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Latest comment: 2 days ago84 comments20 people in discussion
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. 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 , 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!
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
"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" translation to French: "Wikifunctions returned a failed response: No matching lexeme for item in language"
Random "article", translation to Italian: "Wikifunctions returned a failed response: Number of arguments mismatch"
Random "article" translation to Spanish: "(en) Bahrain is a country in Middle East." Hey, I can understand Spanish!
Random "article" translation to Dutch: "Brussel is the hoofdstad of België." THE hoofdstad? Yep, clearly not a problem with the use of articles...
Random "article" 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", 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, 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. 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" 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 "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 "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." or even worse " Bisexuelles lieben Fraus. Bisexuelles lieben Manns."
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-) 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
@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 directly using the function "English plural", 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."
Oh well, at least I learned that "An information is a knowledge." or "biseksualiteit ∈ {seksuele oriëntatie}" in Dutch or still "Bisexuelles lieben Fraus. Bisexuelles lieben Manns." in German . 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 . 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, 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" 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
Latest comment: 11 days ago2 comments2 people in discussion
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. fifteenthousandtwohundredtwentyfour(talk) 13:24, 13 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Forcing WMF employees to use Salesforce Inc is an ethical violation
Latest comment: 1 day ago26 comments12 people in discussion
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." (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 think Commons is a good case study. In theory, only storage and server capacity are needed to deliver the media files — a clear WMF duty. In practice, the editor community there relies on the maintenance of tools like video2commons and croptool, for whom the responsibility fell to volunteer developers albeit using toolforge hosting. Both of those tools were abandoned by their original developers for a time, and there was a call for WMF to help restart dev activity around them, and eventually it happened (perhaps because it wasn't that expensive, all things considered). Arlo James Barnes18:30, 23 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
If they are already laid off, I don’t think no matter how much protest and union is going to bring them back. It’s a done deal. But happy to be proven wrong. 🐈Cinaroot07:51, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
The idea is that they could apply for open roles. At the start of our protest, there weren't really suitable roles to apply for, but might be changing. We should ask for more however: a functioning wishlist process and a culture change within WMF to respect community expertise. In solidarity, —Femke (talk) 🐦 08:21, 24 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
Under California state law (and other states), a termination within 90 days of protected union activity creates a rebuttable presumption that the termination was illegal retaliation. I think it's been less than 90 days since WWU was launched. For this reason, I doubt any of the laid off workers will have a hard time finding lawyers to take their case. Also for this reason, not sure what the WMF was thinking making this move at this time, it could prove to be a massive own goal. Levivich (talk) 18:51, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Although it's circumstantial regardless of whether it helps or hurts the WMF, I've got to say this is the most suspicious point so far and would be interested in seeing this point addressed specifically. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 19:36, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Oh wow, there are exactly 90 days between Feb 19 and May 20 (when the layoffs were publicly announced), what a coincidence. Levivich (talk) 19:58, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Nice theory, but contradicted by this February 6 announcement:
Five years ago I made a Twitter post calling for employees of @wikimediafoundation to organize a union. Yesterday [February 5] a group of us came out publicly to all other staff as being actively engaged in that effort. I’m proud of everyone who has helped get us to this new milestone and I look forward to being part of a recognized bargaining unit in the future.
By the way, the author of that post is quite clearly still employed as of today, another reason to be a bit more skeptical of Tamzin's "This is blatant union-busting" conspiracy theory. (To their partial credit, they already seem to be backtrackinga little, now acknowledging that There are two ways ... etc.)
You found someone still employed who supported a union, and concluded the sackings are not union busting. So what are they? The sacked staffers have dedicated decades developing software that securely runs Wikipedia. Is the WMF merely being ignorant and dismissive regarding their staff and the community? Johnuniq (talk) 03:08, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
You would be correct in assuming that I was only commenting about the plausibility of union busting, not defending the dismantling of this particular team and the roles of the six staffers (and if they indeed end up being fired because of the dismantling of the team, that would indeed be very regrettable). Regards, HaeB (talk) 04:14, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
WMF leadership laying off six people from the Community Tech team, by itself, is already a fiasco that warrants the strong community response displayed in the current discussion. Editors like me are supporting Wiki Workers United to help prevent this kind of institutional error in the future.Additionally, Tamzin and I have both processed enough SPI cases to know that when a suspected sockpuppet makes their account just over 90 days after the most recent sockpuppet was identified and blocked, the timing indicates that that the new account may be attempting to evade detection (due to the 90-day data retention period). In the current situation, the WMF is laying off employees approximately 90 days after union formation, which corresponds to the 90-day anti-retaliation period designated in California's Equal Pay and Anti-Retaliation Protection Act. A majority of editors in this discussion have decided that the possibility of union busting is worth looking into instead of dismissing. —Newslingertalk07:48, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
The social media post does not contradict February 19. It does not even contradict ARandomName123's "at least February 19".
Tamzin "backtracked" by... saying that–of the "two ways"–the second, non–union-busting one "would be more damning".
Tamzin was not the only one to suggest union-busting. In fact, the top of this section is someone other than Tamzin suggesting it.
Bryan's post absolutely contradicts the exactly 90 days theory.
We now have a public statement from Wiki Workers Union (which someone posted below shortly after my comment) which makes the union busting claim even more implausible.
I'm primarily interested in finding out what actually happened, rather than in exchanging opinions about it here. As explained below in more detail, Tamzin had absolutely backtracked on the factual union busting claim. As for "would be more damning", that's a matter of opinion; I do actually agree with Tamzin that an institutional hostility toward dissenters, freethinkers, and valuable members of the community would be (and quite plausibly is) a big problem. But that's very different from actual labor law violations.
"By the way, the author of that post is quite clearly still employed as of today, another reason to be a bit more skeptical of Tamzin's 'This is blatant union-busting' conspiracy theory.",
"...they already seem to be backtracking a little...",
"it looks like hundreds of community members have been whipping themselves into a frenzy"
"IMO we failed basic journalistic standards there"
You seem have put much more effort into compiling these quotes than in understanding what they are about. E.g. the last one expressed my assessment of whether a particular Signpost article failed certain journalistic standards, not an opinion about particular events at WMF.
You're like a person who hears someone saying "I'm not interested in exchanging opinions about politics here" and retorts "Ha! But you just said you like strawberry ice cream and think that 'Dune: Part Two' was a bad movie!"
PS: And since we have folks here who enjoy speculating about timings, I'll reiterate my disappointment about a general lack of curiosity on this page about whether there might have been any recent changes at WMF that could have, say, motivated such a group of employees to finally implement a five year old idea in early February 2026. I don't know if that's the case, but there sure are more plausible hypotheses to explore at this point than those that many here have spent time on. Regards, HaeB (talk) 06:35, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
It means that your reasoning above had been based on a mistaken assumption (my bolding):
Under California state law (and other states), a termination within 90 days of protected union activity creates a rebuttable presumption that the termination was illegal retaliation. I think it's been less than 90 days since WWU was launched. For this reason, I doubt any of the laid off workers will have a hard time finding lawyers to take their case. Also for this reason, not sure what the WMF was thinking making this move at this time, it could prove to be a massive own goal. Levivich (talk) 18:51, 22 May 2026 (UTC)
@ARandomName123 and @Tamzin, since your comments came up in a offwiki discussion, as somebody who was significantly involved in the background I want to set a few records straight. The layoffs/disbanding did not occur on May 20th, instead it occurred atleast a day before it was announced to the community. PTAC in particular was notified about the change almost 24 hours before it was announced. I will also note that this change almost word for word was brought up and discussed in depth during a internal WMF meeting by Suman that I was a part of back in Feb 11-12 long before the metawiki page for the union itself was created. (For the record I voiced my concerns during the meeting and in every subsequent notification about it) But even keeping that aside, the abstract idea of "all the other teams should work on wishes" is a strategy that has been in the works for a while now within the org. The oldest public evidence for this is the creation of the Unsupported Tools Working Group all the way back in September of 2025 which was created since the WMF wanted a structure to be able to prioritize wishes in areas that were not "supported" through other teams. Sohom (talk) 06:53, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Feb 11-12 is shortly after Feb 5, when WWU was announced (according to HaeB's post above), and "all the other teams should work on wishes" is not the same thing as "lay off commtech and make them all reapply for new jobs." I'm curious as to when the idea of laying off commtech was discussed and decided (before or after WWU). That timeline is unclear. Levivich (talk) 07:05, 23 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.
I'll defer to technical contributors here: instead of editors going on strike, wouldn't it make a lot more sense just to turn off the fundraising banners? My understanding was that this is possible by editing MediaWiki:common.css. This would be unobtrusive, wouldn't compromise our editorial standards, and would be sure to get the WMF listening to our concerns. If there's some support here, someone (preferably someone who actually knows how this stuff works) should start an RfC. lp0onfire()15:21, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I think "compromising our editorial standards" is the point. English Wikipedia is the WMF's poster child and premier product. If we all throw our hands up and let the vandals in and let the wiki turn into a veritable graffiti wall for as long as it takes for demands to be met, that's the thing that'd put the most pressure on the WMF. And we have a luxury of latitude to do so that employees at regular companies don't; we're all volunteers, the WMF has no means to compel us to resume editing. Athanelar (talk) 15:27, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Cynically, I don’t think anyone in a decision-making position (i.e. deciding whose livelihood to take away) cares about the editorial content on the wiki, at least not enough for vandalism to apply any pressure. Gnomingstuff (talk) 21:49, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Sure, but they might if it goes on for a couple of weeks and there's a spur of news coverage about Wikipedia's suddenly plummeting standards. Athanelar (talk) 00:00, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Forgive me for being cynical as well, as I do support the strike in theory (I'll stay neutral on the petition above as I was told about this off-wiki and don't want to be canvassed). But I'll be the devil's advocate and say that if I were more skeptical, I'd think that allowing vandalism to fester on-wiki could be detrimental for far longer than this strike lasts. To give a real-life analog, my city has buildings that have had graffiti for years, but it took people just hours to create that graffiti. And like Gnomingstuff said, maybe WMF leadership doesn't care about the equivalent of living in a graffitied building. –Epicgenius (talk) 14:00, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Currently being discussed below. I am open to starting an RfC once the specifics of the proposal are workshopped (whether to make it indefinite or time-limited, whether to replace it with a solidarity message, etc.) Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 15:31, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
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 get the concern but there’s close to zero chance that turning off donations had anything directly to do with layoffs besides being a usable fig leaf Gnomingstuff (talk) 23:50, 22 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
it's also kind of gross -- I'm sorry, but there's no more polite way to put it -- to justify people losing their jobs as "we had to do it because the community just wants too much stuff." Gnomingstuff (talk) 14:21, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
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.
"Open roles" have been brought up several times -- albeit via the statement we are actively interviewing staff who have expressed interest in other open roles, which contains the giant loophole of "well, they clearly aren't interested, so...."
Anyway, these are the current open product/engineering roles, at least the public ones. Of note: There are fewer than six of them (although again, these are only the currently open postings). One of them is a SRE role, which is more specialized. There don't seem to be any engineering openings at the staff or managerial level. And at the risk of being a huge cliche, I will point out that one of these roles asks for "experience with leveraging agentic coding to scale the work of small engineering teams," which suggests another possible angle for these layoffs. Gnomingstuff (talk) 18:44, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
> job listing looks for "experience with leveraging agentic coding"
A mandate is unnecessary if the workforce is curated to select for those who use AI. Regardless, the angle of an organization seeking out people with "experience with leveraging agentic coding to scale the work of small engineering teams" is very clear (they want to use AI to supplement or supplant labor). fifteenthousandtwohundredtwentyfour(talk) 22:06, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
to be clear the second part of that statement (“scale small teams”) is the reason why I brought it up, since it pertains to labor
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
WP:FRAM is over ~375K bytes, meanwhile this whole thread is now 245K bytes, so in maybe 50-100K more bytes or so, there would be much more of a need to move this discussion to its own page. In any case, whether it'd be soon, or after this thread reaches 300K+ bytes, I would support moving to a separate project-space page. - BlueEleephant (talk · contribs) 22:46, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
True, and it may be worth noting that all archives of FRAMGATE total up (including the main incident page itself) over 3.5 million bytes{1}, so although this discussion is well over the size that FRAMGATE was when it was moved, we are (luckily?) nowhere close to the multi-million byte disaster that FRAMGATE was. - BlueEleephant (talk · contribs) 16:36, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I know I'm the person who proposed this, but why is this being done on Phabricator? Phabricator is for software changes and the like. Tbh, I think this should be decided on-wiki. CheeseAndJamSamdwich (talk) 17:09, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Yeah, the gist is that moving the page has some unique problems when it comes to Discussion Tools and people who are subscribed to notifications. Clovermoss🍀(talk)18:05, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
If this is split, I would suggest that the petition be moved to its own page, because by its nature it goes beyond the immediate controversy. Editors who've signed it have agreed to conditionally strike at any point, not just in response to the CommTech dissolution. I would suggest a title like Wikipedia:Collective action solidarity petition. I am agnostic as to whether a split is currently necessary, or I guess maybe the slightest bit opposed because some backlinks would then be an extra click away, which can drive down attention. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe|🤷) 18:10, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Editors who've signed it have agreed to conditionally strike at any point, not just in response to the CommTech dissolution. That is not at all clear from the text of the petition. SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 18:35, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
It is in fact very clear that the sole condition for a strike is if called upon by WWU. The petition itself isn't isolated to this topic, it is demonstrating the willingness to strike for a union. That's it. CNCin solidarity (talk) 18:39, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I think Piano's concern is more about how conditional of a promise this is. For example, a lot of people being willing to show solidarity with the WWU in the aftermath of this vs automatic support if there's a change that upsets them a few years in the future. I don't think everyone is nessecarily agreeing to the latter and I don't think that's even what you're arguing for here. But I understand how the comment can be read that way, especially if you're taking it very literally. Clovermoss🍀(talk)18:43, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Yeah, I (and many others, probably) signed the petition assuming it only applies to the CommTech controversy, but I apparently have now committed to strike for WWU whenever they call for it, not just in response to this incident. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; it just hasn't been explained very well. SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 18:47, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I don't even think that's what is meant above, although other people are free to explain what they mean instead of me reading into it. But I think they were taking your comment to mean that if the WWU wanted solidarity right now and phrased it differently than strictly mentioning CommTech that that's not what people were agreeing to? And I think the signers are upset about everything enough to commit to a strike if called on to do so in the immediate future by the WWU, which is something I think both of you agree on. Clovermoss🍀(talk)18:55, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
He wasn't globally banned at the time, which is part of why he was able to get in (he signed up using his real name). Also not a great experience for me considering I interacted with him on-wiki at WT:CHILDPROTECT and I have my own trauma with CSA, let alone the horrible year I had had IRL. I paid a significant amount of money to have a "vacation" where I risked my life and got publically berated by the then-CEO. I will say for the record that at least she apologized after the conference when I directly asked her to. Clovermoss🍀(talk)21:23, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I will say, the Serbian Wikipedia bans did not come from a void, there were legitimate problems in that area that were reported to T&S by community members including but not limited to a community of admins that considered a CU performing undisclosed paid edits for commercial news companies to not be a huge deal. Sohom (talk) 22:16, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
That's useful context. Was this ever officially communicated in any way or is more along the lines of if you know, you know? I feel like sometimes we rely too much on our informal knowledge networks of trying to figure out what in the world is happening when the official communication from the foundation is often lacking. Or sometimes even that it's not hidden at all but announced in a place that isn't that visible to the average editor. Clovermoss🍀(talk)22:19, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
And this is how I find out we even have a case review council. I bet I'm not the only one who didn't know it existed. As for the rest, it's one thing for something to be well-known in certain circles vs being well-known in other contexts. I feel like this is another indicator of the communication issue, even if I know the foundation is trying somewhat with stuff like the bulletin. Clovermoss🍀(talk)22:58, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Abstract Wikipedia isn't "rubbish", it's a viable project that happens to have a few flaws while in its beta phase. Rome wasn't built in a day. Feeglgeef (talk) 01:55, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I'll remind you that enwiki wasn't built in a day either, the initial software used for it needed to be replaced, and yet now, with the hindsight of 25 years, one would not consider it a distraction from Bomis' pornography business or rubbish as a typical person might have back then. Feeglgeef (talk) 02:00, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I think I am. When I sign things, I am signing what is literally described word for word. Not the context, not the issue, not the location, not the language, not what anyone else is talking about, not what the proposer thinks might happen, but the statement. Only the statement, because that is the only binding part of such a commitment. I don't know what anyone is doing when they put pen to paper, but I'd recommend in future double checking the wording (or any small print) next time if there is any misunderstanding, confusion, or ambiguity. Ask questions if not sure etc. But anyway, thanks for bring this up. It seems other editors may have unwillingly signed up to support a union, broadly speaking, without realising it. CNCin solidarity (talk) 18:56, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I definitely signed up to support a union and to act if they decide they want us to strike, I just didn't sign up to automatically support them for future shows of solidarity forever. As you said, I agreed to what's there. Not what's not there. Clovermoss🍀(talk)19:02, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Anyone is welcome to rescind their support for union action at any time. If you no longer wish to support union action, you can remove/strike your signature. CNCin solidarity (talk) 19:21, 23 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.
