Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA
222 by robin_reala · · wikiworkersunited.org · 94 comments
This is the right move. Unionise when things are good enough that labor can take a hit and keep standing, or when they’re so bad that people might actually die. Either way labor has a strong BATNA.
Right now a lost of software work is kinda in the middle; it’s not very secure and labor isn’t confident and doesn’t have a lot of great, easy alternatives, but by and large getting food on the table tomorrow isn’t an open question.
> or when they’re so bad that people might actually die
Care to elaborate? Am I understanding correctly that the implication here is that there is some condition for which a software engineer having a union agreement could prevent that worker from dying?
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Also, there are allegations of adversarial management behavior. I can't find the link now, but some background:
https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-workers-vote-on-whethe...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49143414
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikitech-l@lists...
Can someone explain why do they need a union when they work for a non-profit? Aren't they mostly volunteers?
From my experience in my youth volunteering at animal shelters and environmental protection groups, you never volunteer for a non-profit for the money or the job stability, but you do it for the mission and the satisfaction of being the change you want to be in the world, even if that means living off ramen and beans and couch surfing. Especially given these are cushy jobs done from the PC via the internet without needing to physically get your hands dirty or break your back in poor working conditions, which a lot of other young well intended and ambitious people in the world would like to do, even for free.
Everything I've been reading in the last few years about wikipedia's management, article moderation decisions, political side-taking, and how they spend their donations has been very fish smelling and off-putting. It's like there's a malicious Hydra in the basement, wearing the Wikipedia name I grew up with as a skin suit, to advance their goals and agendas. Very fishy. But it does feel like this is the inevitable faith of a lot of old and famous non-profits over time, as the gray-beard founding staff leave and get replaced by people who don't share the same values and mission, but have their own agendas and wish to co-opt the established name brand and influence that comes with it to push it. IDK if this unionisation push is for good or for bad since I'm not a fly on the wall at the internal meetings to know the internal drama and gossip, but I do remain skeptical about what's going on at the WMF.
Like maybe the union is well intended today, but will it be the same in 10-20 years with that power? What protection are in place they don't misuse it? For a global repository of knowledge like Wikipedia, I'd much prefer the staff be constantly changing with new ambitious innocent blood, rather than have an entrenched gerontocracy protected by a powerful union, since from my historical knowledge I've never seen that end well long term since long reign and absolute power corrupts.
My 0,02$.
Nonprofit doesn't mean you don't pay your employees. Nonprofits earn and spend money like any other corporation, including paying permanent fulltime staff. Not everything can be done by volunteers. What they don't do is reward their investors with a cut of earnings above expenses.
They are not mostly volunteers. Editors are largely volunteers, but administration and development is very much a financed pursuit.
The nonprofit board can provide some oversight, but bringing workers voices to the table can provide additional perspective.
Everyone wants a piece of the wikipedia gravy train.
In 2010: Wikimedia Foundation annual expenses were about $20m
In 2025: Wikimedia Foundation annual expenses are about $200m
The story of Wikipedia of the last 10 years especially is endlessly higher spending for a very stable number of monthly users (1.5b or so). You can make the case that 80% of this spend is not necessary to what the average users donating to Wikipedia think of as "wikipedia".
It makes sense for the employees to want to lock in their share of the bag.
> It makes sense for the employees to want to lock in their share of the bag.
That's the problem, isn't it? Suppose that e.g. Wikipedia traffic is down year over year because of AI summaries and then they get fewer donations. Now something needs to be cut. It's a non-profit so "investor profit" can't be that thing.
If you then also make it so that it can't be workers, what's left? It's mostly either spending down savings (which isn't long-term sustainable) or sacrificing things that ought not to be, like infrastructure or servicing technical debt. So now you've put off a given percentage of layoffs for a few years until that catches up to you and sinks the whole foundation.
Half of that goes to wages and salary for ~650 staff members. Of the ~114M that goes to wages, 90M goes to people working directly on projects, 15M goes to admin/management, and the other 9M goes to people in fundraising/financials.
9M goes to paying donation processing fees.
3.5M goes towards network infra.
~2M of in-kind services were donated (i.e. doing free work or donating goods) and that shows up as a dedicated expense.
