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The extremely expensive, buggy and ill-thought out "Abstract Wikipedia" has gone live after many, many years, and already it hosts an "article" which not only go against the very purpose of it (putting a complete English article in html is not the way to get automated Wikidata-based translation to 300+ languages), but also creates an unattributed enwiki copy[2]. Not that I am able to get it to load completely, it only returns a few sentences and then nothing happens (which is better than the many errors other pages generate, usually either "Reached max retries. Try again later." or "Wikifunctions returned a failed response: Error in evaluation" or simply "Page not found" when going from "history" to "read" or "page"...). Why this pre-alpha thing has been released to the world is not clear, why the WMF would think it conceptually is a good or feasible idea even less so. Fram (talk) 10:05, 25 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Also see [3], it looks like it’s just going to be another Anglo-project, how tf are non-English speakers supposed to develop the wiki's policies when everything is only done in English. It’s a project that’s specifically not meant to be Anglo and is irrelevant to en.wiki. It should be put on ice until people can discuss via the functions or there’s some kind of multilingual support Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 11:12, 25 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Abstract + wikifunctions is 2 sides of the same coin. And if wikifunctions has this many issues still, then abstract shouldn't have been launched as a "beta". The most basic things don't work yet: e.g. take a random page, click on "edit source" or "view history", then click on "page" or "read"... error, every single time. This is not some obscure thing, this is basic functionality for the whole site, and it doesn't work. Type a page you know exists in the search bar (e.g. Cape Verde), the first result in the dropdown is the Abstract Wikipedia page (see the AW at the end), click it, and again you get the "page not found".
This is probably a simple switch somewhere, but the total lack of care displayed by whoever decided that this was ready to go public is staggering.
As for the multi-language aspect, the core business of Abstract... Q143, Esperanto.
"Esperanto is the languages of internationality. An Esperanto is a languages." (sic!)
In French, this gives "espéranto langue international" plus an error (the title doesn't get translated..., international(e) should be female, the verb has disappeared, ...)
In Dutch, it becomes "taal internationaal". No error, but missing most of the poor original.
Q21, "England is a country in United Kingdom." (sic). In Spanish, this gives "Unable to render this fragment due to an unknown error. ", in Swedish "The rendering service is temporarily unavailable. Please, try again later. " in Italian "Wikifunctions returned a failed response: Reached time limit in orchestrator", in Portuguese "Wikifunctions returned a failed response: Error in evaluation", and in Thai "England is a country in United Kingdom." I'm sure it will work wonders in the small languages for which it is intended though!
I wonder how many employees have worked on this the past 10 years instead of on Phabricator and the wishlist... Fram (talk) 19:49, 25 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Most Western companies, and the WMF is no exception, would work better with half the people on twice the salary. But we would have to have a different attitude to work for that to succeed. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:07, 25 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the link. The team bios seem somewhat telegraphic. Are any of them "hot shot" programmers? And they seem pretty happy. In the commercial world, best software is written by developers who are pushed to the limit. But not for me to dive into details of the team. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 14:40, 26 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
best software is written by developers who are pushed to the limit
Your word was "best", not most widespread. I heavily disagree that this is the Microsoft development process, and in any case, the market share of all Windows systems combined had been precipitously declining for years now because of how bad it is. The attempt by the WMF to do the development process you propose is Knowledge Engine (search engine) and the surrounding turnover. Aaron Liu (talk) 12:36, 30 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
As a former programmer who's experienced severe, life-impeding burnout from overwork twice in her career, I can't disagree more strongly with the notion that "the best software is written by developers who are pushed to the limit". — Hex•talk11:37, 28 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
best software is written by developers who are pushed to the limit. Assuming the limit here is a tight deadline, I would argue that software death marches do not result in great software. Tight deadlines result in insufficient time to write quality code. Quality is sacrificed to (try to) meet the deadline. Not to mention the impact on team morale and work-life balance caused by pressure and overtime. –Novem Linguae (talk) 22:51, 28 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I checked my browser console when viewing the OP's link and there were over 65 requests to the API! As of last week, the WMF (I'm presuming a different team which didn't talk to this one) has decided to limit unregistered users to 1000 requests per hour. Total, across all projects. That includes search suggestions, DiscussionTools previews, VisuaEditor, etc. So about 30 page views for you, and then every project breaks unless you have an account! Suffusion of Yellow (talk) 20:12, 25 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What I don't understand is how we are meant to make an "abstract Wikipedia" that is automatically translated to every language when the very design of the site is so centered around English. In abstract:Help:How to create an article I see a reference to a function called "Article-less instantiating fragment" which creates sentences like "Paris is a city". However, in some languages (e.g. Greek) such a sentence needs an article so the result will be ungrammatical unless a different function is used. Thankfully it seems like someone noticed this issue because the actual page for Paris, abstract:Q90, uses a different function called "defining role sentence" which doesn't have the same problem. But if basic stuff like this is wrong in the documentation, I don't have much faith in the project. In fact, pages like abstract:Q667 (south) still use this "article-less instantiating fragment" function. Warudo (talk) 11:36, 27 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, I found abstract:Abstract Wikipedia:Useful functions for article composition which apparently says that "article-less instantiating fragment" is a good fit for sentences like "Nairobi is a city". It absolutely isn't. Again, it's article-less in English and several other languages but not all of them. While I'm not a linguist myself, it really feels like this system was designed without consulting experts. Warudo (talk) 11:40, 27 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
It seems to me to be referring to the fact that it doesn't require an article in English. It may or may not require an article in any other language you care to mention, so this seems to be a very anglocentric point of view. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:32, 28 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
No, that's definitely not it! Article-less and article-ful have different semantic meanings (the term article here seems to confuse a lot of people who do not understand the project, which I suppose means it needs a rename). All of these examples would use "article-less" (despite the fact that two of them have indefinite ones):
Golf is a sport
El golf es un deporte
The United States is a country
യുണൈറ്റഡ് സ്റ്റേറ്റ്സ് ഒരു രാജ്യമാണ്
And all of these examples would use "article-ful":
A bird is a dinosaur
Un ave es un dinosaurio
These are saying two fundamentally different things irrespective of language. Wikifunctions is already equiped to handle this distinction. Feeglgeef (talk) 18:28, 28 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see any great difference between "Golf is a sport" and "A bird is a dinosaur" apart from the presence/absence of an article in English. Please explain. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:18, 28 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Because golf is a singular thing and there are many birds. Article-less is about one thing, article-ful is about a collection. Feeglgeef (talk) 19:57, 28 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
"Article-less and article-ful have different semantic meanings". But then why are these semantic meanings not mentioned in the documentation of f:Z26039? Instead the function's documentation says Makes a sentence of the form "X is a Y" e.g "Nairobi is a city.", i.e. it takes an entity (X) and its class (Y) and states that it is an entity of that class. What are the semantic differences with f:Z26095? In case you think this is a small problem, it really isn't. Look at the Japanese translation of this documentation (a language that does not use articles). The translator had to use an English example to explain what the function does because in their language the concept does not really exist. Indeed, as far as the users are concerned, these functions are in fact defined in terms of whether the sentences they generate require an article in English. The semantic difference behind that is hidden to them. Warudo (talk) 22:33, 28 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Also, by the way Abstract:Q30 currently says "United States is a country. United States is a republic. Washington, D.C. is the capital of United States." So, I guess the article-less function was not the correct one to use in this case. Warudo (talk) 23:36, 28 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I've already said this above, but the "article" being referred to here is a indefinite one (a/an) at the front. definite articles (the) have no semantic meaning and therefore are to be added on a language-by-language basis. Feeglgeef (talk) 00:40, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Definite article = "the", Indefinite article = "a/an". Also that's not true. The definite article has semantic meaning. It means that we are referring to a specific member of a group and not to the concept in general. In this case, "United States" means any states that are united, which would also include e.g. the Mexican United States. The United States on the other hand are a specific set of states that are united, in this case, the United States of America. Warudo (talk) 00:49, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
We already have the distinction between the concept of a federation and the example in North America seperated by Wikidata. Some languages (like Malayalam, as in the example) do not use an article in front of the United States. Eventually, the function will be able to handle automatically adding a definite article. Feeglgeef (talk) 14:09, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, to be fair, you're right. The generated sentence is wrong but that can be attributed to an incomplete implementation of f:Z26039 rather than a logic error in abstract:Q30 itself.
Still, there are several questions that remain. First, why are the semantics of the two functions defined in terms of English grammar? You said, Article-less is about one thing, article-ful is about a collection. but as I've said above, that's not how it's described in the documentation. But more importantly, if that's the difference between them then why are two different functions for "article-less" and "article-ful instantiating fragment" given to the user in the first place? Why don't you expose a single "instantiating fragment" function that checks if its input has a subclass of (P279) statement in Wikidata? If yes, use an indefinite article, if not, don't use one.
Just FYI, editing your own comments after someone has already answered without indicating the changes is considered bad practice in the English Wikipedia. Not a big deal in this case as you were just fixing a mistake but keep it in mind in the future. Warudo (talk) 14:47, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
@Feeglgeef no, your statement is plain wrong. This is how 6 sentences above will be translated to Russian (browser machine translation, but it's a correct translation): As you can see, all 6 cases uses exactly the same grammar construction, because Slavic languages has no articles and they don't provide meanings, that is provided by articles in Germanic languages. We, native Russians, believe that this semantic meaning simply does not need to be conveyed. MBH (talk) 18:24, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
You have to accommodate the languages that don't, though. The names of the function have been thankfully changed now to "subject is instance of" vs "class is subclass of". These are different things, even if they look the same in Russian. Feeglgeef (talk) 18:30, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
The copy of enwiki is attributed now, and the project is not doomed because one user fails to abide by copyright law or to make a quality article.
As for the beta release, it's impossible to debug or improve without community content, so I'm not sure what you'd have the WMF do. Feeglgeef (talk) 17:03, 28 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
"one user fails to abide by copyright law or to make a quality article." Not a single user has made a "quality article", which is hardly possible with the current setup. And the actual intention of the project, automatic translation to small languages, is just not happening.
Random "article"[5] translation to French: "Wikifunctions returned a failed response: No matching lexeme for item in language"
Random "article"[6], translation to Italian: "Wikifunctions returned a failed response: Number of arguments mismatch"
Random "article"[7] translation to Spanish: "(en) Bahrain is a country in Middle East." Hey, I can understand Spanish!
Random "article"[8] translation to Dutch: "Brussel is the hoofdstad of België." THE hoofdstad? Yep, clearly not a problem with the use of articles...
Random "article"[9] translation to French: "Paris est une ville. Wikifunctions returned a failed response: Error in evaluation" Translating two sentences was a challenge of course.
Random "article"[10], no translation: "Wikifunctions returned a failed response: Could not acquire WASI runner within time limit" and "Wikifunctions returned a failed response: No matching lexeme for item in language" and "Unable to render this fragment due to an unknown error."
You state "As for the beta release, it's impossible to debug or improve without community content, so I'm not sure what you'd have the WMF do." which is absolute nonsense. You don't do a public release of such extreleky buggy software, and you don't call it a beta either. The errors found so far are not edge cases where mass testing is necessary, but things a developers + QA team should easily have found. WMF should, for a $6 million + project, have some people on board who understand what this project is intended for and can test it before it is released as a beta. The release of a severely immature project where even the most basic fundamentals are being questioned is irresponsible. Then again, the decade-long development seems to have been irresponsible as well. Fram (talk) 10:19, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Fram, you have more than enough examples now. Item 17 is disastrous and tells me that the entire system needs a rewrite following a redesign of the architecture. But that would be throwing good money after bad. I predict that there will be no remedy for this project anytime soon. Once the underlying software architecture has problems 1 million bandaids placed on it will be no cure. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 12:32, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
None of these problems are architectural. All of these are the result of the work of a few (like less people than that participated in this topic) community contributors. Feeglgeef (talk) 14:17, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
So there is no Wikidata item for "is a" in French, but this thing will be able to handle translations to languages with very few editors somehow? And "it knows how to say the words in Dutch", er, no: "the" (or "is the") is English, not Dutch. Again, it can't even translate that most basic building block to a language with a large editing base. As for 19, I have no idea how "unknown error" and a failed time limit are the responsibility of Wikidata contributors, nor how a translation tool was ever tested by the developers if the most basic aspects are missing in French, Spanish, Dutch, ...
Someone at the WMF was aware that translation (and specifically translation to languages with very small user bases) was the intention of this tool, right? Because it sure doesn't look that way. I don't see how they can have tested this at an alpha-level to give it the green light to go to beta, if if can't even handle these basic things. Blaming it on Wikidata contributors is rather rude, the developers/testers should have added things like "is a" or "the" or ... in major languages (both the ones I just tested, but also completely different ones with other scripts and grammar) to Wikidata. I assume these people have some fluency in Wikifunctions and Wikidata editing, and in languages and translation? Seems a prerequisite for such a project... Fram (talk) 15:30, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Question: How many people who work on Google Translate are linguists? Please answer to yourself before you read further. Answer: zero. We have all learned long ago that fiddling with linguistic constructs will end in one place: the shelf that holds the Aspirin bottle. So please do not assume that as a requirement. Their problems are much deeper and architectural in nature. They should have never used Wikifunctions, given that they are crowd sourced. Alas the key issue is that we can all huff and puff for ever but we have no control on what WMF does. So maybe we should all take an Aspirin and move on. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 16:22, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Google Translate is not entirely human-made though, but is based on computer-learning (statistics, deep learning and brute force basically). Abstract is based on "humans will build it all", which, while admirable, then requires humans with very specific skills. And "we can all huff and puff for ever but we have no control on what WMF does" is false, we have forced them to shelve things like Flow and Gather. Fram (talk) 16:49, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I know exactly how G-translate works. Thanks. My point was/is that the crowd sourced paradigm works for text input but not for software. The world is moving towards automatic software generation now, so crowd sourcing will be inherently inefficient and error prone. But I think I have said enough now. No more comments from me here. You are right in objecting to the project but time will tell how much power you have over WFM. Cheers Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 22:57, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
How many people who work on Google Translate are linguists? Why are you using Google Translate as an example? Do you know how many mistakes Google translate makes when translating to and from languages other than English? For some reason English homographs throw it off completely. I've seen it do stuff like this where I asked it to translate a verb that means "to bear" and it came up with a word for the mammal. Even ignoring the fact that English is clearly used as an intermediate language here even though it isn't suited for this purpose (probably not by design but because of the way Google translate was trained), why on Earth is Google translate translating a verb as a noun in the first place? I think stuff like this shows how Frederick Jelinek's quote is outdated and is leading us astray at this point. Warudo (talk) 16:53, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
There is no implementation of the function in Dutch. The Abstract Wikipedia team has not added an implementation in Dutch because the community is responsible for creating the function in Dutch, and nobody has created the function in Dutch.
Essentially, how the current English implementation is to string together the first concept with "is the" with the second concept with "of" with the third concept. The function can get the Dutch terms for the concept, but it does not know how to string the words together because nobody who speaks Dutch has told it how. This is not something that the WMF can magically fix. Eventually, when the project is older than a week, somebody will implement it in that language, and in Malayalam, and Dagbani, and Massa, and Southern Altai, and Dusun. Feeglgeef (talk) 21:49, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Please see my last response to Fram. Anyway, time to cool off and move on before someone busts an artery here. You will be glad to know that I shall make no further comments here. Now, in what language shall I say goodbye? Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 23:02, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
"when the project is older than a week"? It's a decade old or thereabouts, Wikifunctions specifically was created in 2020 and launched in 2023. But sure, some Southern Altai Wikipedian will go to Wikidata to translate everything that is needed, then go to Wikifunctions to translate all necessary functions into the grammatically correct version of their language (assuming naively that the used function can be one-on-one transformed to one in their language for every use of it), just so they can then autocreate stilted article stubs instead of either writing them directly, which would require a lot less effort and give a lot more satisfaction, or using an online translation tool to translate an existing Wikipedia article to give them much easier results. Totally realistic. Fram (talk) 07:32, 30 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
When I go to this totally not-alpha project, to the page we are discussing[11], and click on "defining role sentence in English as string" (which should apparently go to abstract.wikipedia.org/view/en/Z28109), I am taken to the Abstract Wikipedia Main page[12]. Please explain to me again how this has been sufficiently tested and was ready to be opened to the wider public? Fram (talk) 08:39, 30 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
"by putting several sentences into a single paragraph, the paragraph as a whole is being run, may cause time-outs, and will be cached. Instead, if, for now, you put one sentence into each fragment, caching and evaluation can be more spread out and should allow for more content. Eventually we want to fix that"[13] Gee, why would you fix the bug where putting more than one sentence into a paragraph makes it even more likely you will get a timeout error? Fram (talk) 15:55, 30 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Probably a few years of pointing out both the immediate and the fundamental issues. The work of developers, testers and product managers. Once the grant and endowment money stops flowing, and some quarterly or yearly goals can be checked on some paperwork, the drive to continue this will stop. At best/worst to keep whatever exists at the time running and let some volunteers play with it for a few more years before completely stopping it (see the soon to be closed down Wikinews). At least with Gather, Flow, ... we could point out that it was actively, directly negatively impacting enwiki (and other wikis): here it is only money and developer time disappearing down the drain. Fram (talk) 14:16, 31 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
For what it's worth I would like to see them continue as the issues pointed out do not seem to be systematic (with the platform design) but an incredibly horrible implementation of it. I do agree that the state of the project seems at best alpha. Aaron Liu (talk) 14:37, 31 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
The systemic issue is the belief that English grammar rules can be copied one-on-one to all other languages. We have e.g. functions for "use this the" and " use with a/an" and "use without either", which even within English is problematic (e.g. sometimes you need X is the capital of Y, and sometimes X is the capital of the Y, like with United Kingdom): but in other languages half the cases of a certain English function may use one construction, and the other half uses another construction, and this needs somehow to be built into the simply English function. I'm simplifying things here, but I hope yo get my drift.