Even if there is nothing explicitly written saying that, it's reasonable to assume that people will be very upset at you if you withdraw your support for something that you have pledged to partake in. SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 20:04, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
When you imply certain meanings, everyone has their own interpretations. Why would you blame someone for changing their minds when the implications and meaning of the action changes? The only thing that matters is the text that people attached their names to. GGOTCC20:11, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
This is patently false. There are numerous reasons why editors might withdraw, many of which are completely legitimate. The overwhelming majority have no financial gain from breaking a strike, so to compare this to other unions striking against corporations or government entities is an extremely unrelaible comparison imo. CNCin solidarity (talk) 20:15, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I meant evidence, not the opinion of a single editor. Notably an editor that has had mud slung at them for the past 24 hours at BN over that essay. Do we have policies, guidelines, or statements of intent over this? No, thus as always, WP:ESSAY applies. To quote the response to this lower down, which is only fair: 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. (emphasis included). CNCin solidarity (talk) 20:05, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I'll just be blunt and say it: I'm afraid of the social consequences that I think will come if I were to withdraw. I don't feel safe disagreeing. SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 20:09, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
You seem to the the only one talking about people who change their mind. Have you received threats that require intervention? GGOTCC20:14, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I'm very sorry to hear that, that is not the atmosphere that's intended here whatsoever. Honestly, just try and ignore what Tamzin has observed if possible. It's only an opinion, not one I share, per above and context. CNCin solidarity (talk) 20:19, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
The last sentence says 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. One show of collective action is not a guarantee for future shows of collective action and I think a lot of people signing took this statement at face value. People support what they supported. I think we're fighting too much over "any point" words that Tamzin used above and not in the thing that people actually signed. If you genuinely think people are agreeing to something beyond what was written, I'd strongly encourage you to double check with individuals that that truly is the case, as I don't see why we should assume that it would be. Clovermoss🍀(talk)19:44, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
To me that's a 101 on how consensus works, not based on any time-sensitive issue in particular. I considered that as part of the small print in normal sized text as it made no reference to the current issue. I don't believe anyone is agreeing to anything beyond what was written, I've already clarified this further down, but I do believe they have agreed to what is written. Ultimately how editors interpret that is up to the individual. CNCin solidarity (talk) 19:58, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
@SuperPianoMan9167 @Clovermoss: I want to be clear, the plain text of the petition indicates a standing willingness to engage in collective action, and while there's common-sense limitations to that (like if it were years later and WWU had been taken over by some bad element), I would say that if your intention is limited only to the present dispute, you should remove your signature, because otherwise you have signed something you don't agree with. Removing your signature is fine, just like not signing it is fine. The whole point here is that this is a volunteer project.To SuperPianoMan in particular, I will say, I am growing increasingly frustrated by the hysteria over a petition where people are invited to say that they would individually participate in a voluntary and policy-compliant labor action if it were hypothetically to occur, and would ask that, if anyone else would like to allege malice in my observation that going against social trends can lead to social consequences, they please do so at WP:AN/I rather than here (let alone, for whatever reason BN) so that I can defend myself in earnest against that facially dishonest personal attack. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe|🤷) 21:55, 23 May 2026 (UTC) Struck the word "else" to reflect my apology for mischaracterizing SPM as alleging malice. 22:32, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for the response. I do agree with your observation that going against social trends leads to social consequences and I do not believe that there is any malice in that observation. SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 21:59, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
It's the common sense limitations part for me, which I hopefully got across as clearly as I could. As I was saying, I think people were reading a bit too much into your "any point", but that's the nature of a website where everyone argues about everything from every possible angle (which I tend to find engaging rather than frustrating as long as I don't find myself up against a brick wall, but I know not everyone's like that). I'm comfortable keeping my signature where it is for now.
I don't think "hysteria" is the best word to be using in an already tense discussion, but I do agree with you that there are better venues for people who are concerned about civility (not trying to single you out in particular, just as a general reminder for everyone that they can seek recourse there if they feel something isn't being adequately addressed).
I'd also like to say that I greatly appreciate that you began organizing the petition in the first place, as it gives people a chance to collectively show their support. I think this is probably the most promising sign in recent memory that people are willing to stand up for foundation employees that do good work and that a lot of the problems people have with the foundation are rather institutional in nature. Clovermoss🍀(talk)22:12, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Sounds like I need to go take a look at BN because I might be missing some context. I just don't personally think escalating rhetoric tends to end well in a general sense. It can leave people on the fence slightly intimidated and to feel pressure one way or the other. People should be able to raise concerns without any of that baggage (hence what I say on my userpage). That said, I strongly consider anyone on the fence to think about what they think now. They can always change their mind later if they think circumstances warrant it, but I think that we have a lot of overlap as a community when it comes to caring about the core values this conversation is about.Clovermoss🍀(talk)22:48, 23 May 2026 (UTC), bolded text at 23:32, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Have been doing that for the past several minutes. I can understand why that experience would be frustrating, but I also think it's generally within WP:ADMINACCT. People are supposed to bring up possible concerns whenever someone requests to be resysopped. I'd rather someone speak up and it turns out that there's no need to be concerned than the other way around. That way people can figure out whether it's something people actually need to be concerned about or not. The longer that discussion went, the clearer it became that an editor had a particular niche interpretation of WP:INVOLVED. I'm not Tamzin, so I would've responded differently from them, but it's clear that bureaucrats had no issue resysopping in a procedural sense, because that's also what they're supposed to do. The main difference this missing context adds to this discussion for me in a personal sense is a better understanding of why recall of admins was brought up as a talking point on this page at all. Clovermoss🍀(talk)23:23, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I don't have a stick? I'm referencing a discussion that took place hours ago on this page where the mention of recall seemed like it came out of left field. It feels slightly less out of nowhere now. Understanding someone's perspective better does not mean that you nessecarily agree with them. Anyways, I'm going to go back and bold what I think the most important part of this conversation is, because I don't want that to get message to get lost amongst a wall of text. Clovermoss🍀(talk)23:31, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I'm mostly just confused why you took my comment like that, but I've brought it up on your talk page and we can talk more about it there. I really don't want to distract from the greater importance of what's going on here. Clovermoss🍀(talk)23:43, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
@GGOTCC: The indentation on this page is crazy and it's starting to get hard to discern who is replying to who (might just be because I'm on mobile). But I'd like to understand what comment this one is meant to be a reply to since I might not be the only one confused about your confusion. Clovermoss🍀(talk)00:16, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
It seems there's some confusion about my comments at WP:BN, so I'd rather clear things up. My issue with the situation is not an essay. That was an illustration and can be ignored if it's throwing people off. My issue with the situation is that an editor who I had a great deal of respect for has taken an actual issue that involves harm to the project and people who have worked on it, turned it into protecting a union that's not really a union, based this entirely on speculation that this may or may not be about union-busting, decided to recruit other editors to disrupt Wikipedia in the name of protecting this "union", shifted this discussion from a focused issue into labor movement role play at the expense of the project, and created an even bigger disaster in that there are now a huge number of editors signing a petition with very serious implications who all think it means different things. If nothing else, I feel betrayed. And this is all I have to say about this. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 02:49, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Those of us familiar with some of the fired developers know how incredibly dedicated and talented they are. It is not always a good idea to respond to bad events by carrying on like helpless pawns. The central issue is whether the community should accept that super-developers can be kicked out after 20 years service because an inexperienced manager thought they should disband a team working on what Wikipedia needs. The only issue regarding the union is to ask why developers would want to spend their time organizing one. Clearly, they think management is broken. Clearly, they are correct. Johnuniq (talk) 03:20, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
With regards to the massive discussion above: is there a dedicated place where conversations/debates like these can be held? Since yesterday, this sub-section has grown by possibly 25K+ bytes, and as such, I've only read a tiny fraction, so I apologize for any ignorance. So far, it seems like the locus of this new discussion is about signatures, escalations to WP:BN, and related contentious matters, none of which seem to be related to whether or not the whole COMMTECHGATE discussion should be moved to a new location, but of course, I may be wrong.
However, if this new thread is completely unrelated to moving this whole mega-section, then should it be entirely HATted? - BlueEleephant (talk · contribs) 04:07, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Can we have a discussion about whether the section "Proposal to move this discussion to its own page" should be moved to its own page? Phil Bridger (talk) 09:38, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I've gone ahead and collapsed the thread. As you said, the entire discussion is completely irrelevant to the topic as outlined in the section header. For the record, I do think this needs to be split off into its own page; it's increasingly hard to keep track of everything being discussed. --Grnrchst (talk) 11:01, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Part of the collapsed discussion was in response to the proposal to split off the petition separately, as it's independent of COMMTECHGATE, though closely related. Some editors don't agree with that analysis, or weren't aware of it, thus this complicated the how to split part of this proposal, based on that fundamental difference of interpretations. But if there is rough consensus to split, then a bartender-esque split would apply I assume, however that would look. It could also be resplit later if consensus emerges. CNCin solidarity (talk) 11:25, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
You're right that's where the thread started, but it's unfortunately not where it stayed. I just felt compelled to collapse it so we could get back to talking about how to properly split this, which I agree, would not be a trivial thing to do. --Grnrchst (talk) 12:14, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
No issues with the collapse, it was more so a light critique of your closing statement, namely: This entire thread. Anyway, as you said, back to the topic in hand. I support a split, ideally with the petition separately (per your suggestion below), or something similar to that effect. CNCin solidarity (talk) 12:23, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
The 2024 open letter might be a good model to follow. Have the petition in its own page and then put relevant discussions pertaining specifically to the petition into the adjoining talk page. --Grnrchst (talk) 12:16, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Yes, that's essentially what I was thinking. Moving to a space dedicated to discussing the substance of the petition would also make it easier to moderate, as off-topic comments could be simply removed. I think I've convinced myself by now, and no one seems to be objecting, so I will go ahead and split the petition part if there's no objection in the next few hours. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe|🤷) 12:27, 24 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
Has there even been any communication from WWU? All this talk of a strike and action depends on their say-so, and I've heard nothing from their end. ARandomName123 (talk)Ping me!15:18, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
@ARandomName123, you can be sure that they are considering both when it would be best to make a statement, and what that statement should say. In their individual capacity, many WWU members are also Wikipedia volunteers, and many of them have personal connections to editors who are not WMF staff. In solidarity, asilvering (talk) 21:05, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Note from the Wikimedia Foundation on unionization
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
@Chaotic Enby Yes, the Foundation does not interfere with these kinds of activities. Since some staff first started discussion of a union, we have ensured that we'd respect these conversations and we've made this expectation clear to all managers as well. Stephen LaPorte (WMF) (talk) 22:21, 24 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. fifteenthousandtwohundredtwentyfour(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 . 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. 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
Sounds much worse for workers' rights than in typical European countries (unsurprisingly). Howver, it seems like that if the WMF wants to encourage unionisation, it can legally encourage employees to "please join a union", in a neutral non-coercive way to satisfy unlawful to ... Engage in conduct that benefits one union at the expense of another, or that reasonably tends to coerce employees to support or join a union, and it is even legally permitted to be non-neutral by stating which union it favours, as long as that statement doesn't qualify as likely coercion. Boud (talk) 10:57, 23 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 . 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
To be clear, there isn't some secret committee or anything like that. This study group is 3 people. It's not really my style to write like that, but if it gets people from the foundation to listen, it's worth a shot. Pine has more experience with those connections than I do. I do think part of the bigger problem is all these committees almost no one knows about not nessecarily overlapping with the pulse of the broader community, even if the community doesn't always agree with itself on absolutely everything. Clovermoss🍀(talk)22:40, 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
If by "micromanage" you mean "ask them to reconsider firing some of their most competent employees for unionizing", then yes. Going to court should be a last resort, and having the WMF reverse course on this and commit to support the union is much better than getting caught in a difficult lawsuit that will drain community resources even more.We are maybe not here to change US labor laws, but, as the face of the Wikimedia movement, we have some responsibility in how they choose to treat their employees, and how we respond to that. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 13:46, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Not everything can be boiled down to a measurable metric, but these were employees maintaining key software while performing a critical liaison role between WMF and the community. We can't really compare them to other employees in unrelated roles in a vacuum, but my point is that they are not easily replaceable, if at all, and that their loss certainly won't be offset by the reorganization of CommTech into a program. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 15:18, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Got it, but that's something quite different than what you initially wrote: "important jobs" is not the same as "most competent." Levivich (talk) 15:30, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
My point is that they have specific competences that can't necessarily be found in anyone else, and that this is especially rare for movement-facing employees. We can argue that how hard to replicate someone's competence is isn't the same, in essence, as how competent that person is, but the gist of the message remains. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 15:32, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
So I ask again: on what are you basing your description of them as competent or having specific competencies or having rare competencies? How do you know they're good at their important jobs? How do you know they're hard to replace? (There are lots of people who know how to code -- today, more than ever before.) Levivich (talk) 15:42, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Like Clovermoss and I said, I'm not assessing that on the basis of their coding capabilities, but of their community experience and institutional memory. The Venn diagram of "experienced community members" and "potential WMF employees" is quite slim, especially compared to more common qualities like coding that would be easier to re-hire elsewhere. Ultimately, this is all a red herring as I don't believe someone being easy to replace justifies them being fired for establishing a union – it was really more of a point of emphasis, but you can replace my original message by "ask them to reconsider firing some of their employees for unionizing" and my point still stands. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 15:46, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I disagree that "experienced community member" has anything whatsoever to do with competency. I find zero correlation between those two -- some of our most experienced editors are the least competent, and I've seen many new editors who are extremely competent. YMMV.
