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Wikimedia Will Not Voluntarily Recognize Union a Supermajority of Its Workers Want
(www.404media.co)
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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While the "volunteers" making it happen for real get nothing...
That's not the problem, 'tho. Wikipedia is volunteer-written and needs money to pay for the SW development and the servers.
The issue is that they are not upfront about their strategy and that they are resisting unionization by the workers who develop the software.
A leading wikimedia software developer (@brooke@bikeshed.vibber.net) lost her job a while ago, most likely due to her involvement in the unionisation effort.
I disagree I think the fact the boss of wikimedia is very well paid and that he is benefiting at the end of day from free labor.
They could reward/pay the most important contributors and they don't. Yes it's voluntary but it's also a comparatively very "" small "" group of people that write a big chunk of wikipedia.
I absolutely can't stand that the boss of such utility service as wikipedia thinks first about his salary rather than rewarding their contributors.
Also you say this is not a problem but I'm sure the Union would have pointed out the same thing I just did.
Also you are missing an important point if you just say "hey they are volunteers, they choose to work for free". It's not like that because as I said it's a few contributors that do the bast majority of article edits.
I'm wasting my time if you think that wikimedia has one problem and that's it. Multiple problems that would need to be adressed by a Union.
There are multiple studies showing that paying volunteers can backfire in many ways. It could turn an hobby into a chore, attract the wrong kind of contributors, or sour those that do not have enough time to qualify for money. Plus, any metric you were to use to assign rewards would quickly be gamed by the wrong kind of people.
We can discuss about how much the administrators are paid and the many issues wikimedia has, but please, for the love of god, let's not pay editors.