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I appreciate that this article actually cites some of the relevant discussions. Wikipedia community processes are unusual in that they are largely public, including that foundation staff members respond to community questions in public, so you can read a lot of the backstory yourself. Here are a few links.

Main discussion about Community Tech team on the Village Pump (discussion board): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#W...

* Response from the WMF (21 May): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#R...

* Note from the Wikimedia Foundation on unionization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#N...

* Response from the WMF (22 May): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#R...

* WWU statement (May 23): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#W...

* Response from WMF 24 May: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#R...

The 24 May statement includes "I know many of you asked why we cannot just guarantee people new roles...we have 4 countries represented, with a wide variance in required actions. I want to note one specific requirement that came from these laws: we could not pre-select certain staff for new roles, as that would appear to be circumventing legally required processes in some countries."

Discussion about proposed direction for Community Wishlist: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist#Prop...

Discussed before at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48285592
>The union Wiki Workers United, which has not yet been recognized, declined a request for an interview.

So, how can they strike when they're all volunteering? What exactly is their Trump-card secret strategy against full replacement? The article didn't even bother addressing the fundamental problem here.

> So, how can they strike when they're all volunteering?

I fail to see the difficulty? Editors striking would mean them not doing the volunteer work they normally do.

How much vandalism do you reckon will go undetected if they do go on strike? How much more time will it take to get articles updated to reflect current affairs?

I would like to see some numbers on it. What exactly is their overall leverage here? What about a lengthy strike? Does anybody really know until it happens?
The solidarity petition is public (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Workers_United_...), and it includes a section with statistics summarizing the contributions of editors who have signed the petition, which suggests the impact of signatories deciding to withhold their volunteer labor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Workers_United_...

A couple highlights:

"5 oversighters [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Oversight] ... who collectively performed 587 of the 1,463 (~40%) suppression actions in April 2026"

"5 checkusers [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:CheckUser] ... who collectively performed 876 of the 5,419 (~19%) checkuser actions in April 2026"

What kind of units would you like on the "numbers on overall leverage" that make sense for a nonprofit and volunteers?
Exactly. There's nothing here. They will need to strike to find out. Might work. Might not.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding but I thought the Wiki Workers United were made up of employees not volunteer editors? Their website says, "We are Wiki Workers United, a global union for the staff of the Wikimedia Foundation. We are the people who do the work to provide a platform, services, and funds to support the Wikimedia movement." https://www.wikiworkersunited.org/
Wiki Workers United is the union for the paid staff of the Wikimedia Foundation, not volunteer Wikipedia editors.
> how can they strike when they're all volunteering?

Volunteering for what exactly? And if what they all are volunteering for went away one day, what exactly would happen to Wikipedia? Is it possible what they are doing, actually has a large impact for Wikipedia?

Striking is less about "us employees are angry" and more about "us who are actually doing things, aren't reaping the same amount of rewards", where "doing things" can be anything from being a salaried employee to a volunteer firemen, they can still strike because of unfairness.

Don't you think it might be harder to replace the people who work for free, as opposed to replacing paid employees? The unpaid labor is...unpaid.
> What exactly is their Trump-card secret strategy against full replacement?

They are the value. Good luck finding volunteers to replace them.

I'm sure there are plenty of reddit moderators ready to take it up if needed.
There are no points to be earned on Wikipedia, so redditors surely aren't interested until it gets completely gamified.
It's a different type of game on wikipedia.
Well, it's not exactly the same. It's not a forum (not that a forum is easy, but it's completely different). If you just substitute most Wikipedia editors, with no handover process, I assure you it's going to be a mess.
It’s a mess already. Just look up their definition of NPOV and compare it to what passes for neutrality in articles.
Well, they've mostly left reddit as well, afaik. It's a few stragglers, people being paid to push agenda, and auto-moderation now. I was reading / moderating reddit for over 4 hours a day, every day, for close to a decade. Heavy handed pro israeli censorship and propaganda has seen me pick up and leave, as i know many others have done. I was already wavering, over reddit's support of astroturfing and shill bots which were obvious, detectable, and reddit refused to do anything about it. Even actively supported it. So with the whole denying /actively supporting genocide thing, it was time to hang it up and leave.