Obviously if they're being let go for unionizing, that's bad. But if they're being let go for being bad at their jobs, then that's good. So how do we know which one it is?
Shutting down a department and having everyone reapply for jobs is the classic move when you want to get rid of the poor performers but keep the good performers. If that's what ends up happening -- if the good employees are kept and the bad ones aren't -- then does that mean there's no problem here? Levivich (talk) 16:07, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Understanding of the needs and dynamics of the group you are designated to help was absolutely a core competency of the comm tech team and was relevant to their job as part of a Community Wishlist. More generally lack of that competency in the WMF as a whole has been a reason for repeated WMF/community clashes. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 16:12, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Yeah but a "core competency" isn't the same thing as someone being "competent." I agree understanding the community is a core competency. (Being an editor for a long time doesn't necessarily give you that understanding.) If someone lacks in that core competency, that would make them incompetent. I agree incompetence of WMF staff has long been an issue. So again, I ask: how do we know that the WMF is letting go of competent, rather than incompetent people? The answer is: we don't. None of us volunteer editors is in a position to judge the competency of individual members of WMF's coding teams. You'd have to be on the team to know, and we're not on the team. Levivich (talk) 16:16, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Levivich I have worked with multiple folks at CommTech, I can attest to the fact that they are more than competent at their software engineering jobs. (and most of them even go out of their way to spend their volunteering time to maintain completely unmaintained community-critical systems). Their output is among some of the most productive at the WMF. Sohom (talk) 16:15, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I disagree about the output. The platform team has done a much better job, judging by output, than commtech. VisualEditor and Discussion Tools suck and have continued to suck for years, the Wishlist is a joke, but the website is never down, even when it gets like a billion views and changes three times a second. That's how I judge the output. Levivich (talk) 16:19, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
And now all the files are blurry (and file preview sizes make zero sense on most file pages) because someone on the Platform team decided that it’s not important enough that the media content looks good on this website. See how easy it is to pick and choose what to be mad about? (DiscussionTools is probably the most innovative software we’ve had developed in years, mind you. And it also involved no bending community to its developers’ will, which is much more than can be said about Platform team and its output, or Security team for that matter.) stjn16:28, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Discussion Tools is probably the best software feature to come out of the WMF in the 7 years I've been here. And that's a damn indictment because that software is worse than what multiple volunteer coders wrote by themselves 10+ years ago (like reply link and CD). If that's the best WMF can do, with almost $200M/yr, it's long long past time to clean house. For decades we've complained that the WMF's software sucks. When they reorganize their software teams, we complain about that, too. Levivich (talk) 16:32, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Because re-organisation by firing employees that are responsible for features like watchlist expiry, global preferences, CodeMirror 6, Who Wrote That?, and Phonos ({{audio}}) is something worth complaining about. If this was handled differently, with roles created for them in other teams in advance, there would’ve been no issue. (There’s also a thing where they seemingly fired Brooke Vibber, which is even more unexplainable considering she was literally the first developer they hired.) stjn16:51, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Who Wrote that is fucking awesome. It's wonderful for removing POV pushing, removing copyright violations, tracking down sources for statements... so much encyclopedia maintenance. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸17:04, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Levivich: I have talked with folks on leadership (including but not limited to Suman) and to my understanding the competency of the engineers involved are not in question in this context. The output of the team as whole is a very different thing from an individual engineers output especially in the context of them spending significant portion of their volunteer time working on mission critical components. The problems with the team were structural problems that were not the team's fault, but rather how WMF is currently operated and managed. Removing the team does not solve this problem. Sohom (talk) 16:41, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I'd imagine it's a fairly subjective opinion, but I've personally found that WMF employees with extensive community experience tend to "get" certain things more and not propose things that would make volunteers riot. But I've also met some employees who are very new to the movement yet very enthusiastic and eager to learn. I can understand the desire to generalize certain experiences/trends, but I see this more as a failure on management's side than on individual employees, especially from what I've heard about what it's like to work at the WMF. This whole conversation reminds me of the one I had with Maryana Iskander where I told her about how some people are afraid to speak up and she seemed confused about why people keep bringing up fear. What would happen if people spoke up? (With the underlying implication being that such fear is unwarranted). Clovermoss🍀(talk)15:23, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Clovermoss: Doesn't seem to me like the community is any better than the WMF at making people feel safe to speak up. Look how @SuperPianoMan9167 got shut down so fast and throughly just for asking if they've really already been laid off or might they all still keep their jobs. When people write things like "nothing prevents striking editors from imposing social consequences against those who cross the picket line," is that making an environment where people feel safe to disagree? I think we demand more from the WMF than we demand from ourselves. Levivich (talk) 16:13, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Levivich: I already posted on Super's talk page a few hours ago to talk about it how it isn't bad they hoped all this wasn't what it looked like. As for the latter, I want to clarify that by "whole conversation", I mean this thread, employees losing their jobs (people tend to feel intimidated for a reason, that doesn't come out of nowhere). The specific comment you mention is an outlier, but I agree it isn't very friendly. Our community can be a bit intense and toxic at times, but that doesn't mean we can't try to make everything better for everyone. Clovermoss🍀(talk)18:10, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thank you for posting that message, I'm glad you reached out. And you're right, it's quite possible for both the WMF CEO, and a volunteer editor, to make the same mistake: one doesn't excuse the other, and we should strive to improve both sides of the equation. Levivich (talk) 18:21, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I will say it was concerning to hear the then-CEO talk about how people bring this issue up frequently but that she doesn't seem to understand why. A lot of people face fairly big consequences for what speaking out can do, beyond it being socially uncomfortable. It's also fairly ironic considering what happened before that conversation at WCNA. Clovermoss🍀(talk)18:27, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
This happens because the Board of Trustees sucks and consistently makes bad picks for CEO. Even when it's different Trustees, still bad picks. Some picks have been better, some worse (Mariana was way better than her predecessors IMO, despite her faults). And the reason the Trustees make bad choices is because we make bad choices when we elect Trustees. Although part of that is because, as we know, the bad choices we picked in the past have great influence over what options we can choose from in the future. It's a self perpetuating cycle of mediocrity. Levivich (talk) 18:32, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
There is a key difference between having several people negatively answer a question of yours online, and losing your real-life job from speaking up. Clovermoss notes, and I agree, that we as a community should make more efforts to be friendly, or at least cordial, to people we may disagree with. However, this isn't comparable to WMF decisions, which can affect people's livelihoods in a much more direct way, and this is why I believe it is fair to expect more accountability from the WMF towards employees under their responsibility. Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 18:18, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Yeah I don't think of the WMF as being responsible for keeping people employed. Like the WMF's duty isn't to protect employees' jobs, it's not like a welfare agency that is protecting people's welfare benefits. People who are bad at their jobs should get fired. The WMF, writ large, has been bad at its job for a long time, and a lot of that is because people who should have been fired weren't, or weren't for a long time, at the top (I'm not in a position to judge anyone's job performance outside the C-suite). I don't know if any of the 6 people in the department were bad at their jobs or not, and I remain hopeful that management will retain the ones who were good, which might be all of them, I just don't know.
It's quite possible that having the wishlist be handled by a single department was a bottleneck, as the WMF said in its statement, and that getting rid of that bottleneck and distributing the workers to other teams is the right move. I'm not in a position to judge the optimal structuring of WMF dev teams.
It seems to me the underlying problem is obvious -- having only 6 people working on the wishlist. How much progress could they possibly hope to achieve with such a small team? It ought to be more like 25 people, which they could easily do with $5-$10M/yr, which they can easily afford as it's less than 5% of their annual budget. So my concern here isn't that they shut down a department, or are letting go of maybe up to 6 people, but that they're not drastically expanding the team by going on a hiring spree. But that doesn't seem to be what's gotten others up in arms here. Levivich (talk) 18:27, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
People who are bad at their jobs should get fired. But the problem is these people aren't bad at their jobs. From what I've heard here and elsewhere, the people that were let go are amazing at their jobs. SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 18:45, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Yeah if it were me I'd hire like 20 ppl in addition to the existing 6 and have them all vibe coding. $10M/yr and the entire wishlist can be cleared in 24 months. Levivich (talk) 19:08, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
More devs for CommTech would definitely be helpful, and I've mentioned "doubling or tripling the number of devs on CommTech" to people before. But a team that just vibe codes would not be helpful (vibe coding sacrifices code quality for speed, and moves the cognitive burden from patch writers to patch reviewers). And clearing the entire Wishlist is not possible because some wishes after investigation will end up infeasible, have a bad ROI, contradict other wishes, be too vague or too big to develop an actionable plan, or other challenges. The old Wishlist was great, but it is necessary to cherry pick what wishes are worked on to completion. –Novem Linguae (talk) 05:07, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
By "all vibe coding" I didn't mean only vibe coding, and by "cleared," I meant every wish processed, not every wish fulfilled. Levivich (talk) 08:06, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I mean that the community should not tell the WMF what operation decisions they take. This is not the business of the community. If for example somebody failed a trial period - should they still get the job if the community wants it to? Should every operational change be vetted by the community? Which community btw? This is total lunacy. Ymblanter (talk) 15:40, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Oh please. Describing a course of action as "lunacy," or "crazy," etc., is not a "mental health based personal attack." "Lunacy" is not a mental health diagnosis. Levivich (talk) 17:22, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Those are both literally words that were taken from the idea of using insanity as an insult.
And yes, lunacy was a diagnosis. Look at the root of the word -- moon. And was present in US law and materials until... dude, this century. I'm trying to be polite here, but your entire second statement, though confidently spoken, is just incorrect. You can read more at Lunatic.
I'm shocked and disappointed that you're doubling down on using such language. Maybe this means more to me, as somebody from Alaska, a place that really struggles with these issues. And as somebody with friends who have dealt with mental health issues. And, specifically, somebody from a an island with a really bad track record of mental health issues. (Healing Heart totem pole gets into some details) But if you can't make your argument without describing your opponents as mentally ill, then you have no argument that anybody should listen to. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸17:28, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Oh please x2. Lunacy hasn't been a diagnosis since the late 1800s. If you call something "schizophrenic" or "autistic," if you use those words as a pejorative, that is offensive. But to call something "lunacy," "crazy," "nuts," "bonkers," etc., is not offensive. It is not actually describing people as mentally ill. It's not saying that mentally ill people are lunatics, crazy, nuts, bonkers, etc. This is well intentioned, but misguided, tone policing. (And let's not get into who has more personal experience with mental illness, doing so would be... nuts.) You don't have to use those words if you don't want to, but there is nothing wrong with using words like "lunacy" to describe irrational actions. Saying "this community is crazy" is not a personal attack or offensive. Neither is saying "doing that is crazy." Replace those words with an actual mental illness or type of neurodiversity, then it's a problem, but not generic words like "crazy" or "nuts." Levivich (talk) 18:07, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Btw, you'll notice in the dictionary entries you linked to, "crazy" to mean "mentally unsound" is tagged as offensive (I agree), but not when intended to mean "erratic". "lunacy" is not tagged as offensive, and is defined as "foolishness." That is exactly the meaning it which I used it, and the dictionary entry you linked to confirms my understanding of the word and undermines the argument you've made. Levivich (talk) 18:16, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
It might be considered CIVIL to avoid using a word that causes offence to others even if you believe that offence is ill-founded.