Purely on a word level this whole construction works somewhat theoretically, but requires a massive amount of work which is exactly the problem for the small languages where this is supposedly built for. On a sentence/paragraph level though, I don't believe this will ever work (for simple cases for related languages, yes, but not in general). If this is pushed through regardless, we will probably end with new Scots and Greenlandic version catastrophes, but then on a larger scale. The setup and performace issues are just the icing on the cake. Fram (talk) 15:05, 31 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
The ideal would be to store everything in context-free language, and then generate sentences in the target language by applying a set of rules. When I was a grad student in Linguistics lo these many years ago I wrote my dissertation on one aspect of Deep structure and surface structure. From my experience trying to figure out what some of the rules are in (my idiolect of) English for a limited subset of syntactical structure, it will take a very large and hard to maintain set of rules with extensive exceptions just for English. My mind boggles at the concept of doing that for all the currently spoken languages of the world. Donald Albury16:35, 31 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed. At the moment, they produce the article [14] "New Jersey is an U.S. state." I presume the "an" comes from an "an before a-e-i-o-u" rule, which doesn't deal with the many exceptions to that rule. And this is a very simple example, in the main development language. Fram (talk) 16:45, 31 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
The systemic issue is the belief that English grammar rules can be copied one-on-one to all other languages. You'd think that people would have learned from the failure of this approach when it was applied to Wikidata. Some editors wanted a property to express the relation "X is the mayor of Y". So they just made a property called "of". They then found out that the property was not only difficult to translate to certain languages but it also evolved into a monster that modeled many different, sometimes contradictory relations (which is kind of bad when the whole point of a database is to be machine readable) and it ultimately required a huge effort from the community to get rid of it.
Yet now, the abstract Wikipedia editors are doing the same things, defining their functions in terms of English grammar constructs and not the underlying logical relations those constructs represent. Warudo (talk) 17:21, 31 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
All of these rules assume that an English grammar rule is also 1 rule in another language. "Article-less instantiating fragment" will sometimes need to be translated with, and sometimes without an article (even if the remainder of the grammar is the same). If this can be done with one function, then there was hardly any need to have different functions with or without article in English surely? And this is a very simple and basic example. So how is this solved? Fram (talk) 20:28, 1 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Article-less does not mean what you think it means here. The name is confusing and should probably be changed, but, for example "Golf is a sport" and "El golfo es un deporte" (both use article-less, despite the fact that the latter has an article) have the same meaning, but "A bird is a dinosaur" and "(The) bird is a dinosaur" have two very different meanings, even if, say, Bulgarian does not make the distinction. The distinction between article-less and article-ful is not actually articles. Feeglgeef (talk) 20:37, 1 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
So if you start from an article which doesn't make a distinction, and go to a language that does make a distinction, you're screwed? If in your example the base language would have been Bulgarian, and you went to English, sometimes the Bulgarian function should give "the" in English, and sometimes "a", which depends on context. And all of this is still between very comparable languages basically. If the base article is for some sentence / meaning "article-less" and the target language "article-full" (or vice versa), you have a problem, no matter how you call these functions. Fram (talk) 20:48, 1 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I get the feeling that Feeglgeef is a little out of their depth here, but there's nobody with any decision-making authority at the WMF willing to rescue them. Phil Bridger (talk) 21:52, 1 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Based on your replies in this thread, it seems you are unwilling to assume good faith of either your conversational partners or the functionaries (pun intended) of the wiki in question. Why not just ignore it, if you feel it is consigned to failure? Arlo James Barnes19:09, 11 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
You actually don't "start from an article which doesn't make a distinction", because all Abstract Wikipedia articles are supposed to be abstract. All articles are required to make the same distinction and all distinctions necessary for every single language (even if some languages ignore them) because they are all written in abstract language. There is no English or Bulgarian base, nor translating here. Feeglgeef (talk) 22:07, 1 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
That, again, makes no sense. Because in English, "a bird" and "the bird" have two different meanings (but refer to the same Wikidata item), you need a different function than for "golf" (the sport), which has in English one meaning for that Wikidata item. But still you claim that the functions, the whole approach, are language-independent, as if these issues in English are the same across all languages for the same words. If Abstract Wikipeda were truly language-independent, you wouldn't need the article-less and article-full functions. And that's still only at the word level, and doesn't go into sentence- and paragraph structures and countless other quirks, irregularities, ... Anyway, it looks so dumb that after all this time, apparently there isn't a function yet to start sentences/articles with an article; we get things like "Bible is a religious text." for an article specifically about the Judeo-Christian Bible (not about the general word). And finding out how things actually work for Abstract articles is very opaque as well, I have no idea where the "suns" instead of "stars" comes from in [15] "Stars are sources of light. Stars contain metals. Suns shine."
Oh well, the WMF team doesn't respond here, but they seem to read it, as some of the most stupid errors get fixed after they are reported here at least. Fram (talk) 07:44, 2 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
If you click through the endless errors and finally try to see a translated article, you get monstrosities like "Ein Äpfel ist eine Frucht."[16] or even worse " Bisexuelles lieben Fraus. Bisexuelles lieben Manns."[17]
People from the WMF, could you please clarify: before releasing this as a supposedly beta product, which tests did you run? Which articles have you created, with which functions, and tested for which languages? Fram (talk) 13:16, 8 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
@Sannita (WMF): as someone who seems to be closely involved, but of course feel free to put this through to whoever is better placed to answer this. I also notice that most activity on Abstract seems to come from an editor who was indef blocked on enwiki for CIR / timewasting, and is now running some AI-generated tool to create non-working pages (like this 193K monstrosity[18]-) and to change working pages (no matter how bad they were) into non-working ones (e.g changing this into this ("Wikifunctions returned a failed response: Error in evaluation"), across a lot of pages. While I think the project should be abandoned as a waste of time and money, it shouldn't be done by mass-vandalizing the work of the editors there. Fram (talk) 16:30, 10 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for your comment. A discussion has been opened, and the bot runner decided to pause their edits. We'll sort this out the wiki way. Sannita (WMF) (talk) 21:59, 10 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
@Fram We did some limited tests in a controlled environment, but doing so can only help you so much in identifying potential problems. We are learning a lot by releasing the beta project (because this is still a beta), and we'll improve from there. Sannita (WMF) (talk) 10:28, 11 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, but no, this is not a beta, this is barely an alpha, the thing is unworkable for all but the simplest sentences, terribly slow, had the most basic errors when released. Using volunteers as cheap/sheep testers on a $6 million+ project which hasn't been thought through, hasn't been tested, and has in its utopic, unrealistic ideals been overtaken by reality anyway, is old school WMF which I hoped had been left behind after previous such failures.
After the omnipresent "Reached max retries. Try again later.", you get a plethora of errors. A 2-sentence "article" gives "Wikifunctions returned a failed response: Reached time limit in orchestrator", basic English words give "Wikifunctions returned a failed response: No matching lexeme for item in language" (but this will work for languages with barely any editors somehow), other articles give "Wikifunctions returned a failed response: Error in evaluation", "Wikifunctions returned a failed response: Could not acquire WASI runner within time limit", "Wikifunctions returned a failed response: Reached rate limit in orchestrator"
And the things that do "work" give results like "Australian continent is a continent in the Earth. Australian continent contains Australia." (German translation of that last line: "Australien contains Australien.") Or the extremely basic issue that when you translate an article, you would expect the title of the article to be the first thing that gets translated, even in alpha-stage. No such luck. This thing is supposed to be used to create articles and translate them into manu languages, but not a single decent example has been produced so far. A "beta" product which simply can not produce an acceptable end product just isn't tested to even the most basic standards and should never have been released. And a project where the actual requirements don't seem to have been thought through, and where the results (if the wanted end result was ever reached) would probably make the Greenlandic and Scots disasters look like minor blips, should have been stopped much, much earlier, before so much money and time was wasted. Fram (talk) 17:44, 11 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I just don't get how they are going along and spending money on something so ill-thought out and poorly executed. Let's ignore for now the basic questions of "is this feasible, which competencies or expertises do we need to think this through, what is the best approach", the slight issue that reality (LLMs) has somewhat changed the whole environment this needs to be thought about, and the basic recurring problem that a completely untested, very buggy environment has been released as a beta for everyone to play with without any guidance. But why are they (WMF and editors) now going further with this in the most inefficient way possible? Everyone creates whatever they like, 99% of what is being made is absolute rubbish that serves no purpose at all. People are creating one- or two-sentence stubs for all countries which all have the same issues.
A logical, productive way of dealing with this project (apart from the most logical one of pulling the plug) would be to start with one article, take e.g. the lead from enwiki (or dewiki or whatever), and build the necessary structure (Abstract + Functions + Wikidata) to create this and translate this in 5 wildly different languages. Step by step, sentence by sentence, until you have a basic set of functions for this kind of article, and have an idea if it will work.
Second steps might then be either testing the same for a related article (say, test 1 was a country, take another country and see if the functions are all transferable or if there are things you missed), or doing the same "build from scratch" for a different topic (say, a biography).
That way, you build a structure, a set of reusable and needed blocks you can refine later on, and at the same time learn a lot of "don't do this" pitfalls and issues. And after you have done this for the 5 or 10 most common types of articles, you actually have a tested, usable, beta environment (or you have realised it won't work at all, or it will work in theory but the work to get things right for a more obscure language isn't worth the hassle).
Instead, we get articles[19] directly using the function "English plural"[20], really useful for an abstract, language-independent project. Or more commonly "articles" consisting of random repetitive sentences like "Reproduction is a biological process. Reproduction is a type of process. A reproduction is a biological process. A reproduction is a creation. Animal reproduction is the part of of reproduction. Plant reproduction is the part of of reproduction. Human reproduction is the part of of reproduction."[21]
Oh well, at least I learned that "An information is a knowledge."[22] or "biseksualiteit ∈ {seksuele oriëntatie}" in Dutch or still "Bisexuelles lieben Fraus. Bisexuelles lieben Manns." in German [23]. Note how here and on all other pages, the actual title doesn't get translated? This is not something the article creators can help, this is something which should have been included by the WMF as a basic element (assuming they realised what Abstract Wikipedia was intended for) but is missing.
The WMF has launched a dashboard to follow the progress of Abstract Wikipedia [24]. It has e.g. a list of articles which work in any language! Well, most of them have no actual text translated through functions, just Wikidata items without any sentence-building, so yes, these work, they just aren't articles... The ones that do try to have actual sentences and supposedly work are e.g. Brussels[25], full text "Brussels is the capital of Belgium." This gets translated as "Brussel is the hoofdstad of België." in Dutch, which isn't correct Dutch. "Bruxelles is the capitale of Belgique." in French is equally wrong, as is the German "Brüssel is the Hauptstadt of Belgien." It doesn't work at all in e.g. Romanian, Moldavian. Anyway, I guess the function "defining role sentence in English as string" should perhaps not be used in Abstract Wikipedia, and items which use it should not be said to be working in any language, as the naturally don't. Something like "list of cities in Belgium"[26] gives a result in English, and keeps running endlessly when I try it in Dutch or French. So not really "working". It looks as if not a single actual article can be said to be working in all or even most languages, making the dashboard rather meaningless. Fram (talk) 11:49, 8 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
From reading the Abstract Wiki, it also seems like there is no way to utilize the past tense, which um… seems a bit critical in an encyclopedia. ExtantRotations (talk) 18:34, 8 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
On the plus side, they have introduced endless repetition, which makes for much better reading. At the moment, the article for New Year's Day reads in full: "New Year's Day is a public holiday. New Year's Day is part of the public holidays in Australia, public holidays in Australia, public holidays in Australia, public holidays in Australia, public holidays in Australia, public holidays in Australia, public holidays in Australia, public holidays in Australia, public holidays in Australia, public holidays in Australia, and public holidays in Australia." Fram (talk) 12:10, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
We are planning to trial an "incident reporting" form here for the next two months, after some smaller-scale deployments on Portuguese Wikipedia and several other wikis. After discussing with functionaries, the trial will start small (visible to 5% of users) and we plan to coordinate with functionaries along the way to agree on the right points to expand visibility.
The incident reporting form is designed to do two things:
Help less experienced community members more easily report potentially bad behavior to the community-managed place that can best deal with it.
For more rare and severe cases, it provides a form to directly report imminent threats of harm to the WMF Trust and Safety team.
This trial will be primarily focused on calibrating the first use case: helping editors report potentially bad behavior, without overloading the system. Registered editors, who have at least one edit and are unblocked and have a verified email, can click a "Report" button on a discussion page. Eligible editors who have Discussion Tools enabled can click a "Report" button on a particular comment. The editor can then choose the category of behavior at issue, and then be directed to a location chosen by that wiki's community for that category. There are screenshots of these interactions at the bottom of this post.
For the last few weeks, we've been working with functionaries to figure out what categories are most needed for English Wikipedia, and to identify the right destinations to point users for those categories.
Based on those conversations, we've made some changes to the categories from what we have deployed elsewhere, to optimize this trial for English Wikipedia, given your community's longstanding policies and processes for dispute resolution. We've further supported functionaries for the last couple of weeks as they've configured the form's behavior for the community and prepared supporting material for end users. Special thanks go to CaptainEek in particular for spending significant time writing and editing material for this trial.
During the trial, we will focus on monitoring the volume of new reports, checking that reports are routed correctly, and identifying any immediate issues. We will be coordinating closely with all community members to fix bugs if they arise, and to otherwise streamline the process. For example, we are exploring some ways to tighten the user experience and help people more directly submit their reports, which we may deploy and measure during the trial as well. We expect to gradually increase user visibility over the next two months.
We welcome your thoughts. If you'd like to talk to us off-wiki, the easiest way to reach us is on Discord.
1. The "Report" button, as shown in the Tools menu (see arrow).
2. The "Report" button, as shown in the overflow menu in a comment thread (for users with the Discussion Tools beta feature enabled).
3. The full set of categories of potentially unwanted behavior that an editor can pick from.
4. Support information for users reporting potential bullying.
5. Support information for users reporting potential sockpuppetry.
Thanks for that folks! For those who are interested, the system is locally customizable in two ways, which I spent the last month or so working on. Special:CommunityConfiguration/ReportIncident allows us to configure various options and links. This query shows all mediawiki pages that we may locally edit to localize text. Typo and link fixes are welcome; all other edits should obviously be discussed as these are full protected media wiki pages with wide transclusion. You may test out the incident reporting system at Event talk:Sandbox (it is not currently enabled in any other namespace); be cognizant that the system is live and unless you are listed as an end-to-end tester, your button clicks may be logged/your emergency reports may be sent. Eric and his team are working on building the tool out more, and they tell us that having test data will help build the tool out more effectively; the next step is hopefully to include a baked in reporting form or pre-filled form templates. CaptainEekEdits Ho Cap'n!⚓18:22, 29 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Additionally, what is the best place to discuss and ask questions? For example, I see that AIV is not listed in "How to report obvious spam", but is listed lower for vandalism – is there a reason for that? It could be very helpful to have a documentation page and a talk page for this feature, if that isn't already the case.Other question I'm having (sorry!), for reporting hateful content, Open a new thread on the appropriate noticeboard for routine and public incidents may give the impression to the reporter that their concerns are dismissed as "routine", is there a better wording or is my fear unfounded? Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 15:41, 30 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
First, yes, I agree having a centralized project/talk page would be good; I can set one up this evening. Second, the trouble with that line is that the wording isn't customizable per category, so every option that has a report to the appropriate noticeboard link has to have the same wording (for now at least). But I agree I had a hard time thinking of wording that worked in most general scenarios; we could probably just remove "routine". CaptainEekEdits Ho Cap'n!⚓15:58, 30 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
This seems like a cool idea, but if I understand correctly the "Report" button doesn't actually create a report? That seems misleading. I was expecting it to ask the user to fill out a form which would automatically post to ANI when submitted. Toadspike[Talk]12:13, 30 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
You do understand correctly. This mismatch has been a source of feedback from the U4C and Steawrds from the start of the project. Eventually that is the goal but that won't be happening soon. However, there is now work being done to allow communities to choose email as an option for some report types. So if we sent people to say the OS queue for doxxing that would generate an actual report. And work has been completed on allowing communities to use a URL with parameters meaning we could do some prefill work at least to generate an actual notice out of the system. But yes an Incident Reporting System that only generated a report in one very narrow case (emergency) for a long time has been and continues to be a weakness of the system. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 14:24, 30 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
In that case, as a temporary measure, is there an option to bold the links to where editors can report? Given how the text can easily fill a page, it can be helpful to prevent editors from getting lost in the sea of links. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 15:50, 30 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
When I last tried on test wiki, bolding did not work (using markup or html); however some changes to allow code to work in some places have been made so I'll test it again and see about bolding links CaptainEekEdits Ho Cap'n!⚓19:20, 30 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
@EMill-WMF, @MAna (WMF), is it possible to add horizontal rule in between the sections? It was not apparent that there are multiple forms for the different reporting/noticeboard venues because visually the noticeboard header and the form labels are similar. i.e. – robertsky (talk) 15:37, 30 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, I'm not sure I understand what you're looking when mentioning multiple forms for different reporting/noticeboard venues, are you referring to how these are configured via Community Configuration? MAna (WMF) (talk) 17:42, 30 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Just to update - this incident reporting form is now live on English Wikipedia, though for now, the report link is only visible to 5% of users. EMill-WMF (talk) 19:30, 8 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, we have a new update. The trial has been running in 5% for a week now, and the numbers are quite small, so we're planning to raise this to 20% on Friday.
Soon afterward, we'll be adding a new feature to the tool to make things more direct for users. For categories where the community wants reports to go to an email address, we're incorporating a web form into the tool that will let the user submit the report from there and it will send it to that email address on their behalf. MAna (WMF) (talk) 17:35, 14 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
No, it's not general purpose - if the community specifies that reports of a certain type should go to a specific email, this form will appear and will send the contents to that email. It's more similar to how emergency reporting already works in the tool, which sends the contents to a specified (WMF) email address. EMill-WMF (talk) 18:47, 14 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Has been introduced but not yet passed. Text is here: [27]
Key provisions to note as this could readily affect Wikipedia:
"6. "COVERED PLATFORM" SHALL MEAN A PUBLIC OR SEMI-PUBLIC WEBSITE,
ONLINE SERVICE, ONLINE APPLICATION, OR MOBILE APPLICATION THAT (A) IS
USED BY A COVERED MINOR IN THIS STATE, (B) ALLOWS USERS TO CONSTRUCT A
PUBLIC OR SEMI-PUBLIC PROFILE FOR THE PURPOSES OF USING SUCH WEBSITE,
SERVICE, OR APPLICATION, (C) ALLOWS USERS TO CREATE OR POST CONTENT THAT
IS VIEWABLE BY OTHER USERS, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO, ON MESSAGE
BOARDS, IN CHAT ROOMS, OR THROUGH A LANDING PAGE OR MAIN FEED THAT
PRESENTS THE USER WITH CONTENT GENERATED BY OTHER USERS, AND (D) ALLOWS
USERS TO PRIVATELY MESSAGE EACH OTHER AS A SIGNIFICANT PART OF THE
PROVISION OF SUCH WEBSITE, SERVICE, OR APPLICATION."
(I can't see WP not falling under that).
"§ 1510. PRIVACY BY DEFAULT. 1. NO OPERATOR SHALL OFFER A COVERED PLAT-
FORM IN THIS STATE WITHOUT CONDUCTING COMMERCIALLY REASONABLE AGE
VERIFICATION TO DETERMINE WHETHER A USER IS A COVERED MINOR. THE ATTOR-
NEY GENERAL SHALL PROMULGATE REGULATIONS IDENTIFYING METHODS FOR COMMER-
CIALLY REASONABLE AND TECHNICALLY FEASIBLE AGE VERIFICATION, WHICH SHALL
CONSIDER THE SIZE, FINANCIAL RESOURCES, AND TECHNICAL CAPABILITIES OF
COVERED PLATFORMS, THE COSTS AND EFFECTIVENESS OF AVAILABLE AGE DETERMI-
NATION TECHNIQUES FOR USERS OF SUCH PLATFORMS, THE AUDIENCE OF SUCH
PLATFORMS, AND PREVALENT PRACTICES OF THE INDUSTRY OF THE OPERATOR. SUCH
REGULATIONS SHALL ALSO IDENTIFY THE APPROPRIATE LEVELS OF ACCURACY THAT
WOULD BE CONSIDERED COMMERCIALLY REASONABLE AND TECHNICALLY FEASIBLE FOR
OPERATORS TO ACHIEVE IN DETERMINING WHETHER A USER IS A COVERED MINOR."
Obviously, it will depend on how the NY AG qualifies Wikipedia in the context of "THE SIZE, FINANCIAL RESOURCES, AND TECHNICAL CAPABILITIES OF COVERED PLATFORMS, THE COSTS AND EFFECTIVENESS OF AVAILABLE AGE DETERMINATION TECHNIQUES FOR USERS OF SUCH PLATFORMS, THE AUDIENCE OF SUCH PLATFORMS, AND PREVALENT PRACTICES OF THE INDUSTRY OF THE OPERATOR" This has shades of the UK's law, which I know WMF has been fighting against. Masem (t) 00:04, 1 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
It's not clear to me that Wikipedia satisfies point (d) of the definition - is email really a "significant part" of Wikipedia? I would think not - it's more like an add-on detached from the core functionality. But maybe I'm just engaging in wishful thinking. * Pppery *it has begun...00:24, 1 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Given that "email user" is a built in function of the site (purposely to keep email addresses hidden), it might come under that. Masem (t) 00:40, 1 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I find it hard to believe that a service hosted by an external mailbox provider is somehow a "significant part" of Wikipedia, given it's not on Wikipedia and entirely optional. You don't need an email address to register. A vanishingly small proportion of accounts ever edits, so I'm guessing an even more vanishingly small proportion of accounts actually has an email attached and uses the email tool. I don't have either number on hand, but the latter, I'd guess, is something like one in a million? Either way, thank you for bringing this here. It's certainly something we (and WMF Legal) want to be aware of. Toadspike[Talk]23:46, 2 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I also don't believe that it could be classed as a significant part of Wikipedia. I expect that most accounts of my longevity and edit count have had similar experience to me. I have an email address defined but don't remember ever sending an email and have received probably less than a handful (definitely less than two handfuls), which could have been sent publicly anyway. If it comes to it (which is very unlikely) I don't think giving up this facility will be any hardship. Phil Bridger (talk) 13:27, 3 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
There's been a worldwide trend lately of some factions trying to make the Internet more regulated, less libertarian, and less of a Wild West, often in the name of child protection. This type of legislation seems to be popping up in many places. In this case it looks like it's just a draft though, so hopefully it stops there. –Novem Linguae (talk) 08:58, 3 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
The best course of action is for Wikimedia to have a general plan for laws like this, and for now to just wait and see if Wikipedia is caught in the crossfire of any of these laws (which, considering how little politicians and the general public understand the collaborative nature of Wikipedia, I'm doubtful we will be targeted.) Gaismagorm(talk)10:40, 6 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
PTAC recommendation on affiliate contribution in technical areas
Is is just me or are PTAC communications often distractingly corporate in structure and tone? I love unlocking capacity strategically distribute impact alignment, bullet points, and lists of three as much as the next editor but still. (this is my favorite of theirs) fifteen thousand two hundred twenty four (talk) 14:05, 9 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
@Fifteen thousand two hundred twenty four: Given that the audience is typically WMF folks/affiliates, a small amount of corporate tone is kinda unavoidable. For what it's worth, I do not consider bullet points and list of threes are not indicators of corporate structure, they if we wrote a recommendation that flowed/looked like a FA or GA, 90% of people (even within the community) would not read it. (For what it's worth, the document you link to was written by the WMF with input from PTAC members so probably a bit more opaque than most). Sohom (talk) 17:19, 9 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on April 25. Please help translate.
Highlights
Community Protection: Wikimedia Foundation secured Indonesian government’s commitment to user safety, privacy, and content integrity ahead of administrative registration in Indonesia.
Stronger protections against bots: Wikimedia Foundation is replacing our CAPTCHA with a new approach to detect bad-faith activities without making things harder for users.
Transparency Report: The Wikimedia Foundation has published its latest Transparency Report. This provides an overview of the work to protect Wikimedia projects and support the volunteer communities who handle the majority of content requests. Our users trust us to protect their identities against unlawful disclosure, and we take this responsibility seriously, granting only 1 of 30 requests for disclosure we received from July to December 2025.
Reading Challenge: As part of the 25th birthday celebrations, Wikipedia Mobile Apps launched a limited-time feature, the 25-day reading challenge with Baby Globe. This challenge encourages a daily habit of reading one Wikipedia article. The goal is to motivate users to come back to the app regularly.
Latest experiments: One upcoming experiment is introducing the Incident Reporting System (IRS) to help contributors easily find the right place to seek help when facing harassment or other issues. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
Change in how new users are autoconfirmed: The account age for autoconfirmed users will now start from their first edit, not the registration date. This is to avoid exploitation by vandals. This change will only apply to wikis that require at least one edit for autoconfirmation.
Organized Reading lists: All Wikipedia users with new accounts and those who activated the “automatically enable most beta features” option can now use the reading lists beta feature. This lets you save articles for later reading and keep it organized in one place for easy access.
Thumbnail size preferences: Default thumbnail size preference for article content is now limited to three sizes: Small (180px), Regular (250px), and Large (400px). This change aims to improve performance and reduce strain on thumbnail services. Current preferences will shift to the nearest new size.
Wikifunctions: To make the development of Abstract Wikipedia visible, the Foundation is requesting your input: which metrics about Abstract Wikipedia pages do you deem important?
Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News weeks 18 and 19 include improvements on Global Watchlist. See also the 62 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
Wikimania: Wikimania is a joyful event. It is a chance to celebrate our community and projects, share ideas and information, build connections among Wikimedians, and inspire and develop future projects. If you and your community are interested in hosting Wikimania in 2028 and 2029 submit an expressions of interest.
Community Conferences: The Foundation is supporting 15 strategic, diverse, and critical convenings taking place in 2026 and 2027, bringing together approximately 1800 Wikimedians across various regions, themes, and language communities.
Don't blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
Wiki Loves Monuments: The winners of the 2025 Wiki Loves Monuments photo contest are announced.
Wikinews closure: All Wikinews have been closed and switched to read-only mode. Content will remain accessible, but no new edits or articles will be able to be added. This closure was approved by the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation following extended discussions.
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletinwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
granting only 1 of 30 requests for disclosure we received from July to December 2025, well that's not right, in giant letters at the top of the page covering requests for user information it states that 2 of 20 requests were granted, lower down on the page it's indicated the WMF Fully Complied with one request from Portugal and one request from the US. The 30:1 figure is from a table comparing the WMF against other companies and uses January-June data. fifteen thousand two hundred twenty four (talk) 13:24, 13 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Forcing WMF employees to use Salesforce Inc is an ethical violation
I've started a post at foundation:Wikimedia talk:Babel#Forcing WMF employees to use Salesforce Inc is an ethical violation about the appalling fact (currently per non-WP:RS, but this is not for article space) that the WMF has been, and still is, forcing WMF employees to use an enshittified non-FOSS, non-community-controlled communicator Slack owned by a 100-billion dollar US corporation Salesforce, Inc. for internal communication in relation to WMF work activities. If correct, then this is an ethical violation that is completely unacceptable. We are not here to subsidise the concentration of power in the hands of authoritarian organisations like Salesforce Inc.
The political-legal-economic context which the WMF has to deal with is understandably difficult, but the imposition of Slack on WMF employees sounds like an unnecessary compromise with authoritarianism. The threat of punitive action: Voices advocating for FOSS alternatives have been ignored. In some cases those voices have been told that continued expressions of displeasure over Slack use could trigger punitive action is also unacceptable, but that's up to WMF employees to defend themselves against (maybe with support from the Wikimedia community?).
Feel free to convert this complaint (it's CC BY-SA, of course) to a proposal in an appropriate forum, though we know from experience that trying to discuss things rationally, based on evidence and ethics, with the WMF can sometimes be like talking to a brick wall. It would be nice to get a more constructive reaction this time. Boud (talk) 09:38, 17 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Might I suggest copying anything you post on this to foundation.wikimedia.org to a subpage of your talk page? wikipedia.org is much harder to censor, and the text will then be findable through our search tools.
