“Wikipedia runs on people. It shouldn’t run over people."
Something big is happening. It’s not good.
479 English Wikipedia editors just put their names on a strike petition.
Between them, they have made 8.6 million edits, written 36,000 articles, and built 164 of the encyclopedia’s Featured Articles.
They have agreed, in writing, that if Wiki Workers United, the prospective union of Wikimedia Foundation staff, calls for collective action, they will answer. Up to and including putting down their tools.
A week before the petition launched, the Wikimedia Foundation laid off the user who started the parallel drive for the union on Wikimedia’s central ‘meta’ wiki. Her name was TheresNoTime.
The English page is called Wikipedia:Wiki Workers United solidarity, and it is now the 4th-largest petition in English Wikipedia’s history. It is still growing. Most editors have not heard about it.
The voices
The signatures stack up with comments:
“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.”
“As a unionized worker and shop steward I’d be remiss if I didn’t give solidarity to WWU. If the union calls for a boycott then I will be doing a boycott.”
“Why do we let the WMF stomp all over us all the time?”
And in the parallel petition over on meta.wikimedia.org, the line that captures the entire moment in one sentence:
“User:TheresNoTime, was just laid off. I couldn’t come up with a better case for this union if I tried.”
The strike is already being engineered
This is where the petition becomes something more.
On the talk page, an editor named CNC asked any willing administrator to please block him from editing articles, on request, so he could honor a strike call without breaking his own habits. Within minutes, the administrator Femke replied: “Happy to place mainspace blocks (or full block) so people can still engage here if it comes to an editor strike.”
Other admins signed up to do the same.
Tamzin, an administrator who proposed the petition, has already written an essay titled “What would an editorial strike look like?” Watchlist banners are being drafted. Editors are circulating “In solidarity” links in their signatures. The community is debating, in real time, whether mainspace blocks should come with strikethrough formatting, and whether template editors can bypass an edit filter that blocks every edit.
These are people working out the mechanics of a strike on Wikipedia in public, in collaboration, calmly, the way they would draft a policy.
That is the part the Wikimedia Foundation should be reading most carefully. Not the signatures. The plumbing underneath them.
Why it matters to you
If you have ever looked up a medication, a Supreme Court ruling, a historical event, a public figure, a chemical compound, an election result, or a movie’s cast list and trusted the answer, you have trusted these people. Not the Foundation. The volunteers and the staff who build alongside them. The encyclopedia is the work of their hands.
The Foundation fired Brooke Vibber, MediaWiki’s most influential developer, who had publicly backed the staff union, a week before it disbanded Community Tech, most of whose team were union members. It disbanded Community Tech, the entire team whose job was to listen to volunteers, and fired the engineers on it. Most of the people fired were union members. The Foundation is sitting on $296 million in reserves and a new AI-licensing revenue stream from selling Wikipedia content to the same companies whose chatbots are replacing search.
And the editors who write the encyclopedia, the ones with 8.6 million edits between them, started signing a page.
They are not yet on strike. They are on the record.
Wikipedia runs on people. It shouldn’t run over people.
Editors can add their name here: Wikipedia:Wiki Workers United solidarity
Note:
The reactions making the rounds right now are real, and they say something about how much people care about Wikipedia. But those aren’t coming from the people organizing the Wikimedia workers union.
Union organizers haven’t started or promoted any of these actions or reactions from editors (e.g. strike/banners) or from donors (e.g. cancellations), in public (or in private). These blogs, in covering the community’s anger, make it too easy to read all of it as the union’s doing. It isn’t.
I don’t know who is and isn’t part of the union effort beyond what’s already public, and I’m not trying to find out. But here’s what I feel sure of: nobody involved wants to see these projects harmed. We’re all here for the same reason. We want them to thrive.