It is not a rare, fringe position for people to object to the use of terms that were historically used discriminatorily in the context of mental healthcare. Even if you do not share the distaste at the use of these terms, I would suggest that it would be seen as a friendly show of good faith and civility to choose other terms to use instead, please. — OwenBlacker (he/him; Talk)18:34, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I am mentally ill. I am not offended by words such as "lunacy" or "crazy" but some people I know may be. OwenBlacker gives good advice. Levivich, stop giving offence and GreenLipstickLesbian, stop taking it. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:37, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
This is a very WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTSy reply. I wasn't around for the grants thing, but I don't see any mention of corruption in the signpost article you linked, grants to combat racial bias and discrimination are a good use of the money I donate, actually. As for the lawsuits, there's not much we could have done about that. I don't think the WMF should operate in countries that can't protect its independence, but I don't think cutting off billions would be a popular move. Feeglgeef (talk) 16:56, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Thebiguglyalien You mean to seriously argue that the community did not care about the lawsuits when the community's response to those lawsuits was placing a giant banner linking to the deleted content and a petition that over 1,000 editors signed? I don't think your claim that the community did not respond to legally mandated takedowns seriously is compatible with the facts of the matter. It's also ignorant of the very basic fact that the external forces would like us to stop editing. That is their goal. If we went on an editing strike in either of the two cases, then we've done nothing but let the people trying to sue our editors win. The WMF does not want us to stop editing; if we do, then there goal their fundraising, their goes their ability to own a website, there goes their ability to do anything. And in terms of your second link -- I can see you actively advocate against a community response there. So, no offense, but you've seriously gone 'No, we can't do anything! Think of the readers!' and then used your own inaction as evidence that the community did not care enough to take action. When, in reality, it's looking like you didn't care enough to take action. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸16:57, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Both the banner and the petition were a joke. You're accusing me of hypocrisy for being against interrupting the project there and for being against interrupting the project here, which doesn't really make sense. I made my proposals for community responses in the cases I listed, but the community didn't act beyond symbolic opposition. There's a realm of possible actions between a strongly worded letter and a total shutdown of editing. A strike is not the only meaningful response to an issue, and is in fact a rather sloppy and reactionary response. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 17:18, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I think that part of the reason people are more willing to jump to action here is actually because of what happened in those situations. I know it left a lasting uncomfortable feeling for a lot of people and that conversations regarding these issues continue to happen. This recent debacle is just the latest fuel on the "the WMF can be really out of touch with the community sometimes" fire. What happened with the board elections is another recent example, too. I think part of it also stems from what we personally have experienced. Very few people extensively know the legal landscape of countries that are not their own and might've given the WMF more a kneejerk benefit of doubt back then. Very few people know the exact "confidential" reasons the candidates were removed from the ballot for. But this incident is clearly sketchy and impossible to defend to a much broader audience. In some ways, it reminds me of this meme. A lot of people have heard this corporate speak before and know from experience that this type of restructuring is not a good sign. A lot of people have seen people who are not anti-union on paper for legal reasons but very much so in practice. And after a certain amount of broken trust, people just stop giving the benefit of doubt entirely. The WMF-community relationship has been rocky for a long time and all of these incidents do not help bring us to a better place but a worse one. Clovermoss🍀(talk)20:03, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I do hope this is the case, and it's plausible that a portion of the editors are signing for this reason. It would at least resolve the priorities concern I described (especially if editors are willing to revisit those after this). But the quick jump to the most extreme action, and the couching it in language of labor movements, makes it hard for me to believe this isn't significantly motivated by a desire of many editors to feel like they get to participate in labor action in a way that validates their beliefs (consider the tale of the gun owner who almost wants his home to be invaded so he can validate and use his guns). I don't doubt they're acting in good faith and believe they're doing the right thing, but the end result is the same: brinksmanship in a way that, if the bluff is called, directly threatens the continued function of Wikipedia by orders of magnitude more than Asian News International, Elon Musk, or even the WMF ever have. And I say this as someone who supports a union (a real one, as opposed to the WWU, which I'm having trouble viewing as a serious, legitimate organization). Thebiguglyalien (talk) 20:44, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
It's interesting that you say that because I actually have better feelings about the WWU than the union that was supposed to represent me with my former employer. The fact that I was unionized makes it harder to do certain things like be compensated for the unpaid labour at my former job. But I also value fairness and I think that this union is trying to make things fairer for WMF employees even if they hadn't had a chance to really advocate for anything yet. From my perspective, that opportunity was taken away from them. Clovermoss🍀(talk)21:05, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
We're not jumping to the most extreme action though. The petition is merely to show our support for the WWU and the affected workers, while the scope of the action is left open. I do personally find the use of political slogans cringey, but such language is only being used by a small minority (I counted 3 or 4, in the signatures), so I'm not convinced it makes up such a significant motivation as you seem to presume. --Grnrchst (talk) 21:08, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I'd consider anyone describing this as "solidarity" to be engaging in "use of political slogans" and making this into a labor movement role playing game. Much of my concern is the fact that there are multiple editors, including admins, talking about extreme acts to disrupt and break the project without significant pushback, which raises serious questions about where "scope of the action" is landing. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 00:48, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
sorry, no; claiming that anyone calling this “solidarity” (an extremely standard term) is making this into a labor movement role playing game is assuming bad faith at a spectacular scale Gnomingstuff (talk) 09:42, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Nobody is obligated to edit; I'm not sure what pushback you're expecting that isn't more likely to make people not edit. And, speaking personally, if you fire the people responsible for the tools I use often (Who Wrote That?, Copypatrol, ect), then I (and others) can't edit to my fullest potential. And stuff grinds to a halt that way. You say it's extreme and will break the project? Well, why aren't you saying that people who make it harder to us to maintain the encyclopedia are acting extremely disruptively? GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸01:18, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Looking over the discussion, I see people suggesting: a full edit freeze, slowdowns, blackouts, "social consequences" against people who don't agree, revoking authorization for bots, disabling software features that assist editing, disabling edit filters, making Wikipedia read only, a database lock, blocking donation banners, running counter-banners, reforming the Board of Trustees, establishing another form of community representation. I could be convinced to support those last four, but there are others where it's shocking and concerning that the community didn't immediately push back on them. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 02:06, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
It is extremely uncharitable to call users expressing solidarity with 6 real human beings, including dedicated fellow editors some of us know personally, who have lost their real life jobs cosplay[ing] as a revolutionary movement or making this into a labor movement role playing game. People aren't just upset that CommTech has been shuttered because it's detrimental to the project, they are upset because 6 experienced staff members have lost their jobs and that this is emblematic of wider issues with how the WMF spends its funding. You can disagree with the sentiment or think it's foolish, but these comments are unnecessary and border on meanspirited. When you have nothing nice to say, it is often best to say nothing at all. You did not need to take potshots at other editors to make your point. Ethmostigmus 🌿 (talk|contribs) 02:52, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I can’t speak for anyone else but I signed because I don’t support layoffs and I don’t support union busting. Frankly I don’t even really care about the tools that much in comparison. Gnomingstuff (talk) 00:22, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Thebiguglyalien I think you forget that I watch your userpage; you're saying here and now that you don't believe in editing strike, and yet you partially retired in response to the external takedown requests and what you percieved to be the WMF's lack of response. Which was well within your right. But it's not materially different from anything anybody has suggested here.
A few points: That was me being personally jaded and feeling unmotivated, not an organized effort with the goal of breaking anything (or deliberately setting anything up to break through inaction). I also didn't make any accusations or threaten to harass anyone who didn't leave Wikipedia (I certainly had some words for people who agreed with DePaco, but not those who constructively edited elsewhere). And finally, it is very materially different than the things I listed in my reply to your other comment just now. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 02:09, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Thebiguglyalien In terms of what readers experience, though, I don't think there's a different in result between editors consciously not editing and editors finding themselves discouraged/jaded. Editors consciously not editing, at least, means that there's a clear path back. WRT to turning off tools... the main suggestion I've seen floated around is turning of CommTech maintained/supported tools. Which, given that CommTech has been disbanded and the people responsible for those tools laid off... that's going to happen. Turning off the tools now, while there's still time for the Foundation to undo what they've done, is infinitely preferable to them just... fizzling out and being turned off in the end. Which is what's going to happen, most likely. WRT to blackouts/turning stuff off... I remember the SOPA/PIPA blackouts. As far as protests go, they were disruptive... but all protests are, inherently, disruptive. Otherwise, they're not good protests. But harmful? Not in the long term. The legistlation they were protesting? Yes, that would have been harmful. And it would have seriously damaged our ability to be a free, online encyclopedia, on a scale much much much worse than any of the recent cases. So I'm happy we did it. While this case is by no means as far reaching, when it comes to maintaing a well running encyclopedia... how do we do that when our tech support gets taken away for vague, bureaucratic reasons, that 100% pinky-promise have nothing to do with unions or getting rid of people whose loyalities lie with the community, not management?
And yes, tech like Copypatrol is vital for keeping the encyclopedia safe for re-users. Ultimately, if we can't do that, then I'm of the position that it's not ethical to keep open. Giving people false assurances that the text they use is free, while disabling our tools to remove the non-free text is just... slimey. So yeah. I like Wikipedia. I've grown up with it -- and I also grew up with teacher parents who used it in their classes. I'd like to keep us free.
And in terms of social consequences... well, I'd like to think those comments have been more about observing potential social fallout. Which is true. Fundamentally, people's livelihoods are on the line, and those people have friends. I'm not keen on threats, but saying that it's possible that people won't go out of their way to help you if you ignore the fact that their friends just lost their jobs... idk. Again, not on board with threats, but nobody's obligated to be your friend. I certainly don't expect people to be friendly to be and review my DYK noms or help me work on articles after I take them to ANI, CCI, or RECALL; that's relatively mild. I can't really be mad at somebody for documenting that fact. And, ultimately... you know what, I'm not friendly with people who tried to make me homeless/fuck my life up as a teenager because of management bureaucracy. And I did a lot of things that would make idea of not reviewing a GA nom look relatively meek and kind. Am I proud of it? No. But, well... what are you expecting? And you can see how that impacted me in the way I deal with people now. Because when somebody looses their job, that's a big deal. When somebody looses their ability to pay for food, rent, their healthcare, that makes people emotional. And I can't really get on anybody's case for feeling that emotion. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸03:42, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Though, speaking more on the "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet"... you say you don't like the idea of somebody imposing social consequences for disagreeing with them. And yet -- you're calling for those very same social consequences against people who disagree with you on the best course of action here. (That also includes a few of the other admin signatories who are backing some of the more extreme measures)It's not using the exact same language, but the meaning is fully clear. Fall in line, or you shouldn't have a user right. And, from management worldwide: fall in line, or your kids don't get to see a doctor. If you cross the picket line then somebody.... might not review a GA nom of yours? Yes, the language on the latter is much more flamboyant. But the substance of the matter? Like the retirement vs boycott, it's fundamentally not too dissimilar. Except in terms of consequences; I think we can agree that there's a hierarchy of what's actually most punishing. What actually fucks up people's lives the most. And, fundamentally, when you only show that you care about the objectively smallest, least consequential thing.... well, it says a lot. Sort of how when people would both sides me for refusing to hang out with a homophobe, because that was imposing a social consequence on them for their bigotry... but remaining silent on the actual bigotry. Different issue. Says a lot about priorities.
@Thebiguglyalien, if you truly believe that the admins involved here are the largest threat in the room, I do not understand how your conscience has not compelled you to start recall petitions for us all. You will have to work in batches - since, as far as I'm aware, we still have that rule on the books about how one person can only open five recall petitions at a time - but if you start now, you'll be done in time for Christmas. If, on the other hand, you don't truly believe that, I would sincerely appreciate it if you would stop saying it. In solidarity, asilvering (talk) 12:32, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
My best AGF interpretation is that a lot of signatories simply haven't read the discussion and seen the proposals they're tacitly endorsing, or that the "union" they're supporting doesn't actually exist except in name. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 12:51, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Thebiguglyalien, I don't know why you have been persistently referring to the WWU in this way. No workers' union springs up fully formed from the ground. However it is they come to be recognized by the employer, that recognition is preceded by a period of organization. That's the period this one is in now. There are real employees who are organizing this union. It is a real group of people who are organizing their labour. It exists. In solidarity, asilvering (talk) 13:12, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
We don't know yet whether WMF employees support this union. We don't know if this union represents a majority of employees, or if it's just a few employees. For all we know, the majority of employees might not support this particular union. Some would say a members-only union is not a real labor union at all, it's just another special interest group--we don't know if this is going to be a members-only union or not. In fairness, yes, the union organizers need time to figure all of these issues out. But, in my view, an anonymous website that announces a union doesn't make it so, and certainly isn't enough info for me to make a decision about whether to support the union, or whether it's a "real" union at all (one that actually represents the interest of the majority of workers, as opposed to just claiming to do, or, in the case of members-only, not even claiming that at all). (ymmv) Levivich (talk) 16:33, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Or they have read it all and have decided that deciding to strike if nessecary would be the only effective way of actually protesting since it's what has got the WMF's attention in the past. I'd hope that we know each other well enough that you'd feel confident I wouldn't retaliate against you. If you'd like to test the waters and do your own form of protest... start with me, I guess? I was a big supporter of recall being a thing in the first place because non-admins should have options beyond ArbCom. I know some people are concerned petition numbers are too low to really represent the community, but if the threshold is reached I'll take a go at RfA and see where people stand. I don't say this with the false confidence of I'm sure it'll be a complete breeze. I've been more outspoken and made some waves since 2023 that are sure to make another RfA a headache if it comes to that. But it's all I can really offer as assurance. And it's more than what a lot of people have for recourse when it comes to poor decisions by the WMF, so maybe it's a meaningful gesture in that sense, too. Clovermoss🍀(talk)13:21, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
You know I'm not going to do that. My concern is not that people are going to stop editing. They're allowed to do that, regardless of their motivation. No, my concern is the motte and bailey where a subset of signatories are saying "it's just WP:VOLUNTEER" while indicating they're open to active disruption or looking the other way as it's proposed. This includes more than one admin who have indicated they're willing to use their tools to engage in disruption if they feel they've been given the go ahead. I would sign the petition without a second thought if it was to express support for the laid off workers, to endorse proper unions for workers at organizations like the WMF, and/or to request reorganization of community representation. Hell, I would probably be one of its more vocal supporters. But this petition is not that. It is a petition to endorse Wiki Workers United, a "solidarity union" that doesn't actually represent the workers beyond a few people. So yes, it worries me that there are editors willing to put everything on the line for this and that the community is allowing it. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 14:53, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Personally I think the more drastic/harmful ideas are empty rhetoric or regrettable things said in the heat of the moment, and they haven’t gained any traction anyway. Part of the idea here is to make the threat so large that the WMF acquiesces before we even need to take concrete action. Everybody here wants a solution. Best believe people causing actual harm will be put on involuntary strikeKowal2701 (talk, contribs) 15:02, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Thebiguglyalien: we all come here with different perspective about what the appropriate response is. I hope to put you at ease with my perspective. Maybe it will, maybe it won't.
The admins that are participating here are generally experienced enough to not close and act on controversial discussions they have been involved in, and not act just if they feel they've been given the go ahead. Many of the measures you find too extreme are not even available to us normal admins (pretty sure it's only interface admins that could disable CommTech contributions for instance). Those folks should be even more trusted not to do something stupid upon a questionable consensus.