I would like to see better evidence for the claim "Voices advocating for FOSS alternatives have been ignored. In some cases those voices have been told that continued expressions of displeasure over Slack use could trigger punitive action" than someone asserting it on Mastodon. Can you show any examples of someone advocating for FOSS alternatives and being ignored? Any example of someone claiming that punitive action was threatened or even somone who claims to have talked to such a person? --Guy Macon (talk) 12:31, 17 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Lots of employees of lots of organisations are "forced" to use crap software (note that I am not categorising Slack as this because I have never used it) and that doesn't necessarily make it an "ethical violation". It is reasonable that one's employer should specify what software/platforms etc an employee should use to carry out the tasks that they are paid for. If this software isn't very good, and isn't open source, then that isn't necessarily a tragedy, more like the real world.Nigel Ish (talk) 12:55, 17 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Evidence for Voices advocating for FOSS alternatives have been ignored: I'm happy to see evidence either way. The original poster chose to delete the Fediverse post; another post in the thread asserts effectively the same thing slack use is mandated for employees by WMF leadership, and our use of it should be understood in that context, in the context of usage of Slack by Wiki Workers Unitedfor intra-union communication. I only know the public evidence that I see. In any case, WMF Board members and "leaders" should not need to wait for "voices advocating for FOSS", they ought to know the whole point of wikis and on what basis the Wikimedia wikis have been built. Authoritarian culture just doesn't make sense in the wiki context. Slack should never have been an option.Authoritarian rights of employers: generically, this depends on the degree to which we accept that employers are authoritarian; our (Wikipedians') pro- or anti-authoritarian views are likely quite diverse. In this specific case, this is not just an arbitrary employer: it's an employer that runs the hardware and legal infrastructure of the Wikimedia wikis, which support an ecosystem fundamentally anchored in FOSS and which aims to support politically free knowledge, which includes software and issues of political control and decision-making. Authoritarian software is inconsistent with transparent, community-managed decision-making. The main issue is a transparent, deliberative, participatory ecosystem of knowledge and management of and decision-making about running that knowledge system. Authoritarianism contradicts that. Knowledge organisations like WMF and universities don't have the ethical right to force non-FOSS usage on their employees. Boud (talk) 15:57, 17 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
This is certainly one way of saying "The WMF uses the same industry-standard software for internal communications and and CRM as can be found in essentially every major tech company or website of similar size, scope, and reach." Just curious: Am I unethical for using Slack every day in my studio? Is my wife unethical for using Salesforce at her travel agency? If the issue is with the product itself, rather than the WMF's usage of it, then by your objection to its mere use as being problematic is tantamount to a personal attack on every user of that software, as it imputes that we are similarly unethical or authoritarian for using it -- simply because you politically don't agree with the company that owns it. ⇒SWATJesterShoot Blues, Tell VileRat!16:10, 17 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Whether you personally or someone close to you choose(s) to use authoritarian software is not the topic here, since that's not in the context of a community that I'm a member of. It's not a case of a political disagreement between me and the company: it's a question of authoritarianism."Everybody does it" is not an ethical argument for the case of the WMF apparently forcing usage of authoritarian software, and in any case, it's not the case that "everybody" is using Slack, as per my comment at the foundation wiki: the matrix protocol, which is being switched to by the International Criminal Court via ZenDiS, is available to all French civil servants in Tchap chat and Visio videoconferencing, and is being used by the United Nations International Computing Centre. At least one well-developed, practical FOSS alternative does exist. Boud (talk) 16:49, 17 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
You're not a member of the WMF staff community either, as far as I'm aware. Am I mistaken about that? Is anyone forcing you, personally, to use Slack or Salesforce in order to conduct any element of your role as an editor on this project? Because if not, then it seems you are perfectly willing to police what software other communities choose to use under *some* circumstances it seems. As I said, it's relevant if your issue is with the product itself under any circumstances whatsoever -- in which case it's a dodge that you refused to answer my question. If that's not the case, then perhaps you could clarify that your objection isn't to Slack and Salesforces as a product, but simply to their corporate governance. ⇒SWATJesterShoot Blues, Tell VileRat!18:37, 17 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not a WMF employee. My activity on Wikimedia wikis depends on the activities of WMF employees. Software is not just a "product": it's a process of proposals of rules, discussions about the rules, edits, tests, decisions, meta-levels, meta-meta-levels, and public histories of those processes. Boud (talk) 20:32, 17 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Very much not a fan of SalesForce, and I would hope the WMF would use as much FOSS software as possible (and support "ethical companies", to the extent that can be said to exist), but for all the bureaucratic aspects of running a nonprofit, I'd like the WMF to do whatever it can to ensure its employees can focus their time on supporting our projects/volunteers. That might mean using software that nobody likes but that just works at the scale of a fairly large nonprofit. SalesForce and Slack are not special in that regard. Office, Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, Photoshop, InDesign, After Effects, Premiere, AWS, Oracle, Google Drive, Gmail, Outlook, Zoom, Acrobat, and I'm sure we can think of many more "we don't like the product, we don't like the company, but it works well when you need hundreds of people focused on something more important". YMMV. — Rhododendritestalk \\ 16:56, 17 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the link -- looks like a useful site. I will say my opinion on this is colored by trying to do this myself for several years and being part of a couple organizations who did the same -- trying to switch to a bunch of free/open alternatives. In all cases, a lot of time was spent on fixing things, compatibility issues, and figuring out how to do various tasks that the commercial alternative just makes easy. So that's mostly what I'm talking about in terms of "whatever it can to ensure its employees can focus their time on [other things]". It's possible other people/organizations could be more successful at doing so than I was/we were, though. — Rhododendritestalk \\ 17:21, 17 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I must say that, for once, I'm in agreement with Rhododendrites here. I'm also very much not a fan of SalesForce, and (in my case) not a fan of the WMF either, but we have to have an environment where the WMF can choose what software is used. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:24, 17 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Choosing software is not like choosing a flavour of ice cream. If WMF employees are controlled by authoritarian software, then that will affect they way that they support the free knowledge community on the Wikimedia wikis; most likely negatively. We should control software, software should not control us; this also applies to WMF workers, who should not be enslaved by the software they use. Boud (talk) 20:32, 17 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
foundation:Resolution:Wikimedia Foundation Guiding Principles#Freedom and open source might be relevant. As an organization, we strive to use open source tools over proprietary ones, although we use proprietary or closed tools (such as software, operating systems, etc.) where there is currently no open-source tool that will effectively meet our needs. To what extent someone actually evaluated that versus some high-level manager just said "I liked using Slack at my last job, let's start using that", I doubt we'll get an answer to. Anomie⚔20:51, 17 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Also, getting a bit off the topic of this section, I note that foundation:Resolution:Wikimedia Foundation Guiding Principles#Internationalism saying We aim to recruit talented people regardless of where they live, and depending on their preferences and the needs of the job, we support them in working remotely or relocating to the United States. has somehow turned into "We'll only hire people in 19+2⁄3 countries."[28] (2⁄3 because they won't employ people in 17 of the 50 US states). Anomie⚔21:03, 17 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
You keep saying authoritarian software--can you explain how, exactly, Slack is authoritarian? Is Salesforce authoritarian for being a publicly held, for-profit company? I'm failing to understand where exactly the line is drawn. StartOkayStop (talk) 23:36, 17 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I think I can explain. There are several concepts here, some of which I heartily agree with and some of which which I might not like but am forced to accept.
[1] There exists a kind of software known as FOSS. Everyone should be allowed to use FOSS software, just as everyone should be free to express their opinion, choose when and where to go to -- or not go to -- church, choose when to get up in the morning, etc. If anyone (typically a government but it could be a local warlord or the leader of a gang) forces their choice on someone, that's bad.
[2] There exists something called a "job", where you voluntarily give up some of the freedoms in [1] in exchange for money. You boss can tell you that you can't express your political views when you are being paid to explain how to use the accounting system. The boss can tell you that you have to operate a lathe when you would really prefer to sleep in. If you don't like it you can quit. Not being allowed to quit because of the color of your skin (slavery) is not the same thing as employment.
[3] One of the things a boss can tell you is what software you are required to use. I might want to edit my documents using NeoVIM running on OpenBSD, but if the boss says I must use Microsoft Word running on Windows 11, I can either do it or quit.
[4] A website like Wikipedia has a different way of exerting control on you or me. They can't stop me from Ruing OpenBSD or composing this post in NeoVIM and cutting and pasting it into the edit window, but they absolutely can forbid me from using ChatGPT to compose it, from linking to a domain on the blacklist, or from posting someone's credit card number.
[5] Boud wants to apply the freedom from [1] to [2] and [3], and possibly [4], arguing that working for the WMF is somehow special and not like other jobs.
[6] Multiple people are expressing disagreement with Boud, which is allowed as long as everyone stays civil and follows Wikipedia's other rules.
I think that's a good overview, except that [2] and [3], as stated, refer to organisations with more or less authoritarian structures that employ people; in contrast, cooperatives, including platform cooperatives, are, at least in principle, democratic structures; universities (depending on the country and particular university) are, in principle, governed collegially by the researchers of the university (in France, unless the law changed recently, the core legal body of a university is the institute: a university exists as long as its institutes continue to cooperate); depending on the jurisdiction, other structures have various rights of employees and organisations' leaders may be legally or culturally constrained so that the "boss" cannot give arbitrary orders to employees. The general topic is workplace democracy. So I would slightly amend [5] to [5'], in which WMF should follow the highest ethical standards of the more ethical cooperatives and other democratic organisations-that-employ people, and not the standards of authoritarian employers, especially since the whole point of WMF is to support Wikimedia wikis. Boud (talk) 16:22, 20 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
The only problem is that [A] The WMF isn't a co-op -- it is a traditional top-down organisation -- and [B] the purpose of the WMF is not to support Wikimedia wikis. They do that, but it isn't their highest priority. Every time there is a conflict between serving the needs of Wikipedia and fundraising, fundraising comes first. Every time. --Guy Macon (talk) 00:57, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
This is getting to a different, but recurring (I think) topic, so should probably be split off somewhere else. It would be good to have your claim that Every time there is a conflict between serving the needs of Wikipedia and fundraising, fundraising comes first documented in a table somewhere - either here on enwiki or on meta. Your claim is strong; what would be useful for the community would be to see that documented with evidence in an appropriate place; as per Linus's law: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". I also wonder if you mean literally just "the needs of Wikipedia" or rather "the needs of the Wikimedia wikis" (which go way beyond enwiki). Boud (talk) 12:47, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I am completely locked out of my account. The system's confirmation emails are taking anywhere from 2 to 30 hours to arrive. By the time I receive the login code, it has already expired. Account recovery attempts are also failing. Could someone please investigate the email delivery queue so I can regain access? I have no idea where else to ask for help. ~2026-29745-56 (talk) 19:14, 17 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I just tested it, and Wikipedia spent less than a minute delivering an email to me. So the email delivery is fine. Not sure about whatever software sends you that login code, but email delivery is working just fine. --Guy Macon (talk) 03:24, 18 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
An incoming email will typically have timestamps in the headers showing when the message passed through all the various systems that handled it, that might give you a clue what was causing the delay. You're looking for lines that start with "Received:" Depending on your mail software, you may need to do something special to be able to see the headers. RoySmith(talk)10:44, 18 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
A couple years ago before they brought in a new product manager who made structural changes to how the wishlist works, the wishlist did two things extremely well: it got everyone from multiple wikis to focus one time a year on prioritizing community wishes, and then it provided an accurate snapshot in time of what software the communities wanted prioritized.
Once the new product manager came in, two critical things about the wishlist were altered:
The wishlist was turned into a never-ending backlog that had no set date, no marketing, and no opportunity for the wikis to focus on it at a certain time. The wishlist went from a yearly thing that many community members participated in, to something that most people forgot about.
Taking the emphasis off of ranking individual wishes by most votes to least votes, and instead organizing it by focus groups, caused it to be organized more poorly, to the point where it was hard to see what software priorities the communities wanted worked on the most.
The wishlist is one of the only ways that the communities can request that their software priorities be worked on by a WMF team. If it's not "essential work", or it's big, or a product manager didn't think it up and get it placed in the Annual Plan, it usually needs to go through the wishlist. By breaking it, the communities are losing one of their most important channels for requesting software from the WMF.
I would argue that most of the changes made in the last few years to the wishlist have been slowly breaking it, culminating in today's announcement that the wishlist and that community tech requests will no longer have a dedicated team to work on them.
Anyway, that's enough background. Here are the actionable changes I'd like to propose:
Undo the disbanding of CommTech.
If the CommTech disbanding is not undone, then transfer those software engineers to other teams instead of laying them off.
Bring back the wishlist's yearly cadence. Put it in December, do Central Notice marketing, hype up everyone voting during a certain week/month, etc.
Refocus back on a ranking of individual wishes. Focus groups can stay, and CommTech can pick them, but it should not be the focus. The ranking should be the focus, and then if multiple wishes in the top 10 happen to be related, then CommTech can quietly make that a grouping.
This is incredibly disappointing news. In the past the Wishlist jump-started some of the most important creations and/or updates to software or extensions that we would not be able to be without today, not least of all en.Wiki's most important single process: NPP Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:20, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
+1 to the actionable changes, this documents my thoughts on this issue in detail. TLDR, I share Novem's disappointment in the firing of staff with some of the most community experience in the Foundation and also share the lack of optimism in the new system. Sohom (talk) 00:46, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I am not conversant with the details of CommTech, but I trust those above who are, and I share their concern. I want to add my unhappiness at what appears to be an attempt to pass off downsizing as something beneficial to the community. Vanamonde93 (talk) 01:25, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
WMF, you've spent tens of millions over the years funding projects unrelated to Wikipedia, but you layoff the team responsible for meeting the needs we as editors have? Why should we support you fundraising on our Wiki, when you have no interest in listening to our needs or supporting us? BilledMammal (talk) 01:27, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Although I'm often ignorant of WMF politics, I found this news alarming enough to pay attention and say something. While I understand the WMF's rationale, this action is shortsighted and harmful to several volunteer efforts. For example, User:MusikAnimal (WMF) has been the WMF connect for Copypatrol, an important part of our (thankless, grueling!) anti-plagiarism process... and now what happens to it? I think CommTech is one of the best bridges between the community and the foundation, especially in recent years; to get rid of that, at a time where volunteers really do need help from the foundation, is a bad decision. Even if you're a skeptic toward everything WMF related, this is something you should be unhappy with and paying attention to. Moneytrees🏝️(Talk)01:59, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Not only is this a shocking decision in light of the current annual plan's "Volunteer Support Goal" but was done in a way that has a lack of answers for obvious questions the community would have. I am very alarmed based on what I know and that alarm is only magnified but people I trust - and who I know the WMF trusts - in the technical sphere like Novem and Sohom speaking out so strongly against this. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 02:07, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I also find it baffling that the WMF would sever one of their strongest connections with the community and lay off employees with precious experience in that regards, especially given the suspicious timing Liliana pointed above. Please undo this decision. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 02:46, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I have been working on and off on a signpost article on this topic for a bit now and have some hope to be able to finish it but if someone else is eager that would be great too. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 03:14, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I read the "becoming a program" post and was a bit releived to see that, at least, they'll provide the same financial support to the wishlist when it's a program as they have been. Less heartened by the lack of specifics about this forthcoming alternative structure, though. Even if literally nothing changed on a day-to-day level, the simple fact that we had a team whose job was dedicated to community tech needs and now we do not is a morale-buster. And not having details for a replacement plan at the time of announcement just seems like an unnecessary community relations blunder. :/ — Rhododendritestalk \\ 03:44, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
It also doesn't make sense. If it's the same financial support, then where are they getting the team members to use that support from? Are they reducing the team members assigned to other projects? If so, which projects? Further, why dismiss the community tech team, who has institutional knowledge that would be invaluable to this project, rather than employees whose institutional knowledge is related to projects whose priority is being decreased? Finally, why is there a need to reduce engineering headcount at all? If anything, the WMF needs more engineers, not less - see the entire graphs fiasco. BilledMammal (talk) 05:39, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
This is appalling. Thank you for bringing it to our attention, Novem. I'm with you on all points. When the Community Wishlist Survey was scrapped a few years back, I was willing to give the WMF the benefit of the doubt, but I cannot see these firings as anything other than a betrayal of the community. Toadspike[Talk]05:21, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
The loss of these talented engineers is quite a disappointing outcome for our global community. Over the years, the community tech team have developed and maintained tools which have greatly benefited the experience of editing Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, as well as helped to recruit new members to join our community. I would encourage the community to look through the archives of meta:Community Wishlist/Updates, where the team had been making periodic updates of the things they are working on: things like "Make the Chart extension beginner-friendly" (something they were "focusing on this month"), adding "the ability to set default watchlist expiries", the Multiblocks tool, adding a warning when linking to disambiguation pages—a bunch of these are small things that perhaps we've taken for granted over the years, but they have certainly added up over time. The Foundation seems to be letting go a highly experienced community-driven group of talented individuals, and the cost-benefit analysis of doing so is highly unclear. Mz7 (talk) 07:07, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
This is extremely disappointing and concerning news. We need more skilled and dedicated people like this working on community tools, not less. This is an atrocious look for the WMF. The donors in my life will be made aware of this so they can take their donations elsewhere. Ethmostigmus 🌿 (talk | contribs) 08:46, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I fully support Novem's proposal. As a volunteer technical developer, I have closely collaborated with MusikAnimal and Samwilson, two members of the disbanded Community Tech team who devoted their volunteer hours to the maintenance of essential tools including but not limited to CodeMirror and ProofreadPage, in addition to their daytime work on the community wishes. It is definitely a great loss with these experienced and dedicated engineers being laid off. 析石父 (talk) 10:42, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I sympathise with the staff affected and their welfare is an urgent priority, but sadly this decision highlights a deeper problem. I stopped editing Wikipedia in 2024 in protest at the WMF's growing arrogance and disregard for the needs of Wikipedia and its editors. I returned recently, convinced by Tech News that a tiny percentage of the huge income we generate for the WMF was finally being spent on something useful. I now realise that the only upgrade was to their PR spin; it's the same old WMF milking its cash cow and giving nothing back. The affected staff may be unable to take industrial action, but editors can. I shall no longer be contributing to Wikipedia or any other WMF project until this matter is resolved, and I am prepared to retire if necessary. It may even be time to follow LibreOffice by forking into a fairer environment. Certes (talk) 11:31, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I'm afraid forking is infeasible, if not impossible. Building WMF-level infrastructure would require massive amounts of money which no person here has. ~2026-30465-73 (talk) 11:42, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
How will the Foundation react if major language editions launch sitewide banners on their Main Pages, declaring that the WMF has been hijacked by corporate bureaucrats bleeding the community and its developers dry? How many donations will donors blindly drop into their laps after that to squander on useless pet projects? ·Carn·!?14:53, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
This is a terrible decision. I'm concerned that the below discussion seems to have veered off into questions of union-busting, which we don't know the details on and the one person who's stepped up to discuss it openly says is not relevant. It's distracting from the core issue which is that this is a bad decision regardless of why it was done. I don't really care if it was done because of union-busting, or because the Board's astrologer said so, or because there was some sort of loss of faith in the ability of the team to deliver. Even in the most generous scenario - where there really was a justified loss of trust in the team somehow - that is cause to fire someone, bring in new leadership, and hire for the newly vacated roles. Layoffs and removing the roles entirely makes zero sense. If this was just an organizational issue, then the team members could have been easily offered transfers. The Community Wishlist - while maybe not as important as the absolute most core "keep the servers on" role - is one of the best returns on investment the WMF can make. With so many... questionable... projects the WMF does fund, why did this one have to suffer the axe. SnowFire (talk) 16:25, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
WMF is saying the wishlist won't be affected, I think -- it just won't be run by a dedicated team. Interpret that how you will. Regardless, what you're saying reflects where I am in all this, too, more or less. Regardless of why the Community Tech team was disbanded, that it was disbanded in this way seems like a big error. — Rhododendritestalk \\ 16:46, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Organizations typically go through cycles of centralizing and decentralizing programs (there are only so many levers management can be pull, after all). It's possible that a time has come where decentralizing makes sense. However the failure to describe a plan of how the specific ongoing and planned initiatives will continue does not reassure the community that there will be a smooth transition, and that vital MediaWiki support will continue to be provided. isaacl (talk) 17:10, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with isaac and note there was not even an attempt by Suman to answer any such questions in his response today. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 17:17, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
This was not a large team so the WMF response that the impacted employees will have to apply to other positions is weird to me. Often at orgs that get rid of groups like this, the group is the thing being eliminated, not the employees, so they proactively work with the employees to be moved to new groups and so there is zero sense that the employees are being fired/laid off. Skynxnex (talk) 04:04, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I am saddened and deeply disappointed by this news, as both a Wikipedian and a MediaWiki developer who has seen first-hand the positive impact the Wishlist and Community Tech team were making. I strongly support all remedies suggested in Novem Linguae's opening post.I am also concerned about the inaccuracy of the m:Community Wishlist/Updates page that was linked as "proven success" of the new decentralised model in the layoff announcement. I checked there for the one wish I was familiar with, m:Community_Wishlist/W352, and saw it was listed as an example of "in-progess" work "to be completed in the next few months" in an April 7 2026 update. This is incorrect information that contradicts both technical history and the wishlist's own status tracking system.[2] A feature that had been completed for several months (and marked as such in multiple places) was presented to the community as examples of alleged "active work" and current focuses of the proposed decentralised model.If anyone had checked before making declarations to the community, or the WMF had been aware what its own engineers (which for this wish, were exclusively part of the Product Safety and Integrity team, which I don't believe is part of the multi-team taskforce replacing the Community team) were actually doing, this would have not been included in the statement.Whether this reflects a lack of coordination, insufficient review, or something else, the result is the same, the community was given inaccurate information at a critical moment.If the only example I can personally verify turns out to be this inaccurate, I have no basis to trust the rest of the claims in this announcement, or the assurances that the community's needs will continue to be met under the new structure. MolecularPilotTalk08:18, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Over the past days, I've spoken privately with multiple former WMF staff members whom I've known for years. According to them, criticizing WMF leadership internally could lead to consequences, and there was a growing feeling that leadership had become increasingly disconnected from both the editing community and staff who work closely with that community every day. Long-standing requests and priorities from editors were often ignored or deprioritized in favor of top-down strategic plans that many staff felt did not reflect the actual needs of Wikimedia projects. They described morale worsening over time and experienced community-oriented staff feeling sidelined.What's important is that the people expressing these concerns still care deeply about Wikimedia's mission and communities. The criticism is coming from people who want Wikipedia and its sister projects to remain community-driven, transparent, and aligned with the values that made them trusted in the first place. Nemoralis (talk) 13:35, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
This subthread originally began with Tamzin's comment of 04:35, 21 May 2026 (UTC). Novem Linguae subsequently moved the original union-busting discussion out of the main thread to avoid mixing the two issues, and Tamzin merged it into the existing subthread to avoid having two discussions on the same topic.
