Greetings Friends!

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.

> Hello! I have donated, what I can and when I can over the years, despite being on an extremely limited income. It saddens me greatly to see that Brooke Vibber and the members of the Community Tech team were let go. I know that the public stance is that the Wikimedia leadership supports unionization attempts, but this action seems to prove that those are hollow, meaningless publicity statements that are not backed by actions or policy. I will be withholding future donations until I feel that Wikimedia has shown that they support unionization. I hope employees manage to unionize soon - and that nobody else's position is questionably terminated. In the modern era of AI disinformation, actual humans willing to put in the work - and coordinate and assist the many, many more who do it FOR FREE - are a precious resource that should not be so easily thrown away.

and got back a form letter:

Thank you for your email and for your support of the Wikimedia Foundation and free knowledge.

Thank you also for sharing your concerns. I am happy to provide you with more context and information about the recent events.

The decision to disband the Community Tech team is not in any way connected to recent discussions about unionizing, nor have we terminated any staff for their participation in those discussions. The Foundation respects the right of staff to unionize if they vote to do so.

Earlier this month, the Wikimedia Foundation restructured the way the organization supports the Community Wishlist initiative, a forum for the volunteer editors behind Wikimedia projects to suggest and collaborate on improvements to our product and technology.

The decision to restructure followed internal assessments dating back to September 2025 on ways to make our Community Wishlist work more effective and to improve our support for volunteer editors. We learned from these assessments that it is rarely possible to fulfill community wishes through a single team due to the vast breadth of the software we support and the number of channels through which we receive wishes. The restructuring shifts the management of the Community Wishlist from a single, sometimes siloed team (formerly known as the Community Tech team) to the full Product and Technology Department — ensuring that community wishes can be acted on by teams who are specialists in many different areas.

As part of this restructuring, the Community Tech team was disbanded, and six roles were impacted. The Foundation has been committed to supporting the affected team members during this transition in various ways. The team members are currently still working at the Foundation and are receiving internal support to identify and apply for open roles at the organization.

Regarding Brooke Vibber’s departure, as a general practice, and out of respect for individual privacy, the Foundation does not share details about personnel matters. This applies consistently in all cases. We recognize that this can be frustrating, but maintaining this standard is important for everyone. However, we do want to reiterate that the Wikimedia Foundation does not take employment actions in response to union activity. We respect employees’ rights to organize and engage in protected activities.

You may also wish to read our CEO Bernadette Meehan’s update to the community here.

I hope that information assuages some of your concerns. Please don’t hesitate to get back in touch if I can be of any further assistance, and thank you again for your support.

sincerely,

Kristie Robinson

Song offering: Carloman - Brigandage Road

from Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights by Molly Smith and Juno Mac:

In the UK, the 1970s and 1980s sex workers’ rights movement was deeply entwined with the ‘wages for housework’ campaign. Marxist feminists named the value of women’s unpaid reproductive and domestic labour and demanded a radical reorganisation of society to value women’s work. Around that time, the feminist group Wages Due Lesbians linked domestic work, sex work, and the work of heterosexuality in a solidarity statement against a 1977 vice crackdown: ‘Wherever women succeed in winning some of the wages due us, it is a strength to all of us and proof that women’s services cannot be taken for granted’.

from Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work by Melissa Grant:

“Hookers and Housewives.” It’s hard now to conceive of these groups of women as class allies. Hookers and housewives, to speak in impossible generalities, are too often considered rivals (by those on the Left as much as by those on the Right), occupying opposite sides of one economic circle, two classes of women who earn their living from men’s waged work. Their labor, by contrast, is considered illegitimate. Caretaking and sex should be offered freely, we’re told, with genuine affection and out of love. A housewife maintains her legitimacy by not seeking a wage, and a hooker breaks with convention by demanding one. They are both diminished and confined by the same system that would keep women dependent on men for survival. And they could free themselves from that system together. As Margo St. James recalled in an interview (also from Carol Leigh’s archives), before she founded COYOTE in early 1973, there was WHO—Whores, Housewives, and Others. Others meant lesbians, “but it wasn’t being said out loud yet, even in liberal bohemian circles.” An early COYOTE supporter, anthropologist Jennifer James, coined the term “decriminalization” to express the movement’s goals of removing laws used to target prostitutes. The National Organization for Women (NOW), still very much in its Feminine Mystique era, adopted the decriminalization of prostitution as an official part of its platform later that year.