If wikipedia is shutting off avenues for community input, maybe that is running it's course as well.

Its been nice internet, I loved you, and I will never forgive google for what they put into motion.

Billions of people on the planet, and not a single one of them would offer to do it?
Why would people who haven't contributed up to this point to Wikipedia contribute now? To save Wikipedia? People don't contribute because most users of volunteer/distributed media are leechers, not seeders. People view no value in contribution and even mock volunteers.
Yes, they literally put up banners that take half of your screen asking for random people to "contribute" all the time. They'll just swap out the money banner to an editors banner and change the color to blue or something.

Edit: They literally have this, the color is even blue. I was truly guessing, but it is a thing:

"There are no small contributions: every edit counts, every donation counts. Thank you."

https://www.wikipedia.org/#:~:text=We%20ask%20you%2C%20since...

If it were that easy to recruit new dedicated volunteers who would contribute a non-trivial amount of constructive work and stick with it over time, I'd be delighted and relieved, but it's not. Contributing to Wikipedia, at the level of many of the contributors who signed the petition, requires a lot of patience, enthusiasm, and time, and it requires building quite a lot of specialized skill. If you're doing it right, you get really quite good at a certain kind of research, writing, and reasoning. I've been an editor for 25 years, with 12k edits, and have not yet written an article that qualifies as a "featured article" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles) - it's super tough!

The foundation's 2026-2027 draft annual plan explains a bit of their current strategy for recruiting more editors, including by deepening engagement among readers in meaningful ways: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...

I'm sure some russians will immediately volunteer.
I'm sure many already have
they're not volunteers, it's their day job, via the Internet Research Agency, et al

ditto for the Indian / Nigerian / S African folks they outsource to -- they're gettin paid, ain't no volunteers

The fire people doing real work. Without those 6 people, what paid people work at wikipedia ? Just fund raisers and managers ?

That seems to be how non-profits evolve these days, fund raisers and management get most of the $ raised. So it looks like the WF is going in that direction to me.

I wish the editors good luck.

WMF has over 600 staff, and 6 were recently laid off from a specific team. The criticism isn’t that no one is doing work at WMF but instead

a) The team affected by the layoff was responsible for implementing ideas from the community, and this historically has not had much traction. This decision sends a signal that WMF does not care about community input.

b) Most of the people laid off were prominent in a union, and the community thinks this is unfair retaliation that a mission focused non profit shouldn’t stoop to.

Can Wikipedia be forked?
It has been a few times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_forks_of_Wikip...
They seem to be specialized forks though, not actual recreations of the entire Wikipedia. We should have like an actual Mediawiki instance that forks the current Wikipedia content and maybe also leeches contributions off of it for some time to keep it up to date.
People often download it into offline storage, i dont see why we couldnt just make our own.
There are various reasons to avoid a fork. Having the resources to maintain such a site, spreading resources thin, and moving over or rebuilding a community of trusted editors are among them.

That said, I am one of the people who downloaded a copy of Wikipedia. It wasn't with the intent of working it. Rather, it was to wait out any political strife (since that is bound to happen with such a large and diverse audience).

Who's this "we" exactly? Who's going to host the infrastructure? I don't think it would be so trivial to "just make our own."
Kiwix and Protocol Labs have a mirror hosted on IPFS: https://ipfs.kiwix.org/

There's Internet In a Box and various other offline self hosted interfaces.

But of course there's a big difference between a mirror of the content and the whole community which updates and creates the content.

keywords : miraheze, wikioasis
It should be.

We should do a hard fork of Wikipedia and call it Openpedia or Openwiki probably.

Whether they are paid or not, this represents an existential threat to Wikipedia. Without an army of competent editors, Wikipedia just becomes garbage propaganda like Grokipedia.
:thumbs-up: