It would be a terrible thing for this organization to die
If an organization won’t respect the fact that it exists ONLY because of its workers, it would be a great thing if it died and made way for one that will. There are enough backups, we can survive the transition period. I have two, currently; one that gets updated, another from the pre-LLM era.
I can’t disagree with the points being made in the replies here. It doesn’t seem like continuing to give them more money will help the situation, and maybe a funding crunch would be the incentive they need to change course and save the organization. Or maybe it would just accelerate its demise.
I guess I’d rephrase my previous statement to: Wikipedia has been one of the world’s greatest free repositories of public knowledge for decades, and it would be a terrible thing for the world to lose that resource. The contributors and employees were always the reason it was such a great resource. If an organization can’t exist without exploiting the people that are responsible for its product, then I agree, it should die and make way for something else. But I (perhaps naively) believe that Wikipedia can exist without exploitation, so the present situation is not fundamental to the organization; it’s the result of poor leadership. So while I don’t want to kill it by withholding funding to send a message, the leadership may kill it anyway by refusing to negotiate with their workers in good faith.
This is yet another case where I can see people in power ruining something I loved, and I don’t know what can be done from the outside. From that standpoint, yeah… if Wikipedia is damned if I do and damned if I don’t, then it’s better to “don’t”.
If an organization won’t respect the fact that it exists ONLY because of its workers, it would be a great thing if it died and made way for one that will. There are enough backups, we can survive the transition period. I have two, currently; one that gets updated, another from the pre-LLM era.
I can’t disagree with the points being made in the replies here. It doesn’t seem like continuing to give them more money will help the situation, and maybe a funding crunch would be the incentive they need to change course and save the organization. Or maybe it would just accelerate its demise.
I guess I’d rephrase my previous statement to: Wikipedia has been one of the world’s greatest free repositories of public knowledge for decades, and it would be a terrible thing for the world to lose that resource. The contributors and employees were always the reason it was such a great resource. If an organization can’t exist without exploiting the people that are responsible for its product, then I agree, it should die and make way for something else. But I (perhaps naively) believe that Wikipedia can exist without exploitation, so the present situation is not fundamental to the organization; it’s the result of poor leadership. So while I don’t want to kill it by withholding funding to send a message, the leadership may kill it anyway by refusing to negotiate with their workers in good faith.
This is yet another case where I can see people in power ruining something I loved, and I don’t know what can be done from the outside. From that standpoint, yeah… if Wikipedia is damned if I do and damned if I don’t, then it’s better to “don’t”.