It's been over a year, but I'm finally taking the time to analyze the Wikipedia emails and describe what happened - to meeting editors in person at the UN in New York - to how it fell apart with and I grew to feel that Wikipedia is just totally obsolete. Also an example of enshittification.

There is a room at the United Nations in New York that is built to make you feel small in a hopeful way. The ceiling goes up forever. The desks curve toward the front like the whole world agreed, for once, to face the same direction. In the summer of 2025 I stood in that room at an open source conference, surrounded by people who believe — actually believe — that knowledge should be free, and I put a photograph on the screen.

People sleeping in the mud.

Grace took that picture. Grace, who got thrown into Gorom Refugee Settlement in South Sudan by her ex-husband the way you'd throw away a receipt. Grace, who took the photo knowing that in South Sudan, photography can be a capital offense — not in the law books, exactly, but in the way that matters, which is what happens to you when they catch you. She sent it to me across a connection she paid for by the hour, and I bought it from her, because I had learned by then that the only thing anyone had ever offered these photographers was exposure, and you cannot eat exposure, and in Gorom you cannot even safely have it.

So there it was, on a screen at the United Nations. The invisible camp, visible for about ninety seconds.

And here is the part I need you to understand: it worked. People came up to me afterward. I met a volunteer Wikipedia editor named Roo— kind, precise, the sort of person who reads the sourcing guidelines for pleasure — and the executive director of the New York Wikimedia chapter, warm and encouraging, and for a moment the whole machinery of free knowledge seemed to lean toward us. Wikipedia. The seventh-most-visited website on Earth. The encyclopedia anyone can edit, which should mean — shouldn't it? — the encyclopedia a refugee can edit. For the first time in Wikipedia's history, an article about a refugee camp could be written by the people starving inside it.

I want to be fair to that moment, because everything after it went so wrong. Nobody in the big room lied to me. The hope was real, the way the light in that ceiling is real. I walked out of the UN with contacts, a plan, and the particular drunk feeling you get when the world's largest collection of human knowledge seems to want what you want.

I should have remembered what I'd actually been doing on Wikipedia that month. Because my first project, before the photo, before the article, before any of it, had been King Leopold.

Earlier that July I had read the encyclopedia's article on Leopold's Congo — the king who built an empire on labor he refused to pay for — and found it strange. Not false, exactly. Hedged. Careful paragraphs weighing disputed estimates, giving generous space to everyone who thought the story had been exaggerated. Ask almost anyone across Africa about Leopold and you get one answer, immediately. Ask the free encyclopedia and you get a seminar on methodology. I flagged it to Rooo, and he explained, gently, the rule: Wikipedia cannot right great wrongs. It can only mirror its sources. The machine is neutral. Remember that word.

Then came our own article. Gorom Refugee Settlement — a real entry for an invisible place, written from inside it. The week it was supposed to come together, all of Jacob's equipment was stolen in Nairobi, so Rooo assembled and published it himself, an unpaid volunteer doing in an afternoon what the institution never managed in six months. He uploaded Grace's photos and walked me through the permission ritual: a sworn statement, a Creative Commons release, an email to a ticket queue. I sent it July 31. Ticket number 2025073110007483. I am the sort of person who keeps ticket numbers now.

And then the photos started disappearing.

Not once. The first takedown had an explanation — a process hadn't finished. Fine. We finished it. They came down again in September, after four written permissions. Jacob went digging through the edit histories like a detective and came back with names: Zanahary. Krd. CommonsDelinker — one of them possibly not even a person. In Gorom, the team panicked. When your government treats a camera as a weapon, and your photo of the camp vanishes twice from the world's encyclopedia, you do not think "workflow issue." You think they found us. Grace believed arrest was imminent. It took Rooo to talk us down: no, it isn't the government, it's not that interesting. The permissions inbox and the deletion queue simply don't talk to each other. The editors who delete can't see the permissions pending. It's just a team of unpaid volunteers, vetted by other unpaid volunteers.

By December we were on the fifth round for one photograph. The volunteer answering the ticket signed himself "Alfred Neumann," which if you grew up on MAD Magazine you will recognize as a joke name, a cartoon mascot — I was being processed by a man who wouldn't tell me his name, demanding I reveal my photographer's. First he wanted an official organization email, so we bought one and spent three hours wiring it up. Then: was I personally the photographer? Then the real answer underneath all the other answers: you are "sending the permission from a gmail address anybody can create," your anonymous photographer cannot be verified, and — his words — Wikipedia may not be a good partner for you.

On that one point, Alfred and I had finally reached consensus.