The social consequences (not reviewing other people's GAs etc).. I'm not in favour of that. It feels we should be in this together, and people can decide to join the strike, ignore the WMF, or put pressure in another way. I hope many folks are willing to speak up and join a strike if necessary, but I completely respect those who feel like providing a service to humanity by editing. I would oppose a blackout; this is conflict between the community and WMF (in the case of achieving more say in software development) and a conflict within WMF that affects the community (laying off experts that can navigate the beautiful messiness that defines our community). A short-term read-only mode, I'm on the fence on whether I would support this in an RfC if the situation does not improve or worsens.
To me, one of the actions you find acceptable (disabling donation banners), I would oppose. We're putting our own goals and other people's livelihoods at risk if we take away funding in a period where readership cannot be taken for granted.
WWU is new, and in this early stage there is an element of 'trust me' when people on the inside say the prospective union is much bigger than just a few people. I get your skepticism when people cannot be as transparent as we are used to. I would not be in favour of action tied to the union if the organising was at an earlier stage and only involved a small group of interested folks. I was taken by surprise when hearing via the back-channels why the union is so necessary, and multiple independent stories of people who are afraid of retaliation or believe they have been a victim of it. In solidarity, —Femke (talk) 🐦 17:17, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I actually wasn't sure what I'd wake up to after my nap which is part of why I took that nap in the first place. I figured it would be less intimidating and less like "throwing rocks at the White House", if I quite literally asked for it. I wrote the comment with sincerity. My biggest concern was if it'd distract from everything else going on in a bad way, but hypothetically a recall petition could happen at any time anyways.
It's clear you don't think much about the WWU, but it's clear that other people do. I disagree that it's not worth fighting for union formation (they should have the opportunity to at least try... if people decide they want a different union later down the line then that's their choice) and the needs of our community (there's a reason people care a lot about one of the few teams at the WMF they're more likely to have even heard of and that they know do valuable work). As many people have already pointed out, we rely deeply on this technical work, and the idea that oh we'll just add it to other people's workloads and get rid of the whole team dedicated to helping it is setting it up to languish and fail. If they really wanted to fix it, they would've given that small team more resources and improved staffing, not fired everyone, some of whom have decades of invaluable experience and encourage them to apply for the limited existing roles. It's upsetting that such changes are being pushed by Jimmy Wales as if they were something that anyone in the community would actually want. If this is truly about the community, listen to all of us making it very clear that we don't want this. All of that it worth striking for, in my opinion.
You don't have to feel the same way, of course. But I don't understand your objections. What I'm confused about is if you think it's disruptive that people are willing to strike for a reason instead of simply cease their volunteer labour, or you're more concerned by the occasional comment where people talk about possibilities like edit filter management and banners, especially since you don't seem to think that previous community actions went far enough? Clovermoss🍀(talk)17:59, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I've pretty much laid out my thoughts here scattered in my comments above. But essentially, I consider things like ANIvWMF and DePaco to be serious long-term threats to Wikipedia which still present a danger to this day. Laying off these employees is bad, but things can be bad without being long-term threats (see: many of the WMF's decisions). I do consider the willingness of respected editors to try and damage Wikipedia for leverage—and the community's inability to immediately shut that down—to be a long-term threat, possibly even greater than ANIvWMF and DePaco. As I see it, that is the thing that demands immediate and drastic response right now. And I actually wasn't sure what I'd wake up to after my nap which is part of why I took that nap in the first place I actually did the exact same thing. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:54, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
A better version of AFG is that editors collectively signed on the following basis: 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. That is it. Nothing more, nothing less.
Tamzin's signature there, and the essay, isn't a reflection of those signing; as documented by their signature there, and essay, explicitly stating that. I genuinely don't understand how this could have been more explicit having already stated I want to stress.
So to stress again, on my own behalf, if this wasn't clear from the collective statement: I am not endorsing, tacitly or otherwise, Tamzin's or anyone's else's: beliefs, theories, ideas, behaviours, actions, or otherwise, regarding this strike, or any other related activity; nor is anyone else, unless they have explicitly said so. Likewise if any admin or otherwise did engage in disruption that lacked consensus, signatories are not inherently endorsing, either directly or tacitly. So please, respectfully, do not misrepresent my signature, or anyone else's, tacitly or otherwise, regardless of good faith when doing so. Thanks. CNCin solidarity (talk) 13:45, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
It seems to be in profoundly bad faith to not only directly state that the admins here are "holding Wikipedia hostage" but also to imply you fear they'll unjustly retaliate against you if you escalate the matter. Athanelar (talk) 12:51, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I don't think that's bad faith when the admin who started the petition wrote an essay advocating for "social consequences" for editors who do not strike, which is described as crossing a picket line. (There's a COI here, too, because that admin is the IRL friend and former roommate of the person who started the union.) When that admin asks for the tools back after writing the essay and starting the petition, it certainly raises justified fears that the admin might use the tools to enforce the strike. And if that happens, you better believe there will be a recall.
Statements like CNC's above are about as credible to me as the WMF's "assurances" that this decision had nothing to do with the union. Another admin decided that use of the word "lunacy," one time, was worth commenting on, but no admin, and no petition signer, has said anything yet about the "social consequences" threat. Also, "Disgraceful rubbish from the out-of-touch WMF" is not worth commenting on. Over at the watchlist discussion someone accused me "sealioning," that's OK to say. Basically if you're pro-strike, you can say whatever and no admin or petitioner is going to say anything... but if you're anti-strike, you're gonna be called out for assuming bad faith, word choice, etc. etc. As usual on Wikipedia, when you're part of the "in group" you can do no wrong, and when you're outside that group, nothing you do is right. Levivich (talk) 16:21, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I prefer clear comments like yours than ones that imply I'd be willing to hold the site hostage because I'm an admin (more specific concerns like the ones you express above are more defensible imo). I think you bring up some interesting arguments here and don't particularly mind that you're anti-strike. If we're not doing a blackout, I'm assuming people like you would be the ones who prevent the site from being filled with vandalism or BLP violations, which is a bit different than a bunch of people not adding content or reviewing GAs. I don't think it's sealioning to push back, but the nature of Wikipedia means people will pushback against that pushback, especially if it's an unpopular opinion (and there tends to be reasons people feel that way beyond "I don't like it"). But what you said about how "nothing you can do is right"... feels painfully familiar. I've definitely experienced that in the past and it's one of the reasons I said above that our community can be a bit toxic and intense at times. Clovermoss🍀(talk)18:24, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
As for the "social consequences" comment, I assume the reason no admin has gotten involved is because it's clear from the context that it's about what the practical realities of a strike would be (no GA reviews). I agree with Wellwellwell that it's harsh to put it like that. We don't have to battle our fellow editors, just like we're not entitled to anyone's labour. If it was more threatening (such as implying that they'd attack "scabs" or something), I'd hope an admin would have actually gotten involved. Clovermoss🍀(talk)18:29, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I understand why my comments may be giving the impression that I'm anti-strike, but I'm not. I'm pro-strike in general -- if editors want to strike, for whatever reason, I support that as a valid protest action -- and have been on strike for years, not that anyone's noticed lol. I'm neutral on this strike, mostly because I don't really know what they're striking about, and I'm not sure the petition signers know, either, and there seems to be some disagreement among signatories about that. What I am anti- is imposing social consequences against those who do not strike. Levivich (talk) 02:55, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Honestly I think it would be helpful if Tamzin removed that sentence from the essay. It's so frustrating that this specific sentence is bogging down the discussion (I count 19 mentions of "social consequences" across 3 different threads), especially when that essay is not what people have signed off on. It sucks that this one sentence, which was written by one person on a user subpage as part of a speculative essay about possible future actions, has pitted us against each other like this. --Grnrchst (talk) 11:15, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Grnrchst: I appreciate the suggestion, but I will not yield to a heckler's veto from a handful of people who, if their reading comprehension were actually as poor as they are pretending it is, would have been banned years ago for CIR. The plain meaning of the sentence is an irrefutable observation about 1) the nature of communities in general and 2) the social dynamics that surround labor actions, and as far as I can tell not a single person has been confused by it who was not actively trying to disrupt this petition. It sounds like your real concern here is a user-conduct matter about a few people who'd rather win an argument than engage in good faith, and I share that concern, but this is not the board to deal with it, and me caving to their feigned concerns will just make them move on to something else to manufacture outrage over. (Not to mention that it would have no bearing on this discussion, since the userspace essay is not what people are signing onto and is not even a formal proposal.) -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe|🤷) 11:44, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
My concern is how the topic of discussion has completely moved away from the core issue and has devolved into bad-faith accusations and personal attacks being thrown around. From the very beginning, I tried to caution against specific action proposals, but that seems to be all we're talking about now. It's very distressing and I'm desperate for this to stop so we can refocus on the context of the layoffs and the content of the petition. --Grnrchst (talk) 12:06, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I would also like to see that happen. However, there's certain basic factors that govern thread participation. The more time goes on from new important information emerging, the fewer novel insights there are to be had, and thus the more a thread is dominated by people who like to argue. All I can really say is, user-conduct problems require user-conduct solutions, and if you think people are disrupting the thread, you should talk to uninvolved admins—perhaps Roy Smith, who's already issued a general warning for this thread. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe|🤷) 12:24, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I don't think this is down to individual users, or even one faction or another, we're just allowing these threads to get off-topic and out of hand, which by itself incentivises people to argue further. I'd much rather we de-escalate internal conflict between each other than escalate it further. --Grnrchst (talk) 12:52, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Thebiguglyalien Sorry, I have to disagree with you -- that falls squarely in the terms of social disagreement for me.
And I have to fundamentally disagree with your statement above that people are tacitly endorsing more extreme measures. Sorry, mate, but that's just factionalism speaking -- us vs them, you're with me or against me. And I know what we both think about that. You'll not that you're the only non-WMF employee I've been responding to on the actual substance of the issue, and having a conversation about priorities. But I'm not accusing you (well, not intentionally) of agreeing with everything any one of the opposers has done, and nor do I think that. Yes, I'm bringing up that I use Commtech maintained tools, that I'm worried about what will happen to them now, and if it's a choice between an encyclopedia riddled with even more POV pushing and copyright issues than we are now, then I'd rather we not have it at all. But I'm not accusing you of supporting the team's shutdown, or the layoffs, or being on board with personal attacks; you're not responsible for the actions of anybody but yourself. I'm not going to hold you accountable for those actions, and I wish you'd extend others the same courtesy. I am saying that I don't think it's fair for you to accuse people of not caring about the ANI or Portuguese businessman situation; it's clear to me that people did, but short of going out to Portuguese or Indian courts to protest, there's very little anybody here could do. I know you don't think that the WMF responded enough in either of those. Governments are shitty and defamation laws are written to protect the powerful; that's a universal truth, and it's not actually one that the WMF can do much about, short of fighting the issues in courts. Which they did. But courts are scummy, and I can't blame them for not fully winning. But the WMF can treat it's employees fairly. The WMF can treat the community fairly. The WMF can chose to not fire people and put them in a position of instability for....again, totally innocent and non-nefarious reasons. The WMF can be an organization that doesn't punish dissent. And I stick to what I can control. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸20:04, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Many of the people who have signed above (53 by my count) also signed the community letter about the ANI case and were actively involved in the subsequent community response, myself included. I understand your frustration with how things have gone in the past, but it hurts to see you imply we haven't been taking any of these things seriously, or that this isn't a serious matter worthy of our concern. --Grnrchst (talk) 17:15, 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
If we don't know for certain that they've been fired, then why have people thrown the benefit of the doubt out the window? Why is there this tendency to assume that the WMF is some kind of corrupt corporate bureaucracy that only cares about donations and tries to stifle the growth of the projects?
(I apologize for my brashness. I'm just hoping to prevent a complete meltdown of the community's relationship with the WMF over what may end up being a misunderstanding.) SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 13:57, 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)
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
How do we know that they have to reapply externally and not internally? Have any of the employees actually stated that they've been terminated? Perhaps they have to apply for a new role internally but are still being paid in the meantime. SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 13:40, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Okay, let me say this unequivocally, based on both what I know from private discussions and what the WMF has said publicly: Six roles were terminated, no one was given a guaranteed move to elsewhere in the WMF, and no one was given advance notice to look for other roles in the WMF. I don't know when final paychecks will issue, so it is likely that some people will technically be applying for new roles internally while still on the WMF's payroll, but that is not some orderly transition. That is people getting laid off and maybe having the chance to find a new job at the same place. I understand why you want this to all be a big misunderstanding, but no, this is what happened, and even the WMF admit it's what happened, even if they use cringey PR euphemisms like "the change" to describe separating six people from their salary and benefits. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe|🤷) 14:07, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
If that's true, then I implore everyone to have faith that the WMF will listen to the outcries of the community. It can and has happened before. Fram's ban was eventually overturned by ArbCom. SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 14:17, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Arbcom has nothing to do with the WMF, and the community's "outcries" are regularly ignored. This is the first time the community has been able to actually organise and affect the crux of these long-running issues, and right now you’re effectively inhibiting its momentum Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 14:22, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
My point is that when people complain, the WMF takes action. Maybe not as much as they should, but they do. I only referenced ArbCom because I referenced the Fram ban controversy. SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 14:28, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
The best way to have the WMF listen to the outcries of the community is to show a united front. If we suddenly stop and just wait for the WMF to take action, it is obviously much less likely to happen. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 14:31, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Which is why I am in no way recommending that people stop organizing. In fact, I recommend the opposite. The more people that organize, the more likely the WMF will listen. SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 14:32, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
You did not recommend people stop organizing. However you rather prominently have attempted to create uncertainty and doubt by creating a new section and by changing the central notice about what's happening. You did this despite volunteers, Foundation leadership, and union organizers all agreeing what is happening in this regard. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 14:41, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I wanted to have faith. But that faith was denied. So I'll walk away. Collapse this section if necessary. I obviously don't know anything about how layoffs work, so my input can be completely disregarded. SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 14:56, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
"If that's true, then I implore everyone to have faith that the WMF will listen to the outcries of the community. It can and has happened before" - the point is, why does WMF only react and respond, when there is outcry? Why do we have to generate an outcrz in order to be heard by WMF? BilboBeggins (talk) 14:50, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
There’s a lot of context and history here that you may not be aware of. There are some editors who have contacts with WMFers and there are lots of discussions happening off-wiki in various places (ones I’m not a part of either). Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 14:10, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
@SuperPianoMan9167, The team has been disbanded, the 6 roles have been made redundant and then can apply internally to interview to join other teams. Yes, they have not been explicitly fired which is irrelevant at the moment since the problem (and the unsaid part) is that there are less than 5 engineering roles open at the Foundation (publicly) and that is without considering that many of the folks in Community Tech might not map cleanly to other roles being hired for (to my understanding, Comm Tech was extremely skilled in PHP, JS and core MediaWiki development, with a good amount of experience building on the Toolforge/WMCloud infra and this might not be the correct toolset for folks hiring on the Platform team) which calls out that they will prioritze candidates with knowledge of Envoy, Kubernetes and IDM systems. The amount of stress being put on members of a team that mind you were some of the most experienced community facing engineers is unacceptable. Sohom (talk) 14:57, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
So my understanding is that the six people have been de facto fired (rather than de jure). I think what counts for most of us, in terms of empathy and possible practical support for the six people closely following advice from WWU, is primarily the de facto situation. Boud (talk) 15:11, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Hi everyone, my name is Selena Deckelmann and I am the Chief Product and Technology Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation. I’ve been watching and reading this discussion closely this week.