Disclaimer: I am working at the foundation and I am not a lawyer!
I am confident there is no connection between Comm Tech disbanding (which I qualify as a product decision) and TheresNoTime having created meta:Wiki Workers United.
I don't think internally many person were aware they created that page until you mentioned it. Coming up with a large narrative around Comm Tech to justify the lay-off of one particular person sounds more like a fantasy. I am not a lawyer and I am not familiar with union protection, but I am pretty sure that would be illegal. Had anyone came to the Legal Department with such an idea, I am confident they would be met with a firm no. Hashar (talk) 06:29, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
The fact that the first WMF-affiliated statement about the community's good faith concerns concerning this incident is to mock them as a fantasy says a lot. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸06:35, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I disagree with how the foundation acts and communicates with the community more than most, but Hashar is just a technical developer sharing their own views. We want to encourage individual employees to engage with us, not aggressively tear them down whenever they say something we disagree with - lets just be appreciative that Hashar provided their own view and wait for the WMF to make a formal response. BilledMammal (talk) 06:40, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
If they are their own views, they they are free to present them as such. But when you state your own, private views, you don't make very definitive statements denying accusations on the behalf of your employer. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸06:43, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
They're not making a very definitive statement; they merely say I am confident.
They're also not speaking on behalf of the WMF. They refer to their own opinion, and the only connection to the WMF is that they disclose that they are employed by them. FYI, their first language is French, not English. BilledMammal (talk) 06:48, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
That's a very selective quote; the rest of it was, as follows: there is no connection between Comm Tech disbanding (which I qualify as a product decision) and TheresNoTime having created meta:Wiki Workers United. That's a definitive statement of fact; they're denying that two events were, in any way, connected. Think about it this way: if you're at the doctor's office, the receptionist can't tell you, in their personal opinion, that they're confident that a symptom you're having isn't an issue. Yes, even if they say it in the parking lot, or DM you on social media. A reasonable person would take that as the opinion of their employer; that's a very widely understood principle whenever you make public statements related to your job.
Regardless, BilledMammal -- I stand by my original statement that when the first WMF employee to speak publically about the issue calls good faith concerns of the community a "fantasy" and accuses them of constructing a "narrative", then that says a lot. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸06:54, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
This isn't a doctor's office though. It's a community project, where we want WMF employees to engage with us without speaking in an official capacity - especially technical employees. Hashir is also, in addition to being a WMF employee, a member of the editing community, with thousands of edits on enwiki. They are also an admin on frwiki.
It also doesn't say much. All it says is this one employee - one member of our editing community - doesn't think this concern is based in reality. Let's not read too much into this - as I said before, let's just be grateful individual employees are willing to engage with us and wait for an official response. If that response isn't sufficient, trust that I will be the first to propose action, as I have done in the past. BilledMammal (talk) 07:06, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
BilledMammal, I find it very hard to believe that you're genuinely arguing that an administrator, who has not edit dismissing other editor's concerns as "fantasy" is something we should be grateful for.
I do agree that I would like to hear a response from the WMF, namely re: why one of their employees is insulting the community in such a manner. I'd like the foundation to clarify if that statement is reflective of internal sentiment, and I'd like to hear whether or not such personalization of disputes and reference to "realities" or implications that other editors are being delusional or paranoid, statements which can be ableist when used in certain contexts, is behaviour that is expected from WMF employees when they are on a WMF-owned website. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸07:19, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
None of that is necessary. An editor saying that something sounds like a fantasy wouldn't even warrant a trip to ANI, much less a demand for their employer to step in.
Regardless, I don't think this is going anywhere, so I will just say "thank you" to Hashir for their perspective, and step back from this conversation. BilledMammal (talk) 07:29, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
@Hashar: Is this a statement on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation? If it is, why is it not coming from a staff account, and why is it coming from someone who doesn't appear to have any relevant role at the WMF? If it is not, then how could you possibly be so confident that this isn't what happened? By the way, this is about firing six people, not one. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe|🤷) 06:41, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Hi @Tamzin, it is not a WMF statement. My role at the foundation is managing a technical infrastructure to assist developers (mw:Continuous_integration) as @BilledMammal kindly mentioned above (thank you!).
I am not in a role to speak in the name of the organization, I am not qualified for that and maybe I should have abstained earlier this morning. For formal staff messages, we have a policy to use a separate account. Mine is probably something such as User:Amusso (WMF) and I do not think I have ever used it since I never have to make statement. I however sometime get pointed I should mention I work for the foundation, which I agree is the bare minimal to clear conflict. Hence the disclaimer.
> how could you possibly be so confident that this isn't what happened? By the way, this is about firing six people, not one.
My point is I wanted to dismiss the idea that someone/group would engineer a whole plan, disband a whole team only to dismiss a person that created a page. I used "fantasy" which might be an improper word and I apologize if I offended the original poster.
There is no ground for this team being disbanded and one of their member potential involvement in an hypothetical union. Had the org wanted to terminate people, it would have been done a while ago.
There's a lot I could say here, @Hashar, but it all really boils down to: You seem to be rather over-confident that you fully understand this situation. We're talking about a union with dozens of members already, which you say no one's heard of. You say the WMF would have taken action a while ago if they cared, but the union's only been around for three months (I think?) and only created a public page on Meta 9 days ago. You keep talking about the lay-offs being to target one person when we've already established that most or all of the team members were involved in WWU. A cynical way to read your comment would be someone shilling for their employer, but I actually don't think that's what's happening here, because I very much doubt this is sort of messaging the WMF wants coming from any employees right now, and frankly I imagine you're going to be told off by some higher-up once the U.S. wakes up. No, I just think you're making the common mistake of assuming that if you don't know about something, it isn't happening. I'd really encourage you to spend some time talking to your colleagues. There is, as I understand it, a #global-union channel on the WMF Slack. Why not join it and talk to people about their experiences, and their impression of what is going on now? -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe|🤷) 09:54, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I also think, @Hashar, knowing that you're French, that you haven't realized quite how anti-union it is possible to be. Most countries don't have France's union culture. And the USA's is, famously, far, far, far worse. A statement like I am pretty sure that would be illegal is, well... -- asilvering (talk) 15:49, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
As you are specifying that you are working at the Foundation, is your statement based on any internal information? If it is only your personal opinion based on the same facts that we all know, I do not find it especially responsible to frame this as what could be read as an official statement. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 09:26, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
This certainly feels like union-busting, which alarms me greatly. I can't commit to a potential editing strike right now (not least because I am organising an editing event within the next few weeks), but we should certainly all be considering whether collective action is something we want to support, both in the name of CommTech being the team that formally give a shit about what we contributors want and need and also in the name of solidarity being The Right Thing To Do™ — OwenBlacker (he/him; Talk)14:12, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I'm creating a separate subheading for this because the effect on the community and the effect on WMF staff, while intertwined, are separate, and I don't want one to distract from the other. I've spoken to a few WMF staffers today. There are some things they weren't able to say, and other things that they could say but I'm not at liberty to repeat, but what I've been able to confirm is:
Most of the people laid off by this action were members of Wiki Workers United
This is not the first time in recent weeks that the WMF has terminated WWU members for no apparent reason. [Edit 07:53, 21 May 2026 (UTC): Since it's been parallelly disclosed by Bawolff below, this is in reference to Brooke Vibber, the #2 co-author of MediaWiki according to Special:Version.]
WWU members are afraid to speak publicly about any of this, including those laid off, since some are still hoping to find jobs elsewhere at the WMF, and others are depending on severance pay
The WMF disbanding Community Tech is an insult to the community, and for that matter to our donors, who I think largely have something like Community Tech in mind in terms of where they expect their money to go. But it's much more than an insult to the WMF employees who've been laid off for engaging in protected union activity, or the ones who are being cowed into silence for fear of winding up like their colleagues. For them, it is their livelihoods, their safety, their health. This is people's ability to put food on the table; for some U.S.-based employees it's their ability to get healthcare for themselves and their dependents. This is not just an insult; this is evil.
If this were something other than Community Tech, maybe I could convince myself it's all just a coincidence. But the WMF has been on a generally upward trajectory at avoiding decisions that will piss off the entire community. "Don't disband CommTech" might as well be the "don't mess with the pancreas" of WMF governance. The only explanation for the WMF doing this—not just reörganizing but outright laying off the team—is that they are so determined to prevent the union from becoming official that they are willing to risk the massive community blowback (which, from a corporate-brain point of view, is a greater downside than the five people left jobless).
An injustice has been done in front of us, and ostensibly in our name. The solution is solidarity. If WWU is not requesting collective action yet, we shouldn't jump the gun, so as to leave the bargaining power in their hands. But at a minimum I think we should establish that if the WMF does not remedy the union-busting it has already engaged in and commit to doing no further, we are prepared to act in solidarity if WWU calls for it, including through an editorial strike if needed. Honestly I'd like to ask for a lot more; I'd like to see every person in the chain of command responsible for this decision named, shamed, and fired. But that would be selfish; right now the priority should be doing something for the people who've lost their salaries and benefits for exercising their legal rights, and making sure that WMF workers can continue to organize and advocate for themselves. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe|🤷) 04:35, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I was prepared to make a similar post, though smaller in size, but I see Tamzin has expressed my thoughts in a more...eloquent manner. I'm sure the idea will soon be presented that the thought of "we can get rid of some unionizing leaders" had absolutely no involvement in this. I find that incredibly hard to believe. This is a layoff of a group of employees based on organizational reshuffling, and surely this would imply the involvement of some type of HR professional. I cannot think of any possible scenario where even a half-decent HR department does not take notice of this fact, and in a responsible organization, would have raised the alarm on how this would be perceived. It is glaringly obvious that the WMF is interested in breaking the union before it can form, and frankly, disgusting is the most appropriate word I can think of to describe union-busting by the WMF. EggRoll97(talk) 04:51, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
It does seem coincidental that this comes a week after Brooke was (presumably) terminated, who was literally the first WMF employee and responsible for a lot of the fundamentals of MediaWiki we still use today. WMF does seem to be cleaning house of some very experienced employees. Bawolff (talk) 05:17, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Just as a late addition, since Tamzin described me as "paralell disclosing" this. All i know is that all Brooke's user rights were removed and WMF is refusing to comment at all after explicitly being asked on mailing list (not even a no comment). WMF doesn't act this way when people voluntarily quit. Bawolff (talk) 16:31, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Unfortunately, I would have to strongly oppose us taking any action to support the union.
Wikipedia's most valuable possession is its reputation, for accuracy, for timeliness, and most of all for impartiality. Taking action on a political matter can threaten this reputation, and while in some rare cases this risk is acceptable because the matter at hand threatens the core mission of our project, such as when we acted against SOPA, these cases are rare, and the WMF engaging in union busting is not one of them.
This isn't to say we shouldn't take action - there are plenty of concerns here that are unrelated to politics that we can and perhaps should act on - just that we shouldn't take action to support the union. I would also suggest that we do not discuss those other concerns in this section, to avoid taking action on other concerns being conflated with taking action in support of the union. BilledMammal (talk) 05:31, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Firing at least six people (per Bawolff) for engaging in protected labor organizing isn't "a political matter". It's unethical, a violation of the Foundation's own policies, and potentially a crime or at least regulatory violation. And it absolutely threatens the core mission of our project: Even if we reckon this completely amorally, if the WMF continues down this path, while at the same time fundraising off the back of our work, that would drive many people to stop editing. I care about this wiki's reputation too. Standing up for what is ethical and legal will not hurt our reputation. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe|🤷) 05:43, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I fully agree with you on this. I will also point out that there is a difference between us taking action at the scale of the encyclopedia (e.g. the SOPA blackout) and us taking action as individuals in support of the union. An editorial strike is, ultimately, not a decision that puts our readers face-to-face with political choices, although it is still one that puts pressure on the WMF, and the comparison with SOPA is not necessarily the most accurate.This is not to say that I wouldn't support taking action at the scale of the encyclopedia, but it isn't something that has been suggested up to now, and conflating the two will not necessarily help with a constructive discussion. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 09:14, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I think BilledMammal's criticism would apply if say, we were mad at the WMF for contracting with another company engaging in union busting (say, Amazon), or if they were lobbying to change labor law, etc. Taking a stand against WMF's internal practices that directly relate to the management and upkeep of Wikipedia is not "political" in a way that affects our commitment to neutrality for our readers, even if it is political in a more general sense. signed, Rosguilltalk13:54, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with this. The WMF has always been expected to be transparent and community-oriented—even if these former Values were weakened into I share my work early, often, and respond to feedback. and Our community inspires in the 2023 (community-consulted) revision—and laying off software engineering community liaisons under covert union-busting is opaque and anti-community. Aaron Liu (talk) 22:42, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Imo this and practically all the scandals in recent memory (incl. those currently brewing) boil down to a lack of community representation at the top (for which the Wishlist was a sticking plaster/bandaid anyway). We can’t tolerate this dysfunctional dynamic in perpetuity, it is very clearly systemic failure at this point, and we shouldn’t wait for the sky to fall to do something about it. (whether separately or in conjunction with Novem's conditions above) Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 09:00, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
No time to expand atm, but union-busting, firing such prominent community and staff members, and gutting CommTech is highly disturbing and requires our strongest response. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 09:14, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Disgraceful rubbish from the out-of-touch WMF. Wikipedia needs bugs fixed, anti-abuse tools enhanced, and other software development. Instead we get expanded bureaucracy satisfying its own needs and egos. Johnuniq (talk) 10:05, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I don't understand how discouraging a few donors from donating would be noticed by WMF. I also don't see how an editing boycott would be effective; the quality would decay and require heavy work to clean up later. A full edit freeze on en.wikipedia would attract attention, but would need very strong consensus. In any case, I think it's up to WWU to tell the community what sort of support it would like. Adding support signatures at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Workers_United should be safe, since that's already requested by WWU. Boud (talk) 13:12, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with Tamzin's orientation. The Wikipedia editing community shouldn't jump the gun on WWU, but this is absolutely the sort of unaccountable activity by the WMF that would warrant organized action in solidarity with the WWU workers. We should be at their disposal, and prepare to engage in slowdowns, strikes or blackouts, either time-limited or indefinite. signed, Rosguilltalk13:47, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Based on the comments here, it's clear that others share my sense that collective action needs to be solidly on the table. I have created a petition in the subsection below. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe|🤷) 13:58, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I broadly agree with everything Tamzin has said. I will add that based on my past experience, staff work pretty hard to keep internal WMF issues internal and only start leaking these issues publicly when things are really bad (c.f. the 2014-2016 problems). Unfortunately I think we are very close to, if not already at, that tipping point once again. I am in full support of the union effort and if the WMF board and management are upset about this, they only have themselves to blame for reneging on past promises that could have defused tensions (e.g. staff ombudsperson) before it got this bad. Legoktm (talk) 16:51, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
While I think everyone should of course be free to express solidarity with any group they wish, I caution to bear in mind that an organization proposing to represent a company's employees isn't the same as one that actually represents a majority (or significant portion) of them. I totally appreciate the sentiment of supporting unionization to protect employee rights, and I agree that employees should be free to choose to unionize. I think, though, there's a way to support these efforts without just saying, whatever not-yet-a-union organization X wants, we should do. isaacl (talk) 22:26, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I'll be honest. I am doubtful of union-busting being the motivation for disbanding the CommTech team. I first heard Selena talk about the idea of having all teams work on the Wishlist in a conference call like two years ago, well before the union. However, it is WMF's job to dispel these rumors by communicating properly with us. Providing details of their process and their motivations would go a long way. –Novem Linguae (talk) 04:49, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Explaining why they had to fire, not transfer, and why just the engineers, not the whole team, would be a good start. Nardog (talk) 05:14, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Petition: Editors willing to join in collective labor action
We, the undersigned, stand in solidarity with Wiki Workers United and affirm our willingness to engage in collective action if called upon by WWU, up to and including staging an editorial strike. Editors participating in the collective action would be able to use normal Wikipedia consensus-building methods to establish the action's terms and, if desired, to establish further demands of our own in addition to WWU's demands.
