Big Tech’s Anti-Labor Playbook Has Come for Wikipedia | by Jake Orlowitz | May, 2026 | MediumSitemapOpen in appSign up<br>Sign in

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Big Tech’s Anti-Labor Playbook Has Come for Wikipedia

Jake Orlowitz

6 min read·<br>4 hours ago

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Photo by Planet Volumes on UnsplashTLDR: In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki and disbanded the team whose entire job was to listen to volunteers. Most of the people they fired were union organizers. Wikipedia’s editors are now threatening to strike in solidarity. The Foundation is sitting on $296 million in reserves and a freshly profitable AI revenue stream. This is a confrontation with global implications.<br>Ten days in May<br>In mid-May, the Wikimedia Foundation fired Brooke Vibber.<br>If that name doesn’t mean anything to you, here is what it should mean. Vibber took over as lead developer of MediaWiki, the platform that runs Wikipedia, in early 2003. She was the first full-time employee the Wikimedia Foundation ever hired, and its first Chief Technical Officer. For more than twenty years she was the engineer you called when something deep in the code was broken. The Foundation itself once described her as one of a very small number of people in the world who deeply understand the technical underpinnings of the system. She was also a union organizer.<br>A week later, on May 21, the Foundation announced it had disbanded the Community Tech team. Five engineers and a manager: gone. Their job had been to take the wishes Wikipedia editors submitted through an official channel called the Community Wishlist, and build them. It was the one team at WMF whose product owner was, in effect, the volunteer community. Most of the engineers were also union organizers.<br>Within hours of the announcement, editors were signing a solidarity petition pledging collective action up to and including an editorial strike. By the organizers’ account, this is the first time editors have organized solidarity action with paid Foundation staff. Administrators offered to step down. Anti-vandalism bot operators offered to switch off the filters. It should not be legal to operate without a union, wrote an administrator named Femke. And a organisation that tries to be a force for good should not be willing to operate without one.<br>WMF General Counsel Stephen LaPorte has publicly said the Foundation respects staff’s right to unionize and will negotiate in good faith. The actions of the past two weeks will determine whether that means anything.<br>The money<br>The Wikimedia Foundation closed last fiscal year with $208.6 million in revenue. It holds $296.6 million in reserves, 17.1 months of operating expenses. The Wikimedia Endowment, a separate fund, sits on $169.4 million in net assets, up $25 million in a single year. Wikimedia Enterprise, the team that provides high speed, high volume API access to AI labs, just turned profitable on $8.3 million in revenue, a 148% jump from the prior year.<br>That last revenue stream is good, by the way. AI companies are training on Wikipedia whether they pay for it or not, and making them pay is the smartest move the Foundation has made in years. The figure should be much higher. OpenAI and Anthropic and Google can afford to write checks an order of magnitude bigger than $8.3 million.<br>The point is the Foundation is rich. Seventeen-plus months of operating runway in the bank. Revenue diversifying, not shrinking. They can afford six engineers. Whatever this fight is about, it is not about money.<br>The pattern<br>The Foundation has spent the better part of a decade in slow legitimacy collapse with its own community, and the people who run it have absorbed exactly the wrong lessons from every crisis.<br>In 2015, then-CEO Lila Tretikov tried to build the Knowledge Engine, funded in part by a $250,000 Knight Foundation grant the community wasn’t told about for four months. When the community found out in early 2016, the project imploded, Tretikov resigned, and the Foundation apologized in the careful corporate register of an organization that doesn’t quite mean it.<br>In 2019, the Foundation banned a longtime English Wikipedia administrator on secret evidence through a process the community had not designed, triggering the largest administrator revolt of the office-action era. They handed the decision back to the community.<br>Every crisis taught a lesson. The lesson was never that secrecy and top-down decision-making were wrong on principle. The lesson was always that secrecy was operationally expensive and should be handled more carefully next time.<br>What followed was the Silicon Valley playbook applied to a nonprofit that had spent twenty years telling donors it was different. A desktop redesign shipped over community objections. Strategic plans landed as fait accompli. Affiliates complained of inadequate funding and consultation while headcount at...