content projects on the web.
The Firings
Lead Developer of MediaWiki is Fired
The Wikimedia Foundation - the organization that manages Wikipedia - hired a new CEO in January, and she’s been making her mark since then.
In mid-May, the Wikimedia Foundation fired the long-time lead developer of MediaWiki (the software that runs Wikipedia), Brooke Vibber. Brooke had been the lead developer since 2003, and had been the first full-time employee the Wikimedia Foundation ever hired. She was also its first Chief Technical Officer. This is someone who knows where the bodies are buried in the Wikipedia codebase - a bona fide expert.
Brooke was a union organizer, and in her farewell note, she invited current Wikimedia staff members to join the unionization process underway in some of the countries with Wikimedia presence.
The Community Team is Fired
On May 21st, Wikimedia announced that they had disbanded the Community Tech team and laid off six staff members.
The Community Tech team was a team dedicated to taking the wishes of Wikipedia editors through the official Community Wishlist and to evaluate and build them.
The Wikimedia Foundation claimed that “having a centralized team was leading to frequent bottlenecks” so instead, they were moving to a diffuse system without a dedicated staff to continue to support community wishes.
A former Foundation employee predicted that this would lead to neglect, saying:
This follows a pattern of breaking up community-facing teams with the idea that now everyone’s going to be responsible for it. And what happens every time is no one’s responsible for it, and then it gets neglected.
The community wasn’t happy about that announcement, and technical contributor Sohom Datta summarized their thoughts, saying:
I would trust [the 6 fired employees to figure out] what the community wants more than anything, and the fact that the Foundation does not see the immediate benefit in retaining these engineers in a job where they explicitly work on community-requested features feels extremely sad and is a significant problem.
He added that “I have zero support for this initiative.”
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.
Net assets:
2025
2024
Net assets without donor restrictions
292,735,030
265,859,067
Net assets with donor restrictions
3,815,000
5,696,323
Total net assets
296,550,030
271,555,390
Total liabilities and net assets
$310,794,417
$286,759,938
These firings aren’t happening because the Wikimedia Foundation is hurting for money - it’s happening because they don’t care about the people who build Wikipedia. Seemingly, like other community sites, they think that people will continue to contribute to the slop machines for free, probably because they are losers.
The Current Crisis
The New CEO
Wikimedia’s CEO since January 20 has been Bernadette Meehan.
Bernadette has had a career in high finance and in public service, and she’s now revolved into the executive role at the Wikimedia Foundation.
Bernadette admits that she has never been an editor of Wikipedia, but claims that she “respects the model of volunteer-driven governance” and that her focus is to “listen, learn, and empower people to do their best work”.
It isn’t clear to me how firing people and teams closest to the very volunteers that build Wikipedia is empowering people to do their best work.
Unionization
Jake Orlowitz wrote about the situation, and he believes that this has something to do with unionization. Jake is a longtime Wikipedian and is the founder of the The Wikipedia Library, a library resource available to all active editors. He also runs a Wikipedia consulting agency. He says:
The Foundation has spent twenty years telling donors it is not like other tech companies. The union drive is the moment when that claim either becomes true or admits it was always marketing. If WMF breaks the union, or just lets the firings stand and waits for the news cycle to drift, the signal sent to every other mission-driven tech organization is that values rhetoric is decoupled from values practice. Every nonprofit pulling in donations on language about community, transparency, and equity gets permission to keep that language on the website while the staff handbook reads like Amazon’s.
Brooke was a union organizer, and Jake reports that most of the fired engineers were also union organizers.
Wikimedia Foundation has since claimed that none of the staff members were fired for union activities, and that they respect the right of staff members to vote to unionize, and that they are willing to negotiate in good faith.
The Reaction
Since the firings, there have been over 700 signatures on two petitions representing Foundation staff and community members. One petition expresses solidarity with the union, while the other pledges willingness to engage in collective action - including an editorial strike.
While I think this is awesome, it also feels a bit like locking the barn door after the horse has bolted.
The fact is, the Wikimedia Foundation has been selling out their volunteer community for a while, and they’ve now moved onto their paid staff.
Movement Volunteers are Being Sold Out
While the Wikimedia Foundation has long paid lip service to the movement volunteers that create and edit the encyclopedia, the firings of the community teams and lead developer aren’t the first time that the Foundation has worked against the very people who build the encyclopedia.
While staff members get paid for their services, volunteers never do, even though the Foundation uses their work to raise funds, and sells the fruit of their labor directly to the big tech AI companies.
Union Demands
Most people in the Wikipedia community believe that the demands of the Wiki Workers United union are pretty modest:
- Transparency and accountability from leadership toward both staff and movement communities.
- Staff input on annual planning before decisions are finalized.
- An end to inconsistent hiring, firing, and promotion practices.
- The ability to safely dissent.
- Mental health support for the workers who deal with the community directly.
In contrast, the volunteer movement community asks for a lot less.
The Volunteer Community
The movement community has a very basic ask - they want their works to be shared alike.
If you haven’t contributed to Wikipedia in a while, you may not remember that Wikipedia is distributed under a share-alike license.