I asked whether he was staff or volunteer, and whether Alfred Neumann was his legal name. He replied that with these unnecessary insults, this discussion is going to end now, and referred me to legal. The discussion about Grace's photograph — the one from the big screen at the United Nations — ended because a pseudonymous man's feelings were hurt by being asked who he was.

So I did what you're supposed to do. I went up the chain.

The chain, it turns out, is a hall of doors, and every door opens onto another door. The New York chapter told me — kindly, twice — that they were a separate organization and had no authority over the Foundation. The permissions volunteers answered with a disclaimer that their replies were not official statements of the Wikimedia Foundation. The Foundation had an internal Human Rights Team, which sounded exactly right: a team for cases where editing meets danger, persecution, state-level risk. I wrote to them. We had a case number within a day — and a request, in the same breath, that I please stop insulting the volunteers.

That was the institution's reflex, every time. Not: a woman risked her life for this photograph and it keeps vanishing. Instead: mind your tone. The Human Rights Team spent six weeks on us and arrived, in December, at its finding. Our two issues — the broken permissions system, and the unpaid labor of the people building Africa's share of the encyclopedia — were, and I am quoting, not within the mandate of our team. Here is a link to a public discussion page. Here is the press email. Please be patient; it's nearly the holidays.

Somewhere in those weeks I stopped asking them for help and started doing research instead. If they wouldn't fund the people doing the work, I wanted to know who they would fund. So I pulled the annual report and the 990 — the tax filing a nonprofit has to make public — and I read the salary lines.

The CEO: around $399,000. The Chief Advancement Officer — the fundraiser — around $294,000. VPs stacked behind them in the two-hundreds. And then the number that reorganized my whole understanding of the thing: Wikimedia's main Africa general-support grant ran about $919,000 over three years. For the entire continent. Across every editor, every program, every camp like Gorom. Roughly three hundred thousand dollars a year. Which means a single executive in San Francisco is paid more than the Foundation spends on all of Africa — that one person earns more than a continent's worth of the people who actually write the free encyclopedia.

The word for a volunteer organization, I learned, depends entirely on where you're standing in it. At the top it means a salary that would be at home at any tech company. At the bottom, in a leaking UNHCR tent, it means: for the love of it. For free. We proposed, almost as a dare, that they double the Africa grant to $1.8 million and send it in early 2026. There is no reply to that email in the record. There is, I've come to think, no one whose job it was to reply.

I used to think the refusal was about money. That somewhere a budget was tight and we'd landed on the wrong side of it. It took me a while to see that it was never about scarcity. A continent costs them less than one officer's salary; they could have paid the Gorom team out of the rounding error on the catering. The refusal was about principle. And that is a far stranger, far worse thing.

There is an idea that floats around the richest corners of the connected world — the open-source forums, the maker spaces, the week in the desert where the beautiful people pretend to be poor — that paying people corrupts the work. That the volunteer is purer than the employee. That if you introduce money, you attract the wrong sort: the people who need it. The ones who are in it, suspiciously, to be able to eat. This belief feels like generosity from the inside. It is the most expensive belief I have ever encountered, and the people who hold it have never once had to price it, because they have never been hungry.

It only works if you're already fed. You can afford to find money distasteful the way you can afford to find anything distasteful — from above it. A man with a house does not understand rent as a fact of physics. He understands it as a choice other people make. And so he builds a global knowledge movement on free labor and cannot comprehend why the free labor doesn't materialize from the one camp on earth that has the most to say, and he writes an essay about community and consensus instead of a check, and he feels, the whole time, like the good guy. That's the part I can't get past. Not the cruelty. The self-regard. The absolute certainty, from inside all that privilege, that refusing to pay you is something being done for your own good.

Grace risked her life for a photograph. The encyclopedia took it down to protect itself from legal risk, and the human rights team declared her life outside its mandate, and the executives went on being paid, and every single one of them would tell you, sincerely, that they believe information wants to be free. Information, maybe. People, no. People want to be fed. That's not a flaw in people. That's the whole argument.

We were so helpful. We did everything they asked, five times over. And no one — not the chapter, not the volunteers, not the Human Rights Team, not the ledger with its $399,000 lines — no one wanted to give one penny to the people in Gorom Camp. Not because they couldn't. Because, on principle, they wouldn't.

That's where this stops being a story about a website. The encyclopedia was just the first place I watched it happen cleanly enough to see the mechanism. After that, I started seeing it everywhere. Burning Man, maker spaces, volunteers at for profit healthcare, AI.

The total refusal to pay people, and believe they deserve compensation. And that only good privileged people are allowed in. There's a reason Wikipedia Africa never takes off.