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.
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.
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.