First, I want to address what is happening with the staff affected by this change - as Suman mentioned, we are actively interviewing staff who have expressed interest in other open roles, and they are going through an expedited internal process. This is not a change; it’s something we started right away when each staff person was told individually that the team was being disbanded. This process (which is sometimes referred to as “redeployment”, and is legally required in some countries when roles are possibly made redundant) takes time because of different regulations, but we're trying to get those processes completed within the next week or so.
Second, it is clear (as it has always been) that the community cares deeply about the wishlist, and sees it as a primary vehicle (some see it as the vehicle) for having editor needs listened to and addressed by the Foundation. Volunteers have also historically looked to the staff size of that team as an indicator of how much it is a Foundation priority; while I don’t agree with this point of view, those who have noted here and elsewhere that at various points in the past other Foundation teams have not balanced wish work with their “regular” work are not wrong.
Regardless of what you think of the proposed version of the wishlist or the decision to disband CommTech, I think all of us agree on one thing: the wishlist hasn’t been working well. I would really like it to, and I’d like to do it with editors. I understand and hear that many of you have felt closed off from the decision making about how the wishlist works for the past several years. It’s time to change that.
I don’t have any big proposals today, but an intention. I’d like to hear from you - here is fine, individual conversations with me or my staff also work, about how we might build a new wishlist that works for both editors and the Foundation. Staff are going to pause on responding for the next few days (and for many, Monday is a WMF holiday) but I’ll check in again early next week. Thank you all for caring about this so deeply. SDeckelmann-WMF (talk) 16:07, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
as Suman mentioned, we are actively interviewing staff who have expressed interest in other open roles, and they are going through an expedited internal process.Will they lose their jobs if they cannot find an open role at the Foundation? SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 16:32, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
build a new wishlist. I would recommend just reverting to what worked two years ago. A CommTech team, a yearly cadence, and organized primarily by individual rankings instead of focus groups. I think thinking that it needs to change and then spending a bunch of time architecting those changes would be a mistake, when we already have a good blueprint. Would suggest keeping mw:Extension:CommunityRequests, and sure some other WMF teams can pitch in, but discard all other changes. –Novem Linguae (talk) 17:12, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
It is definitely unclear to me how shutting down the CommTech team would, in any way, improve the situation with the wishlist. --Grnrchst (talk) 17:27, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Hi Selena, thanks for responding. Pertaining to the desire to work with the editing community on this, I guess my question would be: if the editing community wanted you to reverse this decision to disband the CommTech team and reinstate dismissed team members to their positions, would the Foundation be willing to do so? --Grnrchst (talk) 17:29, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
"I understand and hear that many of you have felt closed off from the decision making about how the wishlist works for the past several years. It’s time to change that." By taking a decision (about the team) which turns out to have completely misread the room and makes many of us feel even more "closed off from the decision making"? "I’d like to hear from you [...] about how we might build a new wishlist that works for both editors and the Foundation. " Reverse the removal of the team, and only then start a discussion with us (and staff) about how to proceed. Fram (talk) 19:35, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Hi Selena. A good start would not be repeating this pattern:
I watched this unfold with Framgate 6 years ago and now again with the BoT elections, but I think it's fairly consistent every time there is a WMF "controversy", you see the same recurring themes: The WMF makes a decision behind closed doors without consultation. They announce the decision late or not at all before implementation. When the community pushes back, they act like they're the ones being blindsided. They claim confidentiality and make general statements without addressing the community's core concerns. They say they are listening and request questions and feedback from the community, to which they have no intention of responding. They sometimes go as far as to issue a non-apology without accountability or any specific commitments. They claim to want to be more responsive and transparent, but it's just part of the charade. This is their strategy of crisis management: waiting it out, saying as little as possible, making empty promises, taking no direct action, and sequestering the last hardliners in some farce of a listening committee, where their complaints can be ignored more directly. That's the step we're all on now, by the way. The only thing that scared them before was irreplacable veteran wikipedians hanging it up and walking away.–Rutebega
I'll also reiterate what I said at the last conversation with the board of trustees conversation. Getting rid of the community affairs committee is a bad look and so is this. I don't understand why people don't listen when we tell people that these things will end in disaster. Stuff like this is why I shook my head at WCNA when a trustee claims that they listen to the community. People do not feel heard and they haven't for a long time. Words are not actions. Clovermoss🍀(talk)20:07, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I'm being more direct here because I feel like I have to. I've generally had good interactions with you Selena, but it's hard to emphasize just how much I've tried to get this across before and how much it feels like this doesn't lead to much and how often I've heard from other people who feel the exact same way. I'd rather you try than not do anything at all, but there needs to systematic changes to prevent systematic problems. Clovermoss🍀(talk)20:24, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Hi Selena, thanks for communicating with us. We all really appreciate it even if some may express that in more hostile ways than others. It was mentioned above that there were exactly 90 days between when WWU seems to have started (see archive) and when the layoffs were announced, which is exactly the period of time required to not be eligible for a rebuttable presumption in favor of the employee under California law. It's pretty frustrating to hear something like 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. (link) while it also seems that the layoff occurred at the earliest possible moment since the WWU started that wouldn't open up the WMF to additional legal risk. Can you elaborate on what's happening here with regards to this timing? Perryprog (talk) 21:07, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for listening. In terms of the future of the wishlist: I think we can combine the best of both worlds: the yearly cadence to bring different Wikimedia communities together and get input from a wide variety of editors + having teams outside of Community Tech pick up a large number of wishes, when they are the more efficient team to work on a wish. A Community Tech team is essential in terms of direct community engagement and being able to do small wishes that don't fit the standard teams easily fast. In the current system, it feels arbitrary whether wishes are picked up; in the previous system that was less of problem, even if the weighting was a frequent point of contention there. We should have the community design the weighting (which could be simply 50% vote count + 50% technical effort score, or something more complicated).
I would also like to hear about concerns that the firing may have been related to people speaking up (including the firing earlier this month), or the 90 days wrt union formation. In solidarity, —Femke (talk) 🐦 22:10, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Here's what I want the WMF to do: in the $240M FY27 budget that is being put together now, allocate 4% ($9.6M) on completing outstanding Community Wishlist tasks. No other department has to cut anything to make this happen, there would still be $22.9M left for everyone to spend over and above the current $207.5M FY26 budget, everyone would just have to increase their budget by 4% less than previously planned, and trimming growth by 4% is not a lot to ask of the organization. Then, spend that 4%/$9.6M on a bunch of devs to catch up on wishlist features with the goal of having nothing on the wishlist more than 12 months old by FY29 or sooner. And when you're adding devs, don't forget to retain the good people on the old commtech team, which I'm told just might be all of them. Levivich (talk) 22:39, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Hmm. Maybe we could start our own foundation and then pool money there in order to make a conditional grant to the WMF to support the wishlist. Then, whenever someone we know (or ourselves) is considering donating to the WMF directly, we ask them to funnel it there. The problem, of course, is that we can't place donation banners on the site like they can, so we won't be able to accumulate enough money to actually affect anything. Feeglgeef (talk) 23:22, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Interesting idea. Why couldn't we place a fundraising banner on the site for a "Community Wishlist Fund"? The WMF could stop it, but there is no reason to assume they would, considering they'd get the money anyway (it would just be a restricted donation). Levivich (talk) 16:13, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I'd like to hear from Selena her response to the following questions: First, would you agree that on Product matters, the "buck stops with you?" And thus, if the CommTech team or Wishlist feature is deemed a failure, that represents a failure in your leadership? Second, would you agree that for the purposes of actually delivering product, six engineers are typically more valuable than one C-suite product person? Third, would you agree that the rollout and communication of this layoff has been a complete disaster, representing a further failure not just on your behalf but on multiple departments? Finally, as it appears that only engineers were affected, will anyone in a product role be held accountable for this debacle, including yourself? If so, in what ways will they/you be held accountable? ⇒SWATJesterShoot Blues, Tell VileRat!03:47, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Another editor directly responded to SDeckelmann-WMF on Meta-Wiki and laid out the problem clearly. The Community Wishlist had been working well before Selena Deckelmann became involved with it. As Deckelmann is now stating that "the wishlist hasn’t been working well" after changes that she oversaw, Deckelmann is at fault for spearheading those changes to the Community Wishlist that have severely degraded its effectiveness (e.g. "revamped the Community Wishlist from a once-a-year survey into an always-open intake process"), and it is Deckelmann (instead the six Community Tech staffers) who should lose her job as a result of this underperformance.Deckelmann's role in these layoffs has shattered community trust in the Wikimedia Foundation, and if Deckelmann is unwilling or unable to reinstate the laid-off staffers and restore the Community Wishlist to how it was before it "hasn’t been working well", then Deckelmann should resign and make room for someone else who is willing to make things right. —Newslingertalk19:01, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I don't think the way to fix this is to have more people lose their livelihoods. From what I remember (I'm not as immersed in the tech space), the idea was that making wishes year-round would allow for less infighting about which technical issues/features we desire the most as a community, which is well-intentioned. I don't know how we went from that to getting rid of the dedicated team and hoping it all works out somehow by shoving more work onto the rest of the staff (as Tamzin said on Jimmy's talk page, are we going to paying those people 10,000 hours of overtime to compensate for what we already had?) and that these changes do completely shatter trust. But I also don't know if Selena was the one to recommend/sign off on these layoffs even if it's the sort of thing you might expect an executive to be involved with? In my experience, she does care about trying, and I think the foundation would be worse off without her. Sohom Datta can speak more to his personal interactions with Selena as a member of PTAC, which I'm under the impression are fairly favourable? Clovermoss🍀(talk)19:16, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I think that's also too harsh. It's the same thing but said in a more sarcastic manner. I personally think a more productive result would be:
Acknowledging that this was a massive mistake instead of side-stepping the issue and insisting that is something the community wants when it clearly doesn't.
Giving people their jobs back.
Removing enforcement of NDAs if that's what happened here (a few people have hinted it's why we aren't hearing from the former employees... while this may be "normal" for American employees to receive severance, if we want to prove that the wmf is different and better, we should be different and better). It'd go a long way to showing that people won't be penalized for speaking up. I think that any severance agreed upon should still be paid out as a sign of good will since none of this should have ever happened in the first place. (Please correct me if I misunderstand how this works in an American context, the idea of severance being conditional like this is weird to me).
More staff and resources directed to a team that is doing unimaginably important work.
Ensure better working conditions somehow and not just in vague promises that are never followed up on.