Professional Services (accounting, consulting, etc) make up another 15M (same as the total management/admin cost).
General operating expenses (property, taxes, office software, office equipment, etc) make up 8M.
Conference and Travel is 6M.
And then 4.5M is expensed as depreciation and amortization of owned assets.
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So to be entirely clear here. WMF projects make up 147M / over three quarters of the total expenses for the year. Fundraising makes up 20M all together (half being essentially fees and the other half is people running fundraising campaigns). And the remaining 21M / 11% is general admin.
11% is quite good for such a large foundation.
And if you want to nail down into it that 75% for projects is going towards a lot of engineering work to support long standing gripes with wikipedia's tooling and infra.
https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2024-2025-annu...
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_reports...
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...
> very stable number of monthly users
Wikipedia has seen their traffic decline with AI eating more and more of their lunch. I imagine it’ll only accelerate from here.
Agents are increasingly accessing Wikipedia, but do not make donations.
There will be a lot of belt tightening at the foundation in the coming years.
So 1/40 of Reuters annual revenues, 1/1000 of Facebook annual revenues, is being wasted on ... lobbying governments against internet censorship and cross-subsidising translations into less popular languages?
How dare the most useful human knowledge resource spend the money freely given to it in such a way!
The 'Wikipedia is spending your donations on DEI' conspiracy has run its course I think.
Your story sounds nice if you deal with the news in right wing tropes. Or if you only hang out with tech bros who think in terms of “bags”.
But are you aware that Brooke Vibber, who has been with Wikipedia since before it was even called that, was the instigating force behind this union? And has since been dismissed? She recently said that, after creating Mediawiki herself practically from scratch, and many many aspects of how Wikipedia works, that the union was her proudest creation.
Like, the first fundraiser they ever ran was literally a small ad in the corner asking if they could buy Brooke a laptop. The old guard were very unworldly. The executive staff have come and go (and with increasingly high salaries and departures from the original mission). If the WMF staff is bloated now, I know who had the incentive to staff up, and it wasn’t the existing workers.
Just saying, maybe given that the WMF is awash in cash now, perhaps some of those employees also want to lock in the principles and practices of the Wikipedia that they’ve given their lives to build.
>In 2025: Wikimedia Foundation annual expenses are about $200m
Am I correct in understanding, the $200M annual spend include the salary of those workers. And in case of any mass layoffs incoming, they are forming an union to better bargain?
Exactly. The WMF spending growth is completely decoupled from its effect on Wikipedia. This only works because the donations pop-up makes people think they are donating to Wikipedia, not to a foundation which mostly does totally unrelated stuff. There is no feedback loop which would limit this spending toward the core aspects of Wikipedia.
This is 95% of all NGOs and their ilk.
Related:
"We now have evidence of how at least $7.7 billion for homelessness was spent on salaries. They created a jobs program that grows at the expense of the actual homeless who need help instead of helping the homeless."
Worst is that there is zero interest to deal with sock puppet accounts, state actors or just typical cliques
I saw a pair of an admin and other person (probably sock puppet) that were used for edit wars, the 2nd account was used to ban edits, especially from non registered users.
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yea...200m is totally a gravey train.
Do you live in the same universe where elon musk was work 1 trillion?
Short statement from the WMF in response: https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2026/09/03/us-staff-uni...
They seem to say they'll accept the outcome and pledge to engage in good-faith. Which is the only correct response, really, so time will tell if these words are more than generic PR.
Commenters in these discussions always confuse wikipedia editors with Wikimedia employees - this is the latter!
Are editors employees in any formal way or are they closer to Reddit moderators? Or editors as in anyone, ie. Reddit posters?
Anyone can edit Wikipedia, editors are not employees. Even the admins are not employees.
(As far as I know you only have to sign any kind of formal documents if you have one of the few roles (as a non-employee) where you may have access to sensitive personal data, which is very few people.)
The OP talks a lot about volunteers, but doesn't clearly state they are part of the union.
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As long as they don’t attempt to force the editorial side of Wikipedia to implement an ideological slant, or otherwise interfere with the NPOV policy, more power to them.
The NPOV policy has just lead to alternate ways to keep things aligned to the region that most prolific editors/contributors would occupy on an idealogical quadrant.
