this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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Fuck AI

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AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.

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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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[–] cheers_queers@lemmy.zip 9 points 47 minutes ago

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.

[–] coolasbreeze@lemmy.world 2 points 25 minutes 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?