Specifically, the license in use is the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, along with the GNU Free Documentation License. These licenses basically say that you can use the encyclopedia for any purpose, but that derivative works are also licensed under the same license.
The reason that contributions are licensed is because under the Berne convention, all works are copyrighted by default. Authors are entitled to all copyrights in the work and to any derivative works - unless and until the author specifically disclaims them.
Releasing their works under these licenses allows contributors to free their works for purposes beyond what is allowable by fair use, given the terms of the license. In the world before large-scale, big tech AI piracy, licensing their works under free content licenses freed their work – with an altruistic purpose.
The share-alike provision ensures that if people want to improve the article in some way, or to create derivative works from it, the improvements or derivative works are also licensed in the same way. This ensures that the contributions are always freely available, and more importantly - that improvements are also freely available.
Since improvements can’t be locked away behind more restrictive covenants, this encourages people, organizations, and businesses alike to improve Wikipedia, ensuring that all of the contributions are always open.
Some people might think that this is unfair - after all, if some big company wants to create learning materials that significantly copies from Wikipedia and makes corrections and improvements, they are the ones improving it - why should they need to share that back - it should be their choice.
The fact is, it is their choice to rely on Wikipedia content in the first place - no one complains that you can’t just copy the World Book Encyclopedia wholesale and make a more “patriotic” version of it. Everyone knows that the World Book is copyrighted and reproductions are only allowed under fair use - unless you make some kind of special licensing deal with World Book.
Wikipedia is no different, except that the contributors are the people that own the rights to the Encyclopedia, and they have contributed their work under a license that requires sharing alike. No one has to create new works based on this work, that is their choice.
The alternative is obvious, for the big tech companies working with Wikipedia to copy freely given works - simply hire people to write an encyclopedia. Instead of relying on volunteer labor and breaking the license that contributions are licensed under, big tech should simply hire people to create a new encyclopedia - one not encumbered by copyleft licensing.
CEO Meehan understands the significance of the volunteer labor and how much it matters that it is generated by humans - in an interview with Gigazine, she says that:
it’s this very fact—that humans created the knowledge—that makes us so valuable to LLMs and AI companies. Because using our dataset means it’s knowledge refined by humans, and AI companies know that it can be useful for LLM answers. It’s an ironic and interesting situation in a way, that AI relies on human content, including Wikipedia, to create products that it offers to the public.
Meehan understands the cost savings that Big Tech is achieving by relying on free labor - she is a seasoned professional who has worked at both JPMorgan Chase and Lehman Brothers and was the US ambassador to Chile - jobs very focused on big business, trade, and figuring out what things cost.
In my post on unpaid reddit moderators, I wrote that a pair of studies by Northwestern University found that Reddit moderators do (at least) $3.4 million worth of unpaid work each year.
We can only imagine what Wikipedia editors’ volunteer labor is worth.
Instead of hiring experts to write texts to train their models with, big tech is instead relying on the movement volunteers on Wikipedia to correct and train their AI models. As more of the web is consumed by slop, diligent Wikipedia editors serve as a kind of sieve for knowledge on the web - cleaning and validating the slop that big tech is spewing onto it.
In that interview, Meehan continues:
And as a third area, we launched Wikimedia Enterprise in 2021. This is a commercial agreement that provides businesses with a vast amount of data in various formats, including web APIs and data from specific periods, far exceeding what’s available to read on Wikipedia for free. Wikimedia Enterprise is essentially a call to major tech companies and other businesses: ‘Our content is always free to use, but our infrastructure is not.’ Scraping is destroying our infrastructure. That’s why we developed a commercial API. This allows tech companies and other businesses to download and use our information in the way we want, but it also gives us value and allows us to protect our public API.
It is interesting that Meehan says that the content is free to use, since on Wikipedia’s Copyrights page, Wikipedia is very clear in saying that “The Foundation does not own that content and cannot grant permission. Not even if your organization needs permission from website operators before copying text.”
Wikipedia also says on that page that “everyone already has permission to edit and reuse article text under open content licenses by the authors, as long as their use complies with the licensing terms, gives proper attribution, and licenses any changes under the same terms.”
Unfortunately, we know that when big tech reuses article texts in their chatbot products, they routinely and continually violate license terms, and often do not give proper attribution.
Every chatbot response that reuses article text contributed by a volunteer that is not reciprocally licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (which is all of it), violates the license that the encyclopedia is licensed under.
Given that the Wikimedia Foundation doesn’t own the content of the encyclopedia and cannot grant permission, what is it exactly that big tech is paying for?
As far as I can tell, it is a backdoor to piracy - the Wikimedia Foundation knows that big tech is pirating the works, and Wikipedia Enterprise is happy to provide privileged access to big tech to help them create slop.
Wikimedia Foundation’s Response
On July 23rd, the Wiki Workers United union officially asked for voluntary recognition of the union. The request came from a supermajority of union-eligible workers who have signed union authorization cards.
Movement volunteers staged a solidarity rally at the Wikipedia movement’s annual conference - Wikimania in Paris.