As proposer. For those wondering exactly how an outright strike would be implemented, I've written up some thoughts at User:Tamzin/What would an editorial strike look like?. I want to stress, though, that that is just one idea for how a strike could work, and any such details would only be decided in the event a strike actually does become necessary, which, to be clear, I'm hoping it doesn't. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe|🤷) 13:58, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
As per my comments above. While we'd still need to hear back from WWU about how they would want us to support them, we should be prepared to provide such support on relatively short notice. I would liken this petition to a strike authorization vote during a contract negotiation, which can be done to strengthen their bargaining position even if no actual strike ends up called. I'll add that on a personal note, I've sworn pledges to never scab on organized labor, as have most members of unions around the world; I'm not about to break my word here, regardless of what we decide to do as a community. signed, Rosguilltalk14:04, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
# I think one of the most urgent things is to create a WWU Telegram group, in which people who have a vested interest in making the foundation look perfect and blameless can't dominate the discussions. I believe this is one of the bigger problems in general engagement about WMF related discussions, that we can solve by creating breathing spaces for fruitful discussion. It also helps that none of us can be singled out in this situation, if we band together. Egezort (talk) 14:07, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
This is unacceptable behavior from the WMF and I don't say that lightly. I'm willing to do what it takes to get them to reconsider these seriously awful decisions. Perryprog (talk) 14:08, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Absolute solidarity with the WWU and the dismissed workers of the foundation. I will support whatever action they would like us to take in response to this disgraceful attacks. --Grnrchst (talk) 14:16, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Am happy to go on strike, or resign as an admin, or whatever action would be effective in helping WWU. It should not be legal to operate without a union, and a organisation that tries to be a force for good should not be willing to operate without one. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 14:21, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I will have to think about what I can or cannot do in the immediate future, due to other commitments, but I definitely support some form of collective action, even if I can't offer as much solidarity as I would like. For the union makes us strong. — OwenBlacker (he/him; Talk)14:27, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
In solidarity with my former WMF colleagues. I am in full support of the union effort and if the WMF board and management are upset about this, they only have themselves to blame for creating this mess and reneging on past promises. Legoktm (talk) 16:55, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I would gladly participate in an editing strike in solidarity with the union effort - maybe one could exclude articles in the category labour movement? --Lupe (talk) 17:01, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Definitely. I don't want it to happen. No one who's signed this does. But if push comes to shove (and if WWU supports, obviously), it will have to be done. This and the whole bolding the donate button thing is just ridiculous. CheeseAndJamSamdwich (talk) 17:41, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
There should finally be some action taken by editors. WMF has recently made several decision on communitites without properly consulting them. All Wikinews projects were closed, all of the languages, regardless of the opinions of current editors of these projects, who opposed closure. Also several administrators, both former and current, and two former bureaucrats, from Serbian Wikipedia, were banned, with neither the local wiki community nor Wikimedia Serbia having understood the reason for the block. And now this happens. This is an extremely worrying trend. WMF should learn that they can not take unilateral decisions which concern the communities and its members, without taking into account the opinion of the communities and its members. BilboBeggins (talk) 18:49, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
(ec) I'm just overwhelmed but let me start with this. And in agreement with Kowal, disabling editing technically would be better off as it could be risky leaving it on while doing a strike. Vanderwaalforces (talk) 18:51, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
No union busting. The explanation given so far is not credible and we need more developers working with the community, not fewer. —Kusma (talk) 19:26, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
This is a disgrace to the whole notion that I stand for. I've lived around worker strikes my whole life in a mining town, and if you ever expect me to side with the corporation you are dead wrong. I am frankly disgusted and appalled by the actions of the Wikimedia Foundation yet again, and I can just as easily go spend my time somewhere else open-sourced without my contributions, including but not limited to hosting an ArchiveTeam Warrior, contributing code on GitHub, working on OpenStreetMap, and a whole other variety of projects that will help contribute to the greater good of society without meddling with the Foundation. If the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto has to be enacted, so be it. Get your shit together WMF; it's about damn time. kline / talk / contribs20:10, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I don't sign this lightly. I have spent countless hours over 13 years editing this website. So have thousands of others, including several of the employees laid off. These people need to be treated as respected colleagues essential to the movement, not as pawns in corporate games. Withholding our effort is a reasonable when such respect is not forthcoming. Vanamonde93 (talk) 20:59, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
As an editor (pretty inactive this year, but active last year) who's dabbled in tech, it's been a long time of hope that only makes the disappointment hit harder. Anecdotally, I've been seeing concerns incredibly ignored, off the top of my head from smaller things like subreferencing implementation to the supermajority opposition to closing all Wikinews, and ensuing silence on the announcement's talk page. Aaron Liu (talk) 22:49, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
While the money flows in the bureaucracy feeds itself. They will continue enshittifying Wikipedia unless a drastic response occurs. Johnuniq (talk) 23:26, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I would have thought the Foundation would have more sense than to gut one of the few remaining staff teams that actually represented the community, and certainly enough sense not to blatantly engage in union-busting. Apparently I was wrong to make such an assumption. EggRoll97(talk) 02:16, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
The individuals laid off include some absolutely terrific volunteer contributors, in addition to their work for the WMF, and they deserve better than this. Very willing to take action (or inaction) in line with the wishes of the union. I've edited every single day for almost a year, but that may have to come to an end. Solidarity forever. Ethmostigmus 🌿 (talk | contribs) 02:55, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
To quote a recent ArbCom principle, "Wikipedia relies on the input of volunteer editors to maintain and produce its content, including managing its dispute mechanisms. The time editors can commit to this is one of its most precious resources". Wikipedia cannot exist without us: as volunteers, we must show that we're not afraid to drop tools, walk away, and take a stand against the WMF's increasingly blatant exploitation of all they take for granted. UpTheOctave! • 8va?04:09, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I look down on union-busting and am willing to take action up to and including letting the vandals in. I imagine that indefinite strikes will be difficult to coordinate. Iseult Δx talk to me07:31, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Surprised to find out about this during my inactivity. CommTech is one of the best teams on the WMF and this is disappointing and stupid. dbeef [talk]08:40, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
We need to think hard about what would actually be effective. Editing is in itself not a chokepoint and certainly not sustained. On the other hand, users with advanced permissions refusing to clear backlogs and threatening mass-resignation of the Mop or other advanced permissions would show a seriousness with regards to escalation path. The Wikimedia Foundation would be wise to avoid a streissand effect, because we want the health of the project to succeed, but it cannot do so, when employees are afraid of retaliation. If these layoffs were genuinely unconnected, WMF could have taken a 100 other measures to avoid what appears to be a blatant disregard for worker rights. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 10:00, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I'm adding this section to emphasize to the WMF the weight of who's signed so far, beyond just the raw number. Others should feel free to add statistics or update for new signatories. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe|🤷) 05:36, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
As of the 101st signature:
Signatories have made a combined 3,001,633 edits (median 17,058) to the English-language Wikipedia[a]
^Excludes edits made on alternate or previous accounts. Edit counts are not updated subsequent to addition here.
^Only includes FAs, GAs, and FLs listed on people's userpages. Double-counts collaborations where applicable, and may also include some double-counts for people who count the same article twice if they brought it to both GA and FA, although this overcount is almost certainly less than the undercount from people who don't list their FAs/GAs/FLs
Strikes in online communities need very wide participation to be noticeable. I'm not sure we can get that kind of participation here, and even if we do, the harms could be significant. That said, if this is to go ahead, it must be time-limited. Indefinite strikes do not work, as unless demands are rapidly met, they fizzle out and fail. Toadspike[Talk]14:10, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Indefinite strikes work all the time. More importantly, the main obstacle for an indefinite strike is providing financial support for the striking workers who won't be receiving their regular pay, an obstacle that does not exist for the editing community. signed, Rosguilltalk14:18, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Here's an article published yesterday about an indefinite strike that appears to have won before it even began [30]; another dispute from earlier this year which resolved after multiple rounds of strikes, including an indefinite strike that lasted a month. signed, Rosguilltalk19:39, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I disagree entirely. Strikes having a time limit merely prompts management to wait them out, rendering them completely ineffective. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 17:01, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
A time-limited strike can still be a good idea. They build awareness and solidarity. The employer can wait it out, but they can't ignore it entirely, and there's nothing that would preclude us from striking again, for longer or indefinitely. -- asilvering (talk) 17:04, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
the harms could be significant. This is the intended outcome if demands aren't met in order to avoid much more significant harm to the encyclopedia long-term. Reminds of when NHS strikes and people respond by saying "but this will cause so much harm" (short-term). Sure thing. That's why it's done, that's why it works, that's why there is still a semi-functional system. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs etc. CNC (talk) 18:30, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
> Furthermore, nothing prevents striking editors from imposing social consequences against those who cross the picket line, for instance by saying that upon the end of the strike they will not review good article nominations or featured article nominations by former strikebreakers. That... sounds too harsh (and WP:BATTLE) for me. I would support the petition if it wouldn't explicitly (in this phrase) draw a conflict line between different Wikipedians. Well very well (talk) 14:12, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
The petition is regarding a general commitment to join in a collective action if one is called for. As I said, my sketch of what a strike might look like is just one idea; in the event it happened, you'd be welcome to advocate for some other approach. That said, this particular line isn't really a proposal at all, but merely an observation of how social consequences work in a volunteer project where no one is entitled to anyone else' labor. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe|🤷) 14:22, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Remember that we're all volunteers here, so anyone is free on an individual basis to refuse to work with someone else for any or no reason. Phil Bridger (talk) 14:26, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Personally I think banners or blackouts would be more effective, if were to strike then it should be by making the wiki read-only to prevent abuse by vandals Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 14:37, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I take the union busting concerns seriously given that the foundation employs a lawfirm with a documented history of supporting organizations' attempts to union bust (e.g. [31][32]). However, it has been my experience that many WMF employees do not stand in solidarity with us. Sometimes this is because of ignorance, sometimes because we are aggrieved against the WMF and so they take the side of the organization they are a part of, and in at least a couple of cases it's because they have a dislike of the editing community (sometimes earned after the editing community treated them or close colleagues poorly). I am certainly not referring to the Comm Tech team, many of whom are clearly members of the editing community themselves, but I also won't pretend that I haven't heard sentiments suggesting a lack of solidarity from other technical workers. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 14:50, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I do find this all a little surprising. Maybe pleasantly surprising? This board is usually, well, rather critical of WMF staff, to the point of "it's outrageous that WMF employs so many people and pays them so much". So seeing editors defend staff, wanting them to unionize, and even arguing to put Wikipedia second with an editing strike to defend that staff is not something I expected to see this morning. I expected to see this conversation comprise mainly outrage at disbanding the team that was dedicated to community technical needs (which is, of course, perhaps the main thing we bang on about, and thus a wild decision). Maybe it's the clearest distinction yet between community attitudes towards WMF leadership and attitudes towards WMF staff. Anyway, sorry for the tangential metacommentary. — Rhododendritestalk \\ 15:40, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
@Rhododendrites, I wouldn't say that an editorial strike puts Wikipedia second any more than a teachers' strike puts students second - which, having been a striking teacher myself, is not at all the case. As we say in education, "our working conditions are their learning conditions". Likewise, WMF staff working conditions have a strong effect on volunteer editors, and on our ability, as a collective, to advocate for our goals. -- asilvering (talk) 15:58, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
There's an ongoing teachers' strike where I live and what is best for the students is at the centre of their demands, they can't provide an effective education to them while their resources are so limited and their efforts so overstretched. I'd argue the same in this case; it is a barrier to effectively educate our readership if the team that provides the community with the technical resources it needs no longer exists. --Grnrchst (talk) 09:39, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
In my experience WMF staff usually keep their views to themselves as they are likely to get in trouble if they are seen as being undermining. Bawolff (talk) 16:07, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I am signing above because I care about supporting Wiki Workers United. However, I want to preemptively question the utility of some of the suggestions for a strike being made, such as disabling anti-abuse tools or in some way allowing disruption to the wikis. Not only is this not in line with community values, it's likely to cause far more impact to the community than the Foundation. As much as it makes me sad to say this, given that WMF management was willing to terminate their own staff to block them from unionizing, I have to wonder whether they would be swayed by even a few hundred editors logging out. And given that the WMF is, ostensibly, not responsible for the content on the wikis (in the sense that article content is not one of the Foundation's deliverables), I don't feel that collective action with adverse effects primarily on our content would really be putting pressure on them effectively. —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 15:29, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, running a counter banner (like "here's how much of your donation goes to actually keeping the servers, here's the number of bugs that were reported vs fixed, here's the median time it takes for a bug to get fixed, here's how many engineers WMF fired last year") during a fundraising campaign would probably be more effective. Nardog (talk) 15:34, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I like the idea of embarrassing our lords and masters into improving, but it can be hard to pin down how money is spent. There is much flexibility in allocating, say, the salary of someone who would spring into action if the servers fell over but normally spends their time on other work. Certes (talk) 15:43, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I believe that the best way to support WWU in the case of a necessary labor action is to simply get the word out. Leverage our collective "reach" as they call it to shine light on the problem. Yes takedowns/blackouts are very visible, but I urge concerned and good faith editors to engagne in a way that is not disrepectful nor unnecessarily disruptive towards our readers. This is not our prospective labor action, we simply stand in solidarity. audiodude (talk) 14:51, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
(ec) We know from history that yes, we do have power in this way, and WMF does care about our collective action, for instance with WP:SUPERPROTECT and WP:FRAM. If we do not maintain Wikipedia, that affects readership and donations. It also affects the foundation's social license to operate, which is key for hiring and retaining staff. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 15:49, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Pardon if I missed it, but have we heard from any of the laid of staff about this? I'd like to know whether they view this as related to unionizing activity. Wouldn't blame anyone for not wanting to speak publicly, though. — Rhododendritestalk \\ 15:51, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
See my initial comment regarding private conversations I've had. At least those I spoke to perceive this as being related to unionizing activity, and are also hesitant to speak publicly as the WMF still has significant financial leverage over them. My hope is that, as more people sign this petition, it will embolden WWU collectively and WWU members individually to speak out, knowing that they have the community's support. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe|🤷) 15:54, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
On this note, is there anything we can do to facilitate communication with WWU? Perhaps we could change the WP:VPW header to also explicitly support communication with WWU, or create a new noticeboard for two-way communication with them? I'd hate for them to tell us to enact an editorial strike, only for us to not see it due to a lack of a proper communication channel. MEN KISSING(she/they) Talk to me, I don't bite! - See my edits18:15, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
@Tamzin:I propose updating the petition text from up to and including staging an editorial strike to up to and including actions such as an editorial strike or a full or partial database lock, though whether a full or partial database lock is possible would depend on whether enwiki can decide this on our own, or whether WMF would override us. I have great difficulty in seeing how an editorial strike by anything less than e.g. 90% of active editors would influence WMF. I'm not too convinced about a database lock either: it would prevent wiki communication that "in some way furthers the goals of the strike". At least the words "such as" would allow the emergence of alternative (maybe more effective) tactics. Boud (talk) 16:20, 21 May 2026 (UTC) (update; see below Boud (talk) 20:04, 21 May 2026 (UTC))[reply]
A database lock would be a matter of forming community consensus, not editors establishing their individual intention to participate in a voluntary action. It's worth discussing, but it's a matter for another section, not this one. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe|🤷) 16:30, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
It's true that technically, an editing strike doesn't need community consensus, but for it to be effective, it would need to have a big consensus. But it's also true that a database strike would likely have to have an extremely strong consensus. I agree that a database strike would be worth discussing in a separate section (though I'm unlikely to facilitate it). Boud (talk) 17:10, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I am not sure I am getting that correctly, but are you suggesting changing the text of an active petition after people have started signing it? Choucas 🐦⬛18:08, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Well, the number of signees at the time was smaller, and I was letting the proposal poster judge whether the change would be acceptable; {{s}} exists for people who would have hypothetically decided to change their support/opposition. Anyway, I've {{s}} the proposed change to the petition statement. Some people are suggesting a database block/read-only status in their comments. Boud (talk) 18:20, 21 May 2026 (UTC) (update; see above; I forgot to ... strike out my proposed edit. Boud (talk) 20:04, 21 May 2026 (UTC))[reply]
I believe the only people who can actually lock the database are employed by the organization we're protesting, so it probably can't happen. For editing, I believe any sysop can prevent all editing by non-sysops by blanking the MediaWiki:Titleblacklist and replacing it with "* <noedit>", which gets us pretty close, and then we can exempt any pages we want to keep editing (like this one) though the whitelist. Feeglgeef (talk) 23:13, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Any action we take would be at the suggestion of the WWU. We would be well within our power to refuse to do more disruptive things, and I'm sure they would respect that.