It’s similar to the way traditional media outlets that pride themselves on not being partisan in what they say, simply exert their bias via what they either don’t cover or inconvenient context/facts they leave out. The writing itself is seemingly neutral, except for the part where if they included the stories or details that run counter to their belief system, their readers might come to a problematic conclusion.
Are you saying it would be better to pick a specific ideological slant? If so, which one?
I am well aware of the existing Wiki slant, it’s certainly not perfect especially on highly political articles. But an imperfect attempt at NPOV seems better than no attempt at all.
Hell yeah -- and on labor day weekend too.
Unions should just rebrand as employee owned corporations that sell labor.
Lot of people discovering the value in having a union after they've lost all of their leverage.
There's nobody more replaceable than the maintainers of a collaborative encyclopedia. A lot of AI will fail where the rubber meets the road. For wikipedia, the rubber never meets the road.
They were dropping a lot of anti grokopedia (I think that's what it's called) shadow press releases a while back. They gradually disappeared, and I started seeing slop showing up on wikipedia. I'm officially starting the countdown until the talk pages disappear.
Is Wikipedia a bad place to work or something?
I'd imagine it must be pretty relaxed/cushy, albeit probably at the lower end of market comp for software jobs in particular.
Does the union stipulate the workers cannot be replaced with AI?
> I'd imagine it must be pretty relaxed/cushy, albeit probably at the lower end of market comp for software jobs in particular.
Based on what?
Mission-oriented jobs tend to be below-market. Open source, gaming, SpaceX, etc.
Unions are not just for bad employers.
Yes nowadays new unions are basically for employers who have a very ideologically liberal workplace - coffee shops, open source, etc
> Does the union stipulate the workers cannot be replaced with AI?
That wouldn't get them off the hook.
Right? If your logo[1] is going to be a fist raised in defiance you'd better at least have something you're trying to fight about. And if you're going to brag about succeeding in your vote at least give an idea about WHY you want a union in the first place.
There are unionization attempts I understand like Amazon warehouse workers and unionization attempts that I don't like the Minneapolis small coffee chain workers whose demands included being able to decide the milk supplier. One seems like standing up for necessary rights, the other seems like cosplay.
I think that this fundamentally comes from thinking that unions are only there for the worst possible jobs in the worst conditions, or where outright abuse occurs. And also from the (imo incorrect) idea that you should have those bad conditions before organizing.
Unions even the balance of power between the executives and labour at an organization. Even if WMF conditions are perfect and there's never any abuse of power (which seems unlikely) -- you should want a union in place _before_ an org decides to do layoffs, or force a practice on its workers that they don't want.
I worked at a tech company a few years ago and the standard anti-union cliche from execs was "we already treat you well" but then about 20 months later they laid off 2000 people, including folks on parental leave. A bit late to try and organize a union at that point.
(edit: typo fix)
One person complaining on Wired about "... says she ... had seen too many colleagues decline to speak up during internal meetings out of fear of retaliation for raising issues or proposing far-out ideas." that is evidence of at least one anecdotal individual personal issue. HOWEVER, the vote being "overwhelming" would seem to indicate they have a severe company culture problem not just one anecdotal issue, its not like she was the only one voting for the union LOL. I've worked at companies with and without unions and the ones that had a union, severely needed the union due to incredibly toxic workplace culture combined with a total lack of management accountability for their responsibility/behavior. Generally people won't bother keeping a union going unless they badly need it, given the enormous resources stacked up against them against forming and operating a union... It has to be a pretty awful workplace if forming a union against all that opposition is somehow still the better path... The quality of management has certainly not improved over generations or decades, so an era of declining union membership is probably not an indication of there being too many unions LOL.
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"The Wikimedia Foundation and the broader technology and nonprofit sectors are navigating a period of significant change. From rapid advances in artificial intelligence to evolving organizational priorities and external pressures, and changing patterns of readership and discovery, the decisions being made today will shape our workplace for years to come. Our union members believe this is the right moment to establish a lasting, legally recognized voice in those conversations. Rather than waiting until difficult decisions are made, we are organizing now to help build a stronger Foundation that can meet future challenges through collaboration, transparency, and shared stewardship."
https://wikiworkersunited.org/faq/