Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia

TLDR: In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki and disbanded the team whose entire job was to listen to volunteers. Most of the people they fired were union organizers. Wikipedia’s editors are now threatening to strike in solidarity. The Foundation is sitting on $296 million in reserves and a freshly profitable AI revenue stream. This is a confrontation with global implications.

Ten days in May

In mid-May, the Wikimedia Foundation fired Brooke Vibber.

If that name doesn’t mean anything to you, here is what it should mean. Vibber took over as lead developer of MediaWiki, the platform that runs Wikipedia, in early 2003. She was the first full-time employee the Wikimedia Foundation ever hired, and its first Chief Technical Officer. For more than twenty years she was the engineer you called when something deep in the code was broken. The Foundation itself once described her as one of a very small number of people in the world who deeply understand the technical underpinnings of the system. She was also a union organizer.

A week later, on May 21, the Foundation announced it had disbanded the Community Tech team. Five engineers and a manager: gone. Their job had been to take the wishes Wikipedia editors submitted through an official channel called the Community Wishlist, and build them. It was the one team at WMF whose product owner was, in effect, the volunteer community. Most of the engineers were also union organizers.

Within hours of the announcement, editors were signing a solidarity petition pledging collective action up to and including an editorial strike. By the organizers’ account, this is the first time editors have organized solidarity action with paid Foundation staff. Administrators offered to step down. Anti-vandalism bot operators offered to switch off the filters. It should not be legal to operate without a union, wrote an administrator named Femke. And a organisation that tries to be a force for good should not be willing to operate without one.

WMF General Counsel Stephen LaPorte has publicly said the Foundation respects staff’s right to unionize and will negotiate in good faith. The actions of the past two weeks will determine whether that means anything.

The money

The Wikimedia Foundation closed last fiscal year with $208.6 million in revenue. It holds $296.6 million in reserves, 17.1 months of operating expenses. The Wikimedia Endowment, a separate fund, sits on $169.4 million in net assets, up $25 million in a single year. Wikimedia Enterprise, the team that provides high speed, high volume API access to AI labs, just turned profitable on $8.3 million in revenue, a 148% jump from the prior year.

That last revenue stream is good, by the way. AI companies are training on Wikipedia whether they pay for it or not, and making them pay is the smartest move the Foundation has made in years. The figure should be much higher. OpenAI and Anthropic and Google can afford to write checks an order of magnitude bigger than $8.3 million.

The point is the Foundation is rich. Seventeen-plus months of operating runway in the bank. Revenue diversifying, not shrinking. They can afford six engineers. Whatever this fight is about, it is not about money.

The pattern

The Foundation has spent the better part of a decade in slow legitimacy collapse with its own community, and the people who run it have absorbed exactly the wrong lessons from every crisis.

In 2015, then-CEO Lila Tretikov tried to build the Knowledge Engine, funded in part by a $250,000 Knight Foundation grant the community wasn’t told about for four months. When the community found out in early 2016, the project imploded, Tretikov resigned, and the Foundation apologized in the careful corporate register of an organization that doesn’t quite mean it.

In 2019, the Foundation banned a longtime English Wikipedia administrator on secret evidence through a process the community had not designed, triggering the largest administrator revolt of the office-action era. They handed the decision back to the community.

Every crisis taught a lesson. The lesson was never that secrecy and top-down decision-making were wrong on principle. The lesson was always that secrecy was operationally expensive and should be handled more carefully next time.

What followed was the Silicon Valley playbook applied to a nonprofit that had spent twenty years telling donors it was different. A desktop redesign shipped over community objections. Strategic plans landed as fait accompli. Affiliates complained of inadequate funding and consultation while headcount at the Foundation grew. The reserve climbed, while fundraising banners continued to suggest Wikipedia might go dark without your donation. Move fast. Ship things. Manage the community as a stakeholder. Treat dissent as a comms problem.

Bernadette Meehan became CEO on January 20, 2026, recruited from a career that included Wall Street stints at J.P. Morgan and Lehman Brothers, a spokesperson role at the National Security Council, senior leadership at the Obama Foundation, and most recently a posting as U.S. Ambassador to Chile. Four months in, the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki is fired, the team that personifies community service is dissolved, and the union is in open confrontation.

This is the standard tech playbook. Fire the engineers who know how the system works, fire the ones organizing labor, hope nothing catastrophic breaks before you can ship something splashy. Twitter did it. Meta did it. Salesforce did it. Google did it. We have all seen this movie.

The union’s demands are embarrassingly modest

This is what Wiki Workers United is asking for. Transparency and accountability from leadership toward both staff and movement communities. Real staff input on annual planning before decisions are finalized. An end to inconsistent hiring, firing, and promotion practices. The ability to safely dissent. Mental health support for the workers who deal with the community directly. Their organizing principle, borrowed from disability rights, is nothing about us without us.

These are demands a competent CEO would have implemented unprompted and taken credit for. A smart executive welcomes the union, signs a generous contract, and uses the goodwill to consolidate authority for the difficult AI-era decisions ahead. That is the textbook play. Meehan and her team chose the opposite. They picked a fight. They picked it by firing union members and the team that embodied community service in the same fortnight, with no public explanation that sufficiently addresses any of it.

Why this matters outside the bubble

Wikipedia is not a website. It is the largest reference work humanity has ever produced. It is the corpus that trains the AI models you use every day. It is the first citation when a high schooler looks up an unfamiliar term, and what a journalist reads before calling a source.

The content is free. The labor is not. The gift economy of the encyclopedia rests on a small wage economy underneath it, and when the wage economy starts behaving like every other tech company, treating the workers who serve volunteers as costs to optimize, the whole thing frays.

The Foundation has spent twenty years telling donors it is not like other tech companies. The union drive is the moment when that claim either becomes true or admits it was always marketing. If WMF breaks the union, or just lets the firings stand and waits for the news cycle to drift, the signal sent to every other mission-driven tech organization is that values rhetoric is decoupled from values practice. Every nonprofit pulling in donations on language about community, transparency, and equity gets permission to keep that language on the website while the staff handbook reads like Amazon’s.

What to do

Sign the solidarity petition if you edit Wikipedia. Email the board and remind them their fiduciary duty runs to the mission, not the org chart. If you are a journalist, cover this. If you are a researcher or educator who depends on Wikipedia, say so publicly.

For the people inside the Foundation: this is not a moment to manage. It is a moment to decide. The decision will define the institution for the next ten years. The encyclopedia will outlive whoever happens to be running WMF today. Your authority to host the encyclopedia is exactly as strong as the trust you maintain, and that trust is being burned through at a rate that should alarm whoever is keeping the books.

What happens next

Wikipedia’s workers are fighting to unionize because the institution hosting the world’s encyclopedia has started acting like a regular employer at exactly the moment when the world most needs it to act like something better.

The encyclopedia belongs to everyone. The labor that sustains it deserves the same protection.