@Kinopiko, the best way to avoid any of those things coming to pass is not to oppose the strike mandate, but to join it, and to make your voice heard when specific actions are being discussed. In many cases, a strong strike mandate can avert the need for a strike at all. -- asilvering (talk) 18:22, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Our Wikipedia abuse filters are imperfect: WP:EFN - work by unpaid Wikipedians is needed to maintain them (updates, discuss flaws and fix them). Per WP:EF, There are currently 142 edit filter managers and 24 edit filter helpers, i.e. 166 unpaid Wikipedian volunteers. Leaving the edit filters enabled with nobody to maintain them might do more damage than disabling them. In any case, the specific tactics seem open to finding rough consensus. Boud (talk) 18:34, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Not maintaining the edit filter sounds like a good idea, except the WMF can mitigate it by removing a single line of code [33]. For context, that line opts the English Wikipedia out of the global AbuseFilter which reflects local consensus. However, if the local editors refuse to maintain the abuse filter, the global filter can and will be enabled here. As other people have pointed out in this thread, the Foundation has gone against community consensus in the past like with WP:SUPERPROTECT. Warudo (talk) 21:11, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
@Warudo: I think it's worth noting that the global AbuseFilter largely is already replicated on enwiki via local filters. Many filters are either imported directly from enwiki, or at minimum heavily inspired, which is also why enwiki is opted out, because it would just be duplication of work to have filters that largely attempt to accomplish the same thing running in tandem with local filters. Even then, this doesn't necessarily mean that the global AF will be any more maintained than the local variant in an editor strike. EggRoll97(talk) 02:23, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Disclaimer, I'm not just new to enwiki, but I am young enough to have never participated in any organized labor movement before, other than marching with a teacher's strike once.
That out of the way, I'm asking: how can I get more involved? I'd rather put time and effort behind helping organize a possible strike than into enwiki additions. I'd really appreciate if someone pointed me in a direction to start, even if it's just reading material on the logistics of strikes. Realtent (talk) 20:50, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
@Realtent, thank you for asking. Since we're volunteer Wikipedia editors, so much of what is involved in the logistics of strike organizing isn't applicable to us - we don't need to worry about Strike funds, about organizing and training marshals, about feeding people, or any of those other kinds of concerns. (But it's as good a time as any to read about how those kinds of things are done.) For now, signing on to the two petitions and paying attention is all anyone really needs to do, but you might want to think about Tamzin's suggestions at User:Tamzin/What would an editorial strike look like?, other ideas people have suggested on this page, and so on. And if you're looking for things to read or edit while you're waiting for things to happen, perhaps you'd be interested in joining WP:LABOUR. In solidarity, asilvering (talk) 21:48, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Question: I assume such an editorial strike would likely include all WMF-run projects, right? Or just the English Wikipedia? Feeglgeef (talk) 02:33, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
There are at least 200,000 active editors on this project according to WP:Stats, so I don't think <200 editors "striking" is going to achieve much. (And most readers and editors don't know and probably don't care about these behind-the-scenes stuff either, so they'll continue editing like usual, etc.) I would support a blackout, though, something like the SOPA one. Some1 (talk) 22:47, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
@Some1: That definition of active includes anyone who has made 1 edit. 200 of the core editors striking would be noticeable, considering we only have about 5,000 editors who make more than 100 edits a month. The editor strikes when WP:FRAM occurred got a lot of attention and even got outside media coverage. A blackout would definitely be much more in your face about it, I just don't want to discount the importance of what people are already committing to. Clovermoss🍀(talk)22:52, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
And there are fewer than a dozen admins who block the large majority of vandals, and another dozen that handle the large majority of sockpuppet investigations. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 22:54, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
We should also probably hide all the donation stuff, and add a notice about solidarity with WWU, perhaps with a button to add you to the solidarity list or something. Feeglgeef (talk) 23:04, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I agree. I'm just saying that if they don't think the signatories not editing is significant enough, this is an option as well. Feeglgeef (talk) 23:20, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I'm pretty sure they can, but I think I'd get summarily defenestrated by ArbCom if I tested that. Hypothetically you could make an edit filter to block every edit, but I'm pretty sure there are safety features that would automatically disable that filter. Idk I haven't been an EFM in a while In solidarity with Wiki Workers United, charlotte👸♥01:51, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
On a technical note, are there admins willing to issue blocks upon request for this, should a strike occur? If i'm striking I'd prefer to do it under an indefinite block, so that a signature strike-through can help raise awareness. Also because I'll just wake up one day and forget I'm on strike, so I would prefer it to be enforced. CNC (talk) 18:38, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Personally, I was thinking more along the lines of using admin tools to just set pages to admin-only edit access, but this is an idea too. signed, Rosguilltalk18:41, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Is that with consensus you mean, or just rogue admin style? Maybe I missed that part of the discussion. But anyway, good to hear that thanks (asilvering, Rosguill). I assume requesting a self-block doesn't require any consensus (other than blockee, issuer), so I'd go with that as a starting point. CNC (talk) 18:46, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
With consensus and the WWU's assent (not least because doing this without a bot would be incredibly time consuming). signed, Rosguilltalk18:48, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I can volunteer to give out blocks on request as well. I am more than happy to support editors who choose to participate. – Epicgenius (talk) 20:29, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Brilliant, thanks willing admins. Anyone else interested in this scheme is welcome to sign up below I guess? I've since subscribed, but any of the willing admins are welcome to also block me per instructions. Note: if blocked you won't be able to engage in discussion about the strike, so choose wisely. In solidarity, CNC (talk) 22:10, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Do mainspace blocks come with signature strikethroughs out of interest? Either way, whatever anyone is comfortable with or desiring I guess. Given it's a self-request, it seems you get to pick and choose. Noting that if that an editor is striking from BUILDWP, mainspace perms are not needed during such a period. CNC (talk) 22:31, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
For those of you unfamiliar with labour action and how it tends to play out, a strike mandate vote is a show of solidarity that communicates that we will take action if something else occurs (or does not occur). In our case, we're saying that if WWU calls for help, we will stand up for them, in ways to be determined, up to and including strike action (the nature of which is also to be determined). Perhaps you're concerned about the form that strike might take; perhaps you really don't want to strike at all. Me too. The only way to decide what form a strike takes is to be one of the strikers and be part of those conversations. And, somewhat counterintuitively, the best way to avoid a strike entirely is to support the strike mandate vote in overwhelming numbers. The people you're negotiating with don't want a strike either, and when they see what kind of power they're dealing with, they adjust tactics accordingly.
The Signpost is Wikipedia's community newspaper. There are many stories which could be told about Wiki Workers United, including your perspective. If you want to draft something then submit at
Some possible actions to which anyone can contribute:
collect the links
summarize the story
step out of the union story, and tell needed background stories like what is the wishlist, what is community tech etc
write pieces for branching narratives, like community solidarity positions
Wikipedia is the only major tech platform which is self-governed by its users. In every demonstration, protest, and election, democracy is always on the ballot. Support The Signpost by participating in journalism because if for whatever reason you neglect a right to use something, then it could go away forever. Wikimedia users can make use of the opportunity to communicate to the world and enter the public record by submitting more stories to The Signpost. If Wikipedia ever declines, then there may never be another global nonprofit community organizing platform which invites everyone to read, and everyone to edit. There is no need for conflict among any stakeholders in the Wikimedia Movement, and we can design our governance structure to be collaborative.
Since the WMF really likes their donation money, a better way to fight this would be blocking all donation banners/buttons using intadmin tools and forcing the WMF to respond to our demands before allowing them back in. That'll certainly turn some heads. ChildrenWillListen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 15:50, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I would support this, but not just as something to "turn some heads". It should be structured as an incentive to make things right. This, unlike the petition I started above, would require RfC-level consensus, so what I'd suggest is a proposal that, if the WMF does not in one week's time 1) comply with the demands in Novem Linguae's initial comment and 2) commit to a third-party investigation of whether staff members have been punished for pursuing unionization, the community will begin to obfuscate donation banners and buttons. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe|🤷) 16:00, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I would imagine WMF wouldn't hesitate to revert completely hiding donation banners as that would be actively sabotaging their ability to fundraise, whereas squashing a counter banner from the volunteer community would have a worse outlook of stifling volunteer autonomy and self-governance. Nardog (talk) 16:15, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Can I ask that one condition in the proposal be something along the lines of:
That the Foundation engages with the communities to design and implement a new system of community representation and oversight, and that the community reserves the intention to take further collective action should such efforts break down or prove ineffective.
With their own employees as well. We may want concrete steps from the Foundation to not only undo the damage from the retaliation, but actively support its employees' right to assemble in a union, and to provide concrete guarantees for worker protections as deemed appropriate by the WWU. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 16:31, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What Tamzin said earlier, that "If WWU is not requesting collective action yet, we shouldn't jump the gun, so as to leave the bargaining power in their hands", really resonates with me. I'd rather we leave the decision of what exactly to do, up to the WWU. If they suggest blocking donation banners, then we should do exactly that. If they don't suggest that, then we shouldn't. MEN KISSING(she/they) Talk to me, I don't bite! - See my edits16:21, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I doubt WWU would support using this type of leverage as reduced fundraising would put their employment at greater risk. Last time we got the banners to be toned down there were layoffs. To echo SnowFire above, if any thing like this were to happen, it should be about WMF's years of disregard for and mistreatment of volunteer needs rather than just the alleged union-busting. Nardog (talk) 17:19, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I support indefinitely blocking donation banners until demands are met. (To me, this means at the very least a credible revival of the Community Wishlist Survey and the reinstatement of the six fired employees.) The Big English campaign, which runs in English-speaking countries around Christmas, accounts for "more than 50 percent of all funds per year" or "nearly 75% of banner revenue". If they overrule us and reinstate banners regardless, we should escalate to a site blackout. Given the remarkable focus the WMF has had on improving fundraising in recent years, I believe this is our strongest lever, stronger even than a strike. (Let's be real, the WMF does not care about petty vandalism, and despite the massive CCI backlog we do not get sued for copyright violations.) Toadspike[Talk]18:51, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Yup. I don't think the people saying "it's not December" or "the WMF has savings" realize quite how much the WMF cares about generating revenue. And the point of an indefinite halt to banners is that pressure builds as the big campaigns approach, whereas with a strike it's the opposite, pressure would fall as it fades out. Toadspike[Talk]08:06, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
All that the English Wikipedia community has ever really done is strongly worded complaints, maybe reverting an office action once or twice. I would absolutely support an editing strike, but taking away their donations is the only way we can really hit them where it hurts. Feeglgeef (talk) 19:06, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Given that the WMF has been building up plenty of buffer funds (AFAIR), indefinitely blocking donation banners until demands are met would both send a strong signal and do no significant damage to WMF functioning. A month of no donation popups would upset WMF people tracking the budget and only require a little less immediate spending on lower priority things. It's not December. I looked at a few Wikipedia pages while logged out in the past few days and saw very prominent pop-up "please donate" boxes, geolocalised, so WMF is not waiting until December. Boud (talk) 20:17, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I second the "please donate" boxes, as I get them while logged out in a guest account. If anything, a community pushback to all fundraising banners would improve the user experience overall while having a minor impact to WMF; if anything, I foresee people opposing any effort to bring them back if they are paused. GGOTCC01:18, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I created a preliminary plan for this a few years ago. It should still work, but there was also a major limitation; with time, the WMF could develop countermeasures. For this reason, it was always planned to run during the December fundraising campaign, as it should be able to significantly limit the WMF's ability to run ads for a month, though maybe not much longer.
If we decide to proceed with this, I instead suggest that we inform the WMF that we will begin blocking fundraising ads during December, or earlier if they start their major fundraising operation earlier. I note that they often run ad tests throughout the year; these bring in little revenue and are not worth acting to prevent.
I'm not going to share this plan on-wiki, to avoid giving the WMF advance time to counter the ideas inside, but I'm willing to share it with a few editors who would be relevant to implementing it if they wish. BilledMammal (talk) 02:15, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
We could also run a counter ad before the next campaign, informing readers about these strains or just the fact that none of the money one donates goes to the people writing the content they read, which is still not widely known it seems. That would give WMF less excuse to trample it. Nardog (talk) 02:56, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I'm Suman, and I’m the Deputy Chief Product & Technology Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation. I know that this has been really hard news for editors and staff alike, and I’ve shared a message with more information on the wishlist talk page. In short, we’re already working with affected staff to expedite interviews for open roles, though this takes time given some of the relevant local regulations around the world. The human side is not lost on us, and we are doing what we can to support people through this transition.
I can also unequivocally confirm this decision is not connected to discussions staff are having about unionising, or terminating staff who have participated in those discussions. We respect staff’s right to have these conversations. As I shared in my original post, the decision about the Commtech team and the Community Wishlist was made to help WMF more effectively address wishes by having more teams work on them. We ask that you judge the impact of this change based on how well and how many wishes we are able to support in the coming months.We share the latest statistics via our monthly updates. SCherukuwada (WMF) (talk) 16:38, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
One thing that would help to establish that this is in no way union busting would be if the WMF would take the good faith step towards recognizing the WWU and enter contract negotiations as appropriate. Failing any demonstration along those lines, it's hard to take the WMF statement at face value, as Mandy Rice-Davies appliessigned, Rosguilltalk16:43, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia's brand these days hinges on being the website that isn't evil. Independent of anything else on this page, not engaging with WWU in good faith is an excellent way to ruin that image. Vanamonde93 (talk) 16:54, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
To be frank, the dissolution of community focused initiatives sends the complete opposite message, as I repeatedly emphasized at the last board meeting open to the public (see User:Clovermoss/WMF#2025). The WMF really likes claiming it listens to people and actively ignoring all the feedback it doesn't like, in my experience. Clovermoss🍀(talk)16:45, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I've worked for enough companies to know that it's possible to unwind a team by transitioning those employees directly to new roles rather than firing them and then "expediting interviews" for new positions. --Ahecht (TALK PAGE)12:42, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
This is the second time that the foundation has asked for the community to judge them on results after major disruptions around the Wishlist that the community reacted to with alarm. I certainly believe you that it's not about saving money, but what I don't believe is that the same number of resources will go to progress on the Wishlist moving forward. I don't believe this because you haven't explained how that will be true. The lack of partnership with community bodies ahead of this change to a program - like PTAC - make it harder for me to believe you're actually interested in being held accountable for results. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 16:19, 21 May 2026 (UTC) Copied from my reply on meta Barkeep49 (talk) 16:50, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
On: "I can also confirm this decision is not connected to discussions staff are having about unionising."
