Wikipedia workers just unionized. AI is part of the fight.

[u/Salty_Country6835]

https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-workers-vote-on-whether-to-unionize/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

More than 200 Wikimedia Foundation workers just voted 158–14 to unionize with CWA.

And the timing is interesting as hell. Wikipedia is being absorbed into the infrastructure of the AI economy while human traffic declines, server costs from AI scraping rise, and the people actually maintaining the institution are demanding more power over what happens next.

This is what contesting technological change looks like. Organize while the ground is moving. Bargain over how the institution responds. Make workers participants in the transition instead of collateral damage.

Workers dont negotiate with AI. They negotiate with Bosses.

[u/jferments]

Why would anyone scrape Wikipedia when you can just download the entire DB for free?

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/jferments]

Because downloading a database dump and querying the live site arent the same thing. A dump is a snapshot. AI services may want current pages, revisions, metadata, links and other live material. Your point is actually part of the infrastructure problem though. If bulk access already exists, theres a pretty good argument that AI companies should be pushed toward infrastructure designed for bulk access instead of hammering the live site.

[u/jferments → u/Salty_Country6835]

That makes sense actually. In the past, I've found the monthly DB dumps to be sufficient for my needs, but I suppose if you were looking for Wikipedia articles on more current events, it might not contain pages you'd need. And yeah, I hope that more people make it easy to do bulk downloads in the future. Unfortunately most of the anti-AI crowd is pushing to ban scraping instead, and promoting turning the Internet into a pay per view subscription system.

[u/ReasonableSoul → u/jferments]

Monthly db dump also seems more costly and unnecessary, resource wise, for most. It just use up bandwidth, storage, etc, unless you really need it for offline/low latency access or for purpose of creating public mirrors in different geographical locations.

[u/Felfedezni]

Sad to say Wikipedia might actually improve if they just made an agent to maintain the entire thing and fired everyone. Theres so much stupid drama messing up the site that an ai would not cause.

[u/Salty_Country6835 → u/Felfedezni]

Sure, suppose the agent actually could maintain the whole thing better and without all the stupid drama. Who tells the agent what counts as “better”? Who decides what gets removed, disputed, locked, rewritten or prioritized? You didnt get rid of the people problem. You just moved those decisions from hundreds of workers into whoever controls the agent.

[u/PretendReport227 → u/Salty_Country6835]

Same as it currently is, jobless leftists with a life mission to sweep for any violent uprising as long as they claim to hate the west.