Volunteers asked CEO Meehan for a response on the request for recognition, and she refused to voluntarily commit to recognition, instead saying that the team’s focus was on Wikimania, and that they would respond to the request afterwards.
A few days after the Wikimania Conference ended, the Wikimedia Foundation announced it would not voluntarily recognize the union and said the union would have to conduct a vote as overseen by the National Labor Relations Board.
In a frequently asked questions section added to its statement, they write:
We have heard a range of views from staff, including concerns from those who have felt pressured to support union efforts and those who are confused by the unionization process. We have also seen a misunderstanding around what the union can do for global staff and Wikimedia movement communities.
Wikimedians haven’t stood still in the mean-time. The Wiki Workers United union posted a list of fact-checks of statements by the Wikimedia Foundation about the unionization effort. It is clear that the union thinks that the Foundation is engaging in union busting - especially after a June 2026 filing revealed that the Foundation hired Littler Mendelson, a law firm known for union busting.
What Should People Do?
We’ve seen various responses to the firings of community teams.
Jake - who brought a lot of attention to the plight of the fired workers - believes that people shouldn’t cancel their Wikipedia donations.
He believes that we’d be handing leadership an excuse for more firings - after all, there was a dip in donations. Beyond that, he believes that Wikipedia is too big to fail:
You’d be pulling money from the encyclopedia to make a point about the people who manage it, and the encyclopedia is bigger than whoever happens to be managing it. Behind that one word [Wikipedia] sit fifteen billion page views a month, three hundred languages, and a quarter of a million volunteers who’ll never see a dollar of your gift and who just need the lights kept on.
I disagree.
I think that if Wikipedia is too big to fail, and if we can never dissent by depriving the Foundation of money or labor, we’re already locked into being forever serfs for big tech.
If the only resolution on the table is 7 fired employees that serve the volunteer community that does all of the work, we’ve already given up on the idea of doing right by the volunteer community.
Big Tech relies on all of this free labor and is paying a paltry $8.3 million a year. That wouldn’t cover Big Tech AI’s coffee budget for the year, but they get the highest quality encyclopedia available without needing to employ a single person to make it happen.
This isn’t an insurmountable problem: if the chatbot companies can’t reciprocally license the work of volunteers - as the volunteer’s most basic ask - they can simply license the World Book encyclopedia.
The fact is, the value of the open content encyclopedia is to ensure that it remains free - if that bargain is broken, what is it that movement volunteers are working towards? Why should volunteers work for free for something that Google and OpenAI and Anthropic could donate back to the commons? Nothing is stopping those companies from taking a tiny part of their capital to produce an even higher quality encyclopedia than volunteers have.
The movement volunteers are so altruistic as to beg to be ripped off by the big tech pirates, even though they won’t abide by the most minimal restrictions to their work – work that is freely given.
Given that reality, it isn’t surprising that Meehan, Wales, and big tech generally think that they can continue to rely on volunteer labor and donations to pay their salaries. Even when they are openly ripping off the community, and firing the teams that support the community, volunteers can’t simply stop contributing.
If the Wikimedia Foundation is making backdoor licensing deals with big tech without even reminding them of their obligations under the Creative Commons and GFDL licenses, contributors need to draw a line in the sand.
Why should people pay the Foundation any money at all? The money isn’t protecting your contributions - instead, people who help you contribute are being fired.
Institutional Legitimacy
The Wikimedia Foundation has lost institutional legitimacy.
When the foundation that we expect to maintain the encyclopedia for everyone is the very same entity that is selling out the people writing the encyclopedia, volunteers need to ask themselves what makes the Wikimedia Foundation the legitimate steward of our contributions and donations.
One one side, we have the Wikimedia Foundation, led by someone who hasn’t edited Wikipedia, and on the other, we have a fired former CTO and lead developer of the software that runs Wikipedia, along with a fired tech team dedicated to producing product features wished for by the community that writes the encyclopedia.
We expect the movement volunteers that write Wikipedia to trust the Foundation that has already sold them out.
These events have led to a crisis of legitimacy. Wikipedia can and should be forked, and volunteers should decentralize and only recentralize if policies are in place to actually protect the encyclopedia and the people writing it. The Wikimedia Foundation has shown that they cannot be trusted with this responsibility (or our donations).
This isn’t time to rally around the Wikimedia Foundation flag. They have taken millions of people’s donations and are firing people who support the only thing people care about - the encyclopedia. People aren’t donating their money or their work to make it easier for big tech to generate slop - but that is what volunteers are doing.
Even if the union is recognized, the Wikimedia Foundation has stated that there is misunderstanding around what the union can do for Wikimedia movement communities. That doesn’t bode well for movement volunteers who are already being taken advantage of. Even if the union is recognized, the volunteer community will continue to be left out in the cold.
The volunteers have all the power here. They are the ones doing the work. If the Wikimedia Foundation can’t protect the Wikipedia corpus from big tech’s assault on it, and instead teams up with them while firing the people that work solely for the community, what is the Foundation for? Why do they need to exist?
If you liked this material, please consider supporting me. You can message me or follow this blog on Mastodon.