I've never been an executive, but I feel like these fairly common sense suggestions would actually solve a lot of what people are upset about right now. Clovermoss🍀(talk)19:55, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
The reason for the specific questions I asked of Selena is, as a producer and PM in software development myself, I have a difficult time accepting that this isn't a failure of product leadership. You said it yourself: people with product responsibilities are "side-stepping the issue and insisting that is something the community wants when it clearly doesn't" -- i.e. failing at the basic responsibilities of a product manager in understanding the needs and wants of their market segment, and advocating effectively for features that will improve the relevant KPIs. So I'm curious why it's only engineers who are getting the axe here, when this directly implicates that it was PMs who seem to have catastrophically failed at their jobs. And since the communications rollout of this has been so horribly botched -- even at increasingly escalated levels of responsibility -- I also find it difficult to believe that it's junior engineers that are the problem here and not senior and C-level product staff. So I'd like to hear from Selena in her own words as to whether she feels she and her PMs bear any responsibility for what happened here, and how they will be held accountable in the same way that engineers are being held accountable. ⇒SWATJesterShoot Blues, Tell VileRat!20:43, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I think that's fair, as leaders should be held to higher standards. My main source of hesitation comes from knowing that the WMF as a whole has a dire need for better communication and true listening, and that it's not just a Selena problem. I don't think that anything would truly be fixed if Selena resigned. Having her leave would leave a vacuum since she's one of the most prominent people actively trying to listen to people. I also worry that part of the blame (and I'm not talking about the engineers) may lie elsewhere and we don't know all that yet. Clovermoss🍀(talk)20:49, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I support all of this (with the same caveat that IANAL and can't speak to severance), and would clarify that "better working conditions" should be measurable. I would like to add the expectation of a tangible step toward increasing community representation in the WMF. A few ideas have been floated here and in the past, and I imagine there are people here who can speak to that. The WMF exists solely in service of Wikipedia and her sister projects. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 21:23, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I agree there needs to be a real commitment and not just the standard platitudes that go nowhere. Letting people be able to speak openly about said working conditions is the first step to doing something measurable (and people under NDAs can't do that). Hard to know what needs to change if you're actively preventing people from having genuine conversations about the issues at hand. Clovermoss🍀(talk)21:46, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Clovermoss fwiw, according to wmf severance policy is 1 month of pay per year worked (up to max 9 months), which is quite a bit more generous than the ontario minimum you linked. I'm just mentioning because i think many community members aren't aware of just how much money is on the line for staff that have been terminated. Probably in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. I'd probably sign an nda too if i was offered 6 figures for it. Bawolff (talk) 04:43, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
My concern was more the fact that severance could be optional (e.g. tied to an NDA) and not automatic, if I understand American norms right, rather than something that just happens when you've been working for a company for years and are unexpectedly laid off (and someone's immediate financial security is evidently a massive concern for anyone under those circumstances). As for the amounts that have probably been thrown at them, I don't blame anyone for saying yes to life-changing amounts of money, but if the foundation is serious about not hiding problems, that's not the way to fix that. The cost attached to such NDAs if they exist is also likely to add up substantially over time if they are used this way. In addition to not fixing the root of the problem, that's not a responsible use of donor funds. But if I'm onto something, that money has already been "spent", those people deserve to be compensated for what they've been through, and the best way to fix this mess is to hope they'll be willing to talk about it all openly to make things better if they're allowed the chance to do so without consequence. Clovermoss🍀(talk)04:50, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I don't know about this specific case or to what extent it's current practice, but in the past WMF has indeed tied severance pay to the signing of an agreement that includes release of all potential claims related to unfair dismissal, non-disparagement of WMF or its officers, and an NDA about the agreement itself. Knowledge of that practice is also having a chilling effect on what people who do know about (or know rumors about) recent cases are willing to say. Anomie⚔14:12, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Consideration (like a release, NDA, non-disparagement, sometimes non-compete, etc.) in exchange for severance pay is, for better or worse, a requirement under U.S. law in order to make the severance payment obligation legally enforceable. Otherwise, the severance pay is a gift, and companies could stop making the payments, and employees wouldn't be able to sue to enforce the severance agreement. It's theoretically possible for companies to make a single lump sum severance gift to departing employees, but that's almost never done, and there are some legal reasons why not. Severance isn't a gift, it's a bribe, in practice, to get the employee not to sue or otherwise harm the employer. Levivich (talk) 15:20, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
As I was saying, it's weird that there isn't a minimum severance and that it has to come with conditions. I appreciate the context... but just because there has to be sort of conditions, it doesn't mean there has to be some of what seems to be the norm here. Given what's going on, if the foundation wanted to do the morally right thing instead of what's legally required, have that money be a gift to meet what I'm asking for here. Is there a way to retroactively do that, legally speaking? I'm definitely not a lawyer. I just want to do what feels right as someone who cares deeply about other people. Clovermoss🍀(talk)16:20, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
They could give a lump sum payment as a gift, but then they open themselves up to claims of discrimination (why did these employees get a gift when other employees got a contract?), and questions about whether gifts to former employees is a proper use of donor funds (you can imagine a scenario where gifting a former employee 9 months pay would be considered outrageous). Levivich (talk) 16:40, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
If it was going to happen anyways, I really don't see how it's irresponsible. The only difference is people know about it. And it's not like other outcomes people are suggesting (training a new executive and engineers that don't have the same institutional memory) would be cheap, either. Some mistakes are just straight up expensive. I don't know how to solve that other problem you bring up, but surely someone could figure it out something that is fair. A big part of the reputation behind not being evil should be walking the walk, even if moral injustice is normalized elsewhere. Clovermoss🍀(talk)16:53, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
"Fair" is one of those things that sounds good in theory but is very difficult in practice. A hypothetical person who was laid off last year and signed a release and NDA in exchange for severance pay might think that what is "fair" is for these laid off employees to get the same exact deal, and that anything else would be "unfair." Others might say that not suing the company, publicly badmouthing the company, or revealing confidential information, are perfectly "fair" requirements in exchange for getting extra pay after you're laid off. It's one of those in-the-eye-of-the-beholder thing. Or to quote one of my favorite sayings: where you stand often depends on where you sit. What's fair for a laid off worker might not seem fair to the worker who has to pick up the laid off worker's slack, and management, trustees, and donors, might all have different views as well, not to mention us volunteers. Levivich (talk) 17:26, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Being fair is difficult, I agree. But the solution isn't to not even try to be fair. Avoiding those conversations entirely doesn't solve anything. It's better than just defaulting to what other people do because it's "normal" who do the same thing for the same reasons. (For example, my "normal" is that long-term employees get a minimum severance as a legal requirement and that you can't put conditions on that unless you're negotiating for something higher than the minimum, which is still kinda shady but not nearly as shady compared to shut up or worry about paying your rent because I just decided I don't need you even though I do). I also think the average person has a lot more grace for any sign that gives the slightest measure of goodwill compared to ones that take advantage of them. There's only so much slippery slope that line of thought can take. In my experience, WMF employees care deeply about their work and chose to work there because they wanted to do work for a company that wasn't evil. Also, the average person really doesn't have the time or patience for lawsuits unless it's quite literally their last resort. Even the pop culture knowledge of frivolous lawsuits rests on stuff like the woman who bought coffee at McDonald's and how people talk about that is a great injustice to what actually happened (read Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants). Clovermoss🍀(talk)17:37, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
But to your initial argument of what about other laid off employees, why would it be bad for them to have the same rights as anyone else who had never worked for the WMF? The idea of ensuring someone's silence forever as a matter of practice is super messed up, imo. There's a huge difference between confidential trade secrets or whatever and simply being allowed to talk frankly about what happened at your former job. And again, the cumulative cost of not allowing people to speak adds up. It's not like that doesn't have financial implications. So if it's going to be expensive either way, why just not be evil? Clovermoss🍀(talk)17:40, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
If your job, or your fiduciary duty, is to protect the company, then you don't want former employees publicly speaking frankly about the company. If you are the employee, then you don't want your former employer publicly speaking frankly about your employment. Thats why employers and employees agree to mutual non-disparagement clauses in employment agreements and severance agreements. Not every agreement has a non-disparagement clause, but just like the employee doesn't want the employer publicly saying "they were a bad employee," the employer doesn't want the employee publicly saying "they were a bad employer." I don't see anything unfair or evil in employers and employees agreeing to mutual non-disparagement, if that's what they want to do. Levivich (talk) 17:46, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
And I don't think the answer of "fiduciary duty" is good enough, which is why the board needs to be reformed too. If someone's a bad employee, let their actions speak to that. Don't prevent people from speaking frankly. The hidden cost is much greater for trying to fulfill that sense of duty. Clovermoss🍀(talk)17:50, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
There's also a huge difference between doing something because it's a mutually beneficial arrangement and being forced to take the only option you have in an unbalanced power dynamic. Clovermoss🍀(talk)17:51, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Same Q I posed to Anomie, if it's public and you can share: what company pays severance without consideration (in exchange for nothing, without any conditions)? I'm genuinely curious to learn of examples of this practice. Levivich (talk) 17:42, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
While you're right about the "it's a bribe" part, I'm not sure about your assertion that the company can't give the pay without consideration, and certainly they could make the consideration much less onerous. As for but [lump sum severance payment is] almost never done, and there are some legal reasons why not, WMF, at least in the past, seems to have disagreed. (strike misquoted) Anomie⚔16:21, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
The WMF has disagreed in the past? What do you mean? Have they given a lump sum severance gift to someone in the past? I'm curious to learn more, is it public info? Levivich (talk) 16:42, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I see I misread your statement above, you were specifically referring to a lump sum gift rather than a payment. What I have knowledge of was not to be a "gift". Sorry for the confusion. Anomie⚔17:23, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I've heard that they quietly changed that policy to add "up to" before embarking on some of the latest rounds of controversial policy changes. Which has caused some consternation among staff. Anomie⚔13:55, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Newslinger, I think the TA whose comment you are referencing is over simplifying things by a large margin. Back when the original wishlist was in place, there were significant infighting among editors about the fact that often smaller communities would get drowned out by bigger communities and that the needs of the smaller communities were not being met. During that time, there were legitimate calls for significant change in the wishlist format. Selena heard those criticism and was the person to appoint a group of PMs to look into changing the wishlist. This was a good thing. The person who specifically spear-headed the current format was User talk:JWheeler-WMF a now-departed employee, who previously managed the Community Tech team who oversaw the "Future of the Wishlist" initiative.
Based on my understanding, what Selena has championed over the years has been "more WMF resources should be devoted to working on tasks from the wishlist" which, as a abstract concept, is a move towards the right direction. What has not worked is the rest of the organizational machinery and the implementation of the same under JWheeler-WMF and Mike (the current PM). There have been multiple times where me, Barkeep and Novem have reached out to her about the wishlist not working during events or one-on-ones, and to her credit she has been fairly receptive of the criticism and (to my understanding) has conveyed that to the folks who have owned the wishlist. Not only that, she was the driving force behind setting up PTAC a group of volunteers who (in theory) get to advise PMs and the C-suite on product direction. If anything, my personal compass is that the Product and Tech department (and the C-suite to some extension) under Selena and Iskander has become more communicative and receptive of editor criticism rather than less. (As a point of difference, I do not remember Grant Ingersoll (the previous CTO) ever even trying to interact with the community). While, I'm pretty sure she did sign off on Comm Tech being disbanded, I think calling for her to step down is 100% the wrong conclusion to take in this context and I think we will be worse off without Selena in the org. Sohom (talk) 19:46, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thank you for the context, Sohom Datta. After reviewing m:Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Larger suggestions/Dismantling of the annual Wishlist Survey system, I see that the community supported rehauling the former Community Wishlist Survey when the majority of the top-10 proposals from 2021–2022 had not been done. Based on this, I have struck my mention of the cadence change from my previous comment. It is encouraging to see you say that Selena Deckelmann is receptive to criticism, and I hope Deckelmann takes the time to read every single piece of feedback in this community discussion to understand how she would need to change course to avoid causing a debacle like this in the future.I do expect Deckelmann to:
personally ensure that all six laid-off staffers are immediately rehired by the WMF on equal or better terms (from the staffers' perspective) compared to before the layoffs (with severance paid and NDAs waived, per Clovermoss),
personally ensure that the implementation of the Community Wishlist is restored to a state where the community would regain confidence in the WMF's ability and willingness to meet community needs, and
personally update the community on a regular basis about her progress on these two items.
These are my bare-minimum expectations considering the magnitude of this controversy, and I am looking forward to reading Deckelmann's next response. —Newslingertalk21:13, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
As a reminder, the rules for this page include While grievances, complaints, or criticism of the foundation are frequently posted here, you are expected to present them without being rude or hostile. Comments that are uncivil may be removed without warning.RoySmith(talk)17:31, 22 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
We, the provisional members of WWU, are deeply appreciative of the many community voices speaking in support. While we do not know the reasons behind Foundation leadership’s recent actions, it remains clear that a union is necessary to ensure that WWU’s focus areas are established and upheld for the health of the organization and of the movement.
As a pre-recognition and pre-contract solidarity union, we are currently focused on internal organizing efforts and protecting Foundation staff. Therefore, we cannot commit to responding to external inquiries at this time.
For Foundation staff who have been following these conversations and are interested in learning more or participating, organizing conversations are ongoing and there is space to join them.
A heartfelt thanks to all parties who share in WWU’s values and goals.
– Provisional Members of WWU 01:30 UTC, May 23, 2026
I think describing Tamzin's comments as a conspiracy theory when they seem to have a plausible basis is not the best idea. I'll also note that the "two ways" comment says: There are two ways to read this situation, from where I stand. One is that you disliked that some or all of these people were trying to unionize. The other is, per what Nemoralis is saying, that the WMF has an institutional hostility toward dissenters, freethinkers, and valuable members of the community, which naturally guides it in the direction of terminating people who just happen to be involved in the union. I honestly think the latter would be more damning. The former would "just" be petty corporate bullshit; the latter suggests a fundamental inability to run an organization in the interest of its volunteers and donors. Because time and time again, the WMF is firing the people who try to make it better (I don't think it's accurate to describe that comment as "backtracking"). Clovermoss🍀(talk)02:58, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Also, there hasn't been any reason provided for why Brooke, an active and influential person in attempting to organize this union, is so suddenly and recently without a job. The employee that Jimbo dedicated a whole day to. There's very few reasons to let go an employee like that, especially when the WMF has already stated that this hasn't been done for financial reasons. I understand why people are concerned and don't nessecarily trust the standard corporate speak. Maybe new information genuinely will come to light that will make this questionable in a different way, but I understand why people are skeptical until that happens. You have to have a pretty tense relationship for people to automatically assume the worst outcome like this (such as knowing that several WMF employees have felt intimidated when trying to speak up in the past). Clovermoss🍀(talk)03:03, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
No, that "two ways" comment absolutely implies backtracking (which, as I said in the linked comment, Tamzin should actually get partial credit for), also when you compare it to, say, this earlier claim by Tamzin:
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 to clarify the context, Bawolff hadn't said there that these six people were fired for engaging in protected labor organizing - that was Tamzin's own factual assertion.
As for the other points you are bringing up in response: I'm commenting here primarily because I'm interested in what actually happened in this case, and because it looks like hundreds of community members have been whipping themselves into a frenzy largely based on a particular strong claim that is quite likely false. I'm not too interested in joining a wider debate about WMF here. (I have written quite a bit about WMF governance, transparency and accountability issues elsewhere, and criticized the organization frequently, e.g. just earlier this week on Meta. I also agree with concerns about the dismantling of the Wishlist as a way for the community to influence software development.) Likewise, I'm not very interested in speculating about Brooke's case here. (Btw I notified her two days ago that she was being talked/speculated about on this page. But I think she should be left alone if she doesn't want to comment.)
I will say though that I find institutional hostility toward dissenters (the second "way" that Tamzin now admits as possible) much more plausible, although that's unfortunatelyacommonphenomenon in many workplaces and very different from actual labor law violations. I think it's very unhelpful to blur the lines in that regard.
I don't think anyone here knows for sure what was in the hearts of WMF management when they terminated these staff. I doubt it was solely about the union - simply because how blatently illegal that would be. However it could still be related. Maybe WMF saw them as troublemakers due to their union activity or other advocacy, and when the opportunity came to get rid of them they took it. The situation certainly seems unusual. Brooke is one of the most famous mediawiki developers. MusikAnimal on the commtech team has a decade of experience at WMF and is extremely well regarded in the dev community. Letting go of this many high profile devs at one time seems unusual. I can't think of a previous time where so many high profile highly regarded devs were let-go in such a short time period. I think the union-busting theory is holding a lot of sway simply because WMF's actions seem very unusual and hard to understand. Bawolff (talk) 04:34, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
The situation certainly seems unusual. - I think it's difficult to make such conclusions based a few recent cases, each of which could well have different reasons; there have been departures of well-liked veteran developers before. But to run for a moment with your assumption that something has indeed changed recently: Another thing that I find frustrating about so many folks projecting their simplistic preconceived labor rights narratives here (long-suffering WMF laborers finally rose up against their oppressors by unionizing, which surely must have triggered the disbanding of the Community Tech team) is a pervasive lack of curiosity on this page about whether there might have been any other changes at the Wikimedia Foundation since the beginning of this year that could have resulted in a changed attitude towards certain kinds of employees. I don't know if that's the case, but if people engage in so much speculation already, there would seem to be more plausible hypotheses to explore at this point. Regards, HaeB (talk) 05:48, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Arguably, even if unintentional, the way WMF has gone about this could have a chilling effect on unionization effort. I suspect many here would argue that WMF has a moral duty to refrain from acts that have a chilling effect on unionization or at least put effort in to mitigate the chilling effect as far as possible. Bawolff (talk) 06:15, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I think the reason no one suggested that the alleged union busting is the result of a new CEO is because that would be inappropriately speculative and not because people are unaware there's a new CEO. Levivich (talk) 06:53, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
the alleged union busting is the result of a new CEO was not the possibility suggested here.
that would be inappropriately speculative - but your own (now debunked) "Oh wow, there are exactly 90 days [...]" insinuation of a connection between WMF's actions and California labor laws was appropriately speculative?