Before I sign off for the night, I just want to stress: Even if the WMF is somehow able to provide conclusive evidence that this isn't union-busting—which would basically have to be evidence that it was a set-in-stone plan agreed upon (not just tossed around as a possibility) long before the unionization began, and that the plan always involved laying off the whole team rather than reässigning them, and that no discussions of the layoffs involved any mentions of anything union-related—that wouldn't change the necessity of community solidarity with WWU, because laying off a whole team of experienced and productive engineers for opaque bureaucratic reasons is exactly the sort of bullshit that is making employees want to unionize. If the WMF's defense is "We're only shitty employers, not union-busters", that wouldn't be much of a defense. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe|🤷) 18:39, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
And, to emphasise what several have said already, Wikipedia's brand these days hinges on being the website that isn't evil. -- asilvering (talk) 18:52, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
My bestie the other day asked me if there was anything exciting happening on Wikipedia. And I had to say no, except for those two ArbCom cases that had wrapped up, but that wasn't very interesting. And I told her, I hope something interesting does happen soon, and I'll let her know when it does!
Absolutely none of this explains how firing six people with direct experience in this area, can possibly increase productivity in this area.
Why not move them to the other teams? Surely their experience would be invaluable to those taking over the responsibility for something they haven't done before. I've worked with/for businesses and corporations both large & small for decades, yet I've never seen this happen before.
It can be archived on its own page when this is done. VP:WMF doesn't get much traffic anyways so it's not like this is overwhelming other discussions here. voorts (talk/contributions) 20:04, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I asked about this above, but I figured this might deserve its own subsection. Any collective action we would partake in would have to be at the direction of Wiki Workers United. I get the sense that the folks here are antsy to Do Something Right Now, but really, the best thing we can do is express our solidarity and wait for them to reach out to us. Maybe we could codify our support of WWU by having a place that makes it easy for them to reach out to us, and for us to reach out to them?
Two ideas:
We can edit the header of WP:VPW to explicitly permit communication from WWU too.
I'm sure they're well aware of this discussion and will weigh in when they've discussed their own strategy. I think the petition above pretty clearly acknowledges we'll work with them at their direction. voorts (talk/contributions) 20:38, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Please try to understand the situation faced by the sacked workers. They have family commitments and need an income to keep a roof over their heads. They cannot (well, they should not) speak out. That's partly from ethics (a misguided sense of loyalty to the project they have supported for decades) but also it's a matter of future employability. Prospective employers would not want someone who makes a fuss after being booted. Johnuniq (talk) 23:39, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
It's easy to be courageous when you are not involved. Hey, look at me! I am an anonymous user on the internet! I have human rights! On the other hand, real humans have dedicated decades to the project and they have been kicked in the guts. And you think they should publicly spell out all their problems with the WMF before looking after their families. And that's because they have legal rights. Johnuniq (talk) 07:36, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
@Johnuniq, you're reading a lot into voorts's statement that was not there. It is true that the workers who have been laid off are in a difficult position and voorts has not disputed that. What he has said is that workers do routinely speak out, and so cannot (well, they should not) speak out is not true. Furthermore, WWU represents more than just the editors who have been laid off. WWU has both their colleagues and their own medium-term strategic goals to consider when it comes to making public statements; they may indeed decide that, at present, it is best to say nothing. But a union that cannot speak out in response to the layoff of colleagues is no union at all. In solidarity, asilvering (talk) 09:01, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
It wouldn't surprise me if for some of these employees, severance pay was conditional on signing signing some sort of NDA. Given the tenure of some of these people, that would ptobably be a very significant sum of money. Bawolff (talk) 03:57, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Seems very likely to me too, as in I expect it's the case unless there's a law against it in someone's case. The NDA would almost certainly include a prohibition against saying anything negative about WMF or its people, and against acknowledging the existence of the NDA itself. This has a chilling effect on other staff's willingness to speak out on the fired employees' behalf too, if they know details, as they don't want to jeopardize the fired people's ability to take the severance that they may be counting on. Anomie⚔12:27, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
There are several questions emerging about how the Foundation is approaching the current conversation about unions, and I wanted to address these questions directly. We respect the right of our staff to unionize if they vote to do so.
As of this writing, Foundation leadership has not received a formal request from any organization to be recognized as a union representing U.S.-based staff. In order to lawfully recognize and negotiate with a labor organization, that organization must represent at least a majority of eligible staff members. In the U.S., that is typically determined by the outcome of a secret ballot election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board. If eligible staff members do reach the 30 percent threshold required under U.S. law to request a vote to unionize, the Foundation will respect the legal process. No such vote has been requested at the Foundation. We respect the rights of all eligible staff to vote and if the majority of eligible staff vote in favor of representation, we would proceed to negotiate in good faith. Stephen LaPorte (WMF) (talk) 23:41, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
As of this writing, Foundation leadership has not received a formal request from any organization to be recognized as a union representing U.S.-based staff.
So why did you sack incredibly dedicated and super-talented developers? Those people just need an office and peace and quiet—stop managing them, get out their way, and they will do what they've done for many years before you arrived. Johnuniq (talk) 23:59, 21 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
(To both) As Stephen’s user page notes, he is WMF’s legal counsel, so not necessarily someone in charge of hiring or firing anyone. His message seems also to be purely about the legal aspects of compliance of WMF with the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 since that’s where his competence in the organisation lies. It doesn’t mean that the wider WMF shouldn’t be cordial with the union and hopefully recognise it, but I don’t think someone like Stephen would deviate from the legal standpoint of things as opposed to the wider moral standpoint. On that note, pressuring the Board would probably be infinitely better than trying to pressure even the top lawyer, as they usually don’t decide things like that. stjn00:10, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Stephen! Thanks a lot for your reply. I am delighted to know of your commitment to negotiate in good faith when compelled by the relevant legislation. Many people here, including myself, would love to see your offer to do so extend to the union-forming process itself. Namely, the Foundation could provide further reassurances in that regards towards employees setting up such a union, and to not interfere with such activities even before the relevant threshold is reached. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 00:12, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
If eligible staff members do reach the 30 percent threshold required under U.S. law to request a vote to unionize, the Foundation will respect the legal process. – What a delightful if. I imagine it would be rather hard to count towards that 30% threshold if one is no longer employed, for whatever reason. fifteen thousand two hundred twenty four (talk) 00:15, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
So, essentially: "we'll respect the process once we're required to do so"? That feels very much the bare minimum, especially if you fire pro-unionising staff before such a process could officially commence. nilnz00:17, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Seems like labor unions in the United States#Labor negotiations and members-only unionism are relevant Wikipedia articles/sections here. I don't see that The ability of such unions to meet on workplace grounds also relies upon the discretion of management (in members-only unionism) implies that it would be unlawful for the WMF Board to recognize and negotiate with a [minority] labor organization. The sentence In order to lawfully recognize and negotiate with a labor organization, that organization must represent at least a majority of eligible staff members sounds like a legally false statement (I'm not a lawyer, just using common sense). It rather sounds like "In order for WMF to be forced to legally recognize and negotiate with a labor organization, that organization must represent at least a majority of eligible staff members [in the US]". In other words, it seems that the WMF Board is unwilling to voluntarily negotiate with WWU, and would be only willing to accept to do so based on a show of force (strict majority of representation). It's as if WMF Board members have completely forgotten what WP:!VOTEs are. What's wrong with the WMF Board treating WMF employees as reasonable people, especially if grouped together in one or more minority unions, despite the Board (apparently) not being legally forced to do so? Boud (talk) 00:42, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I believe (IANAL) that when they use the term "negotiate", they are referring to formal negotiations between the WMF and WWU (ie. collective bargaining). In that case, it is true that a union must represent at least a majority of staff members, even if the WMF voluntarily recognizes the union [34]. In fact, it is unlawful for employers to[...] Recognize, bargain with, or execute an agreement with a union that lacks majority support among unit employees[35]. I assume this differs for members-only unionism, in which the union only negotiates on behalf of the members, but based on my reading of WWU's FAQ, they are not attempting to be one. ARandomName123 (talk)Ping me!01:23, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
@Stephen, thanks for weighing in, but I think people want more concrete answers from your client about what the fuck they're thinking rather than a commitment to comply with US labor law. voorts (talk/contributions) 02:05, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
User:Slaporte (WMF): there are two routes for recognizing a union in the US: the forced route (the vote) or the voluntary route when 50% is reached. Will the Foundation recognize the union voluntarily as well? And will the Foundation help the union being formed, for instance by providing a room for prospective union members to meet or spreading information about people's rights, including the right not to be fired for unionization efforts? —Femke 🐦 (talk) 06:00, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Then.... whose? (Frankly, I'm more worried about this becoming the Wikimedia Foundation v. Wiki WatchersWorkers Union court case if the NLRA were to be the case's main subject.) George Ho (talk) 06:33, 22 May 2026 (UTC); self-corrected, 07:50, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
WMF Legal's? or WWU? Whether or not the NRLB is contacted depends on whether or not WMF decides to voluntarily recognize the WWU, assuming it has majority support [36]. I don't see why this needs to be a court case either. There is no reason to believe the WMF will violate the NLRA, should WWU present the necessary number of signatories. ARandomName123 (talk)Ping me!06:42, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry. I just got excited when I saw 100+ signatures of "editorial strike" and a link from the Labor Dept. (BTW, I just now fully read the article about the Act itself and realized that company unions have been outlawed in the US since.) George Ho (talk) 06:50, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
AFAIK from the union’s page there is an internal channel for union discussions at WMF’s Slack, which is probably as close as you can get to ‘a room for prospective union members’ in a remote-first environment. stjn10:40, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
@Slaporte (WMF) @User:BMeehan-WMF @Jimmy Wales it is great that WMF is aware of textbook legal requirements for unionization, but that is far from the spirit or essence of what is being discussed here.
The current optics is a chilling message to any remaining WMF employees to fall in line. We should be hearing from the CEO, who is well aware that the National Labor Relations Board is understaffed by the most anti-labor President in US history. WMF is also aware, that even pre-union recognition, workers have a right to speak freely, without fear of intimidation or consequences.
Instead of wasting precious WMF resources on unfair labor practices litigation, or the community's dwindling on energy, WMF would do well to reinstate the sacked workers (change the team or project...fine) but don't financially penalize people.
Prove this is not a cynical union busting measure, by providing room availability to discuss unionization without coercive messaging or employing notorious union-busting law firms. All of this would go a long way to mitigate this shit storm that is headed our way. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 10:19, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
Everything discussed here so far is only nibbling around the edges of the issue. The real issue is with the undemocratic and unrepresentative Board of Trustees. Currently, it consists of eight seats sourced from the wider Wikimedia community, seven appointed by the board itself; and one founder's seat reserved for Wales. This means that at best the community has 50% of the seats, but the WMF also controls those elections, limiting the candidates to those that they support and rejecting those that the community supports like Kudpung.
If we are to solve these issues in the long term, the board needs to be reformed. I propose that we include two demands related by this in any action we take:
Seats sourced from the wider Wikimedia community must at all times makes up at least two-thirds of the Board of Trustees
These seats are directly elected by the community, under a "one editor, one vote" system. Candidates may only be excluded from the community vote when there are legal reasons to do so (for example, the candidate being under US sanctions)
I recently called out a board member for stating that the Board's input into the Annual Plan wouldn't be public and for saying that the board was approachable. In other words I 100% think we need to reform the Board of Trustees. However, I also think we can achieve meaningful progress and change in the areas being asked for above in reagrds to the people being laid off, the uninonization effort, and the support rather than destruction of the Community Wishlist. Adding demands about the board to this will make everything harder precisely because it will no longer be possible for WMF Employees to say yes. So mark me down as "right general ideas, right problem, wrong place/time". Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 02:35, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
At the moment, there is a level of momentum among the community, to the extent that nuclear ideas like blocking funding are being considered. I think that we should take advantage of this opportunity to permanently solve the problem, rather than having the WMF make a couple of minor concessions and then continuing exactly as they were before. BilledMammal (talk) 02:41, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I think based on the commentary above that many don't feel that doing right by the people involved here are "minor concessions". Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 02:44, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I’d much rather something less concrete like this, otherwise it risks alienating those who support reform but not that version, and we need more consideration about it to know what’s best Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 07:27, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with the above responses that this is not the right time to propose this. As much as I would love to see structural reform of the WMF to make it more democratic and cooperative, proposing sweeping changes like this right now is putting the cart before the horse. --Grnrchst (talk) 09:50, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
While I strongly concur in principle that something needs to change in how the board is constituted, I think you'll find that in my 20 years here I have never put myself forward as as a candidate for the board. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 10:23, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I'm thinking about starting a Meta-wiki RFC to campaign rehiring and then transferring former members of disbanded CommTech as derivative of the following:
If the CommTech disbanding is not undone, then transfer those software engineers to other teams instead of laying them off.
I would recommend waiting on this. Suman's statement above about we’re already working with affected staff to expedite interviews for open roles does seem like they've shifted their thinking and are now trying to find other roles in WMF for these folks. I would also encourage WMF to reply to this section and make a stronger statement about this, such as "if the CommTech team remains disbanded, I am confident that we will be able to find other roles at WMF for all 6 affected staff". A statement like that would go a long way towards convincing folks that less pressure is needed in this tense moment. –Novem Linguae (talk) 05:05, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
It is definitely not nice that six people are being fired, and I definitely would not like to be in their place right now. I sincerely hope they will quickly find new jobs or get different positions within WMF if they wish to. Please accept my deep compassion.
However, I tried to understand what is being discussed here, with about a thousands replies per day (really difficult to keep up) and severe consequences proposed like a blackout or even cutting off the fundraising banners (imo a non-starter but is kept being discussed). I see several themes, and most of them should not be seriously discussed here.
The team should not have been disbanded - may be yes, may be no, it depends on how the WMF organizes their work, and I do not feel we should tell them how to do it, especially in view of imminent big changes due to restructuring of Google search, when the number of human Wikipedia readers is going to drop to zero;
It is unethical to fire people on such a short notice - fully agree, but this is perfectly legal and quite common in the US, and this is a significant part of the story why the WMF is in the US and not in Europe where this would be illegal. We are not here to improve the US labor legislation;
The WMF resists unionizing - if this is the case, and this is illegal (no opinion myself) - if this is the case, just go to court;
How to technically organize the blackout - well, may be first run an RfC and see whether there is consensus to do it. I personally would oppose;
May be some other topics which are difficult for me to distill.
Based on the above, I believe the only issue which is worthwhile to discuss is whether the interaction between the WMF and the community concerning the tech issues is optimal. This is an important issue, and I have been critical about it in the past, but it is smth running already for years, and might or might not be related to the events which lead to the opening of this thread. Could we focus a bit please? It is great if we want to make the planet better, but I an not sure this thread is the effective way to do it. Let us concentrate on smth we can really achieve.--Ymblanter (talk) 05:55, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I believe the only issue which is worthwhile to discuss is whether the interaction between the WMF and the community concerning the tech issues is optimal. As of writing, over 100 editors disagree with that sentiment. voorts (talk/contributions) 06:20, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
I've been watching this discussion from afar for a bit now. While I obviously support the well-being of the affected engineers, I have to ask: have the affected employees really been laid off from the WMF, or have their roles simply been disbanded? Do we know for sure that they were fired? Or are they still employed by the WMF and just being transferred to other teams? I ask this because when a WMF employee stops working for the Foundation, their official WMF account is locked (example), and none of the official work accounts listed at m:Community Tech/Team have been locked.
Beyond that, the WMF is in a no-win situation right now:
If they really are union-busting, that's most definitely unethical and possibly illegal;
If they're not union-busting, which is what I'm inclined to believe, then nobody will believe them.
I've noticed the same thing. But, on the other hand, if they were being reassigned I'd expect the official communication from Suman above to say that rather than corpo-speak about "expedite interviews for open roles" and "through this transition" that seem to indicate they're having to effectively re-apply if they want to stay. Anomie⚔12:35, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
The WMF has explicitly said "all five engineers and a manager impacted by the change are encouraged to apply for existing and upcoming roles at the Foundation", which is corporate-speak for "their current jobs are gone and we are not guaranteeing new jobs". So yes, that's a layoff, not being transferred to another team. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe|🤷) 12:35, 22 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
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