Wikipedia Turned on its Volunteers. Now it's Coming for its Workers.

Wikipedia Turned on its Volunteers. Now it’s Coming for its Workers. | Youssuff Quips

Wikipedia Turned on its Volunteers. Now it's Coming for its Workers.

Aug 4, 2026

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.

I made a video if you want to watch instead.

Play Video: Wikipedia Fired its Workers. The Real Story is Worse.

The Firings<br>Lead Developer of MediaWiki is Fired

The Community Team is Fired

The Current Crisis<br>The New CEO

Unionization

The Reaction

Movement Volunteers are Being Sold Out

Union Demands

The Volunteer Community

Wikimedia Foundation’s Response<br>What Should People Do?

Institutional Legitimacy

Big Tech’s war on community is aggressively continuing in 2026. Since mass market chatbots came onto the scene, sites that rely on community contributions have been chasing their most valuable community members away by making deals with AI companies to turn community contributions into slop for the masses.

The war has come to Wikipedia, one of the longest running open content projects on the web.

The Firings

Lead Developer of MediaWiki is Fired

The Wikimedia Foundation - the organization that manages Wikipedia - hired a new CEO in January, and she’s been making her mark since then.

In mid-May, the Wikimedia Foundation fired the long-time lead developer of MediaWiki (the software that runs Wikipedia), Brooke Vibber. Brooke had been the lead developer since 2003, and had been the first full-time employee the Wikimedia Foundation ever hired. She was also its first Chief Technical Officer. This is someone who knows where the bodies are buried in the Wikipedia codebase - a bona fide expert.

Brooke was a union organizer, and in her farewell note, she invited current Wikimedia staff members to join the unionization process underway in some of the countries with Wikimedia presence.

The Community Team is Fired

On May 21st, Wikimedia announced that they had disbanded the Community Tech team and laid off six staff members.

The Community Tech team was a team dedicated to taking the wishes of Wikipedia editors through the official Community Wishlist and to evaluate and build them.

The Wikimedia Foundation claimed that “having a centralized team was leading to frequent bottlenecks” so instead, they were moving to a diffuse system without a dedicated staff to continue to support community wishes.

A former Foundation employee predicted that this would lead to neglect, saying:

This follows a pattern of breaking up community-facing teams with the idea that now everyone’s going to be responsible for it. And what happens every time is no one’s responsible for it, and then it gets neglected.

The community wasn’t happy about that announcement, and technical contributor Sohom Datta summarized their thoughts, saying:

I would trust [the 6 fired employees to figure out] what the community wants more than anything, and the fact that the Foundation does not see the immediate benefit in retaining these engineers in a job where they explicitly work on community-requested features feels extremely sad and is a significant problem.

He added that “I have zero support for this initiative.”

It is worth remembering that the company that fired these 7 workers is sitting on $296 million in reserves, and that the encyclopedia that they manage is entirely written by volunteers for free. Wikimedia isn’t spending anything to pay people who produce the work that they are fund-raising on, and what they are selling access to. In fact, in the last fiscal year, Wikimedia Enterprise - the team that provides high speed, high volume access to AI companies - just turned profitable on $8.3 million in revenue.

Wikipedia isn't hurting for money

These firings aren’t happening because the Wikimedia Foundation is hurting for...