What? Are you saying there is no connection between WMF's actions and CA labor laws? The WMF is headquartered in California (no doubt you know this?) I think you misread my comments. I don't know what you think I meant but I wasn't insinuating anything. I write explicitly. There are in fact 90 days between Feb 19 and May 20. There is in fact a CA labor law with a 90 day retaliation window. There is in fact a connection between WMF's actions and CA labor laws. The connection is that WMF is subject to CA law. These aren't insinuations, they're facts, and they haven't been debunked (can't actually, that's the nature of facts). It doesn't actually matter whether the WMF waited slightly less than, exactly, or slightly more than, 90 days. None of those three possibilities make it less or more likely this was union busting. The timing that matters is whether the decision to layoff happened before or after the formation or announcement of the union. Levivich (talk) 07:46, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
No, what has been debunked in light of that Feb 5/Feb 6 post is the assumption that the creation of the Meta-wiki page on February 19 marked the beginning of the protected union activity, which was evidently underlying your remark above:
Oh wow, there are exactly 90 days between Feb 19 and May 20 (when the layoffs were publicly announced), what a coincidence. Levivich (talk) 19:58, 22 May 2026 (UTC)
It doesn't actually matter whether the WMF waited slightly less than, exactly, or slightly more than, 90 days. None of those three possibilities make it less or more likely this was union busting. - Sorry, "Oh wow" and "what a coincidence" express pretty much the opposite (i.e. that the timing makes it more likely that this was union busting), and definitely count as insinuating in my book. What's more, you are also contradicting yourself with regard to another speculation you had made above, where you had stated that WMF waiting less than 90 days would actually matter quite a lot:
I think it's been less than 90 days since WWU was launched. For this reason, I doubt any of the laid off workers will have a hard time finding lawyers to take their case. [...] Levivich (talk) 18:51, 22 May 2026 (UTC)
And there too you were speculating quite a bit yourself (e.g. could prove to be a massive own goal). Hence my surprise above that you criticized my own remark about the new CEO starting on January 20 and the union launch happening on February 5 as inappropriately speculative.
Are you saying there is no connection between WMF's actions and CA labor laws? [...] The connection is that WMF is subject to CA law. - of course I meant a specific causal connection between the timing of WMF's actions here and this particular 90 day provision, not that WMF isn't subject to CA labor laws. I'll take your feedback and will try to use a more precise wording next time. But since you are complaining I misread your own comment, it would have been nice to spend a few more seconds yourself to think about whether that could really have been the intended meaning here.
The timing that matters is whether the decision to layoff happened before or after the formation or announcement of the union - OK, but that's an entirely different question. In any case I'm glad we seem to agree that this 90 day window doesn't yield much evidence here.
Per my earlier comment, the timing of the layoffs in relation to the 90-day anti-retaliation period in California's Equal Pay and Anti-Retaliation Protection Act is worth looking into. If the layoffs occurred within the 90-day period, Levivich's 18:51 comment suggested that the laid-off staffers would be able to obtain relief. If the layoffs occurred shortly after the 90-day period, which appears to be more likely, then Levivich's 19:58 comment implies there is still reason to investigate whether the layoffs were motivated in part by the union formation, which I and many other editors here agree is a matter that should be examined. —Newslingertalk09:38, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
If creating web pages for a union on meta.w.o counts as "protected conduct"/"protected activity", then some of the WWU pages were created barely a week or so ago could count - well within the 90-day limit. Boud (talk) 16:08, 23 May 2026 (UTC) (clarify Boud (talk) 16:12, 23 May 2026 (UTC))Reply
You're using the word "debunked" to describe a change in analysis resulting from new facts coming to light. When I thought the union was <90 days old, I pointed out that's within the 90-day window, gives the workers the benefit of the legal presumption, and could mean a difficult case for the WMF. When someone linked to a union announcement exactly 90 days prior to the layoff announcement, I pointed out that was a surprising coincidence (using the words "oh wow ... what a coincidence" which I'd think was clear enough?). When you linked to an announcement that was more than 103 days old, I noted that it doesn't really matter if it was <90, 90, or >90. I know it's really unusual on this website for people to change their minds when new facts come to light, and you can call that evolution "debunked" if you want to, but it's kinda aggro.
Now, on "inappropriate speculation." My saying that some speculation is inappropriate is not the same thing as my saying that all speculation is inappropriate. Of course my comments about the effects of the timing are speculative. We're all engaging in tons of speculation on this page, and that's fine. What makes speculating about the new CEO being the cause of this inappropriate, rather than appropriate, speculation is WP:BLP. There is a huge difference between speculating about the motives of "the WMF," an organization with hundreds of people, and speculating that a particular individual is engaged in union-busting. The latter is a BLP vio IMO and thus inappropriate. I think, as I said, that is why nobody brought up the new CEO, not because people aren't aware there is a new CEO. But you seem to have taken that silence as evidence of ignorance rather than evidence of discretion. Levivich (talk) 16:54, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I don't think it's backtracking to say that, rather than being direct union-busting, this may have been the superset of union-busting, namely discriminating against anyone who goes against management. If a company is consistent enough at punishing all dissenters, they'll succeed at busting unions without ever deliberately targeting them. Importantly, suppression of union activity is a foreseeable consequence of that kind of policy, so I don't see a meaningful distinction. In either eventuality, the WMF's goal was to exclude people who are likely to promote workers' rights, and the result was the termination of multiple union members while they are actively organizing. By way of analogy, if people thought a company was refusing to hire Jews, and it turned out that actually they refuse to hire anyone but Christians, would you say that it was incorrect to say they discriminated against Jews, just because they actually targeted a broader group, which they knew to include Jews?And, I'll stress, the idea that the WMF punishes dissent is not a conspiracy theory. It is the perspective of many current and former WMF employees who've spoken out publicly or privately. I've had so many people reach out in the past few days to talk about this. I'd really like to hear more public testimonials, but people are predictably hesitant to violate NDAs, potentially lose severance pay, or face industry blacklisting. If WMF executives like SDeckelmann-WMF want to establish good faith here, a great place to start would be an enforceable public commitment that current and former staff members can voice their concerns about this without fear of retaliation. -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (they|xe|🤷) 04:45, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Wouldn't it have been more accurate to use the superset of union-busting, then? It would've been more reasonable to accuse the WMF of punishing dissent, rather than union-busting. To use your analogy, instead of saying they discriminated against Jews, it would be more accurate to say they discriminated against anyone who wasn't Christian. In both scenarios, it is implied that the chosen subset is the targeted one, when that is not the case. ARandomName123 (talk)Ping me!05:53, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
A more direct plain translation, since this already seems to be confusing some folks: "We don't want to say this is union-busting, but man, this sucks. Big thanks for your support, Wikimedia community. Dear journalists, we don't have a spokesperson yet, please be gentle. Fellow staff, come join!" In solidarity, asilvering (talk) 03:22, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
It's a bit awkward for me to be the person to bring this up, but I think people should take a look at User talk:Jimbo Wales. It's the closest we've got to any kind of update for hours. I don't find it very encouraging, personally. Clovermoss🍀(talk)05:37, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
I didn't find it very encouraging either, but I don't think we're likely to get any official responses before the long weekend is over. Meanwhile, few editors have weighed in on the thread where Selena specifically requested comment: meta:Talk:Community Wishlist#Update from Selena. Anyone who has something to suggest or ask about how this situation has been handled and how community desires will be handled going forward should do so over the next couple of days. In solidarity, asilvering (talk) 13:19, 23 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
My name is Selena Deckelmann, Chief Product and Technology officer at the WMF, and I have been following the conversation closely.
First, I want to apologize for the confusion caused by our initial posts on this topic. We could have been more clear and invited in more input from the beginning on how we can make the process of taking in wishes and responding to community needs better together.
Many of you have asked questions about the staff who were affected by these changes. Our priority in each individual staff conversation was to ensure they are aware of what options exist internally (including the severance they would receive if they chose not to apply), the process to apply for new roles (which has been expedited as much as is fair and permissible given they are known internal candidates), and where needed, specific introductions and/or connections to hiring managers to ensure questions about the work and roles are addressed.
I know many of you asked why we cannot just guarantee people new roles. As part of the planning related to disbanding the Community Tech team, we reviewed the rules in each affected staff member's country to determine our obligations in these situations. We also looked at how the laws differed country to country -- in this restructuring, we have 4 countries represented, with a wide variance in required actions. I want to note one specific requirement that came from these laws: we could not pre-select certain staff for new roles, as that would appear to be circumventing legally required processes in some countries. We made the decision as part of this restructuring to extend the option for a "consultation and redeployment process" to all impacted staff, even those who live in countries where this is not required. This process, required in some countries, is a period of time where staff whose roles are up for elimination have the opportunity to look for other positions internally (while remaining active as staff) that match their skill sets. We thought this was the most equitable approach given that this is a team of staff with years of valuable community expertise and developer expertise and these are skills that we need to be able to move quickly and respond to the global trends we're already seeing shape the internet and broader ecosystem we operate in.
I can confirm that we have a number of interviews ongoing, and we are expecting several processes to wrap up by early next week. If and when staff have been selected for these open roles, staff will be encouraged to update the relevant team page to show their new roles. We are going to respect each staff member's decision on how and when to communicate these changes, and ask you to do the same.
Regarding the future of the wishlist, I have received a lot of feedback from you in this discussion and directly, and am listening. In terms of changes, I am genuinely open to bringing back individual wish voting. Some version of this has existed since October, though as several of you have noted, it lacks the level of engagement that we had with the annual process, and I’m willing to discuss ways to make that better, including an annual or some other recurring cadence of a community wishlist survey. The wishlist will continue to have a technical program manager assigned to ensure that incoming wishes are delegated to the right team and a triage process for ensuring review of wishes by those teams.
I think the best way forward is to partner directly with editors in designing what this looks like in further detail, as well as considering other angles, like increasing participation in the wishlist across volunteer communities. One way to do this would be for my team and I to work directly with PTAC to come up with a proposal, and share it here for your consideration within three months. Is this something worth moving forward with? I am open to other ideas on how best to collect specific suggestions - hosting an open call, a Discord chat, etc. SDeckelmann-WMF (talk) 22:25, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
@SDeckelmann-WMF: The wishlist will continue to have a technical program manager assigned to ensure that incoming wishes are delegated to the right team and a triage process for ensuring review of wishes by those teams. If the editors decide differently, would you be interested in changing this structure? I do think this structure is the reason we have a extremely opaque and unusable process to begin with.
Regarding engagement with editors, I will also throw in a fourth option, what if we (the community) discuss, come up with a plan, have a structured period of WMF stakeholder-input (offwiki/onwiki/through PTAC, either way I'm willing to help out there) and then hold a Global RFC? Would that work? Sohom (talk) 23:30, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Agreed w Sohom, that’s a better plan and such a conversation should also include the former members of CommTech as they know the issues about this better than anyone. We also haven’t heard anything about why Brooke Vibber was let go (pertinent since Selena is their boss).
I know the following is outside of Selena's remit, so I guess this is to those higher up the command chain: I second Clovermoss in saying that this goes beyond CommTech and the Wishlist, this scandal is merely symptomatic; the core issues are working conditions for staff and community representation in positions of authority/oversight (ie. a second bite of the apple at m:Movement Charter). Anything less won’t stop the community's collective action, whatever that may turn out to be. Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 00:44, 25 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Looks like we're now on the They say they are listening and request questions and feedback from the community, to which they have no intention of responding. They sometimes go as far as to issue a non-apology without accountability or any specific commitments. They claim to want to be more responsive and transparent, but it's just part of the charade. This is their strategy of crisis management: waiting it out, saying as little as possible, making empty promises, taking no direct action, and sequestering the last hardliners in some farce of a listening committee, where their complaints can be ignored more directly part of the pattern. This response does not resolve the crux of the issues at hand. I think we as a community deserve much better than that. Clovermoss🍀(talk)23:37, 24 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thank you for your response - at this point, anything but radio silence is a step in the right direction. However, this statement does not give me confidence that this will all be resolved in a satisfactory and productive way. Clovermoss put it perfectly just above. Changes need to be made, and they are not. These engineers were experienced, community-facing employees that, from your statement and from above, seem to have a low chance of being re-hired. This is no way to treat these people. In solidarity, Chorchapu (talk|edits) 00:01, 25 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
SDeckelmann-WMF, this is not going to end until there is a tangible and measurable improvement, and it is not going to end until the improvement is delivered as opposed to planned or in progress. So you may want to get the suggested changes in motion quickly—days, not weeks. There's no shortage of suggestions amid the mess above, and I'm sure you can just ask if you want more of them. "Things take time" will fall on deaf ears.The necessary amount of change to satisfy people is certainly going to be multiplied for each of the laid off employees who don't get a new position (or their old position back), so that would be an efficient shortcut to make the problem less pressing. I don't know if any amount of improvement will make this go away if there are zero rehires. If that's unrealistic, then getting out of this crisis might be unrealistic too. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 02:55, 25 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
@SDeckelmann-WMF With regards to discussions, I think a discord call is a good idea. (Probably before the annual plan, because this situation needs to be addressed in it) But avoid collecting suggestions, it leads to the same pattern of people feeling minimized and ignored. We're here to build wikis. We should draft policies that way. A lot of the tension between the WMF and wp's editorbase is because many editors see the WMF as apart and above wikipedia, that needs fixing. I think some good steps would be moving as much as you can out of slack and onto meta (ex: any document that's going to end up on meta should be drafted there with people welcome to edit), avoiding PR speak as much as possible, and being more a part of the community. MetalBreaksAndBends (talk) (Its our wiki!)05:01, 25 May 2026 (UTC)Reply
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You are invited to join the discussion at MediaWiki talk:Watchlist-messages § Solidarity petition and collective labor action following WMF Community Tech layoff. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 14:45, 22 May 2026 (UTC)