Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of trust on the internet. But last week, volunteer editors and contributors were alarmed to hear that a small but important team of engineers at the nonprofit that supports it had been laid off. The layoffs didn’t just threaten to sever an important link between the Wikimedia Foundation and its community — they also raised concerns that the WMF was engaging in union-busting. After days of heated discussion, some Wikipedians are ready to support a strike. What that even looks like on a platform where creators mostly aren’t being paid is a different question.
On May 20th, the WMF said it was disbanding the Community Tech team, a group of five engineers and one manager who are among WMF’s paid staff. The team was a bridge between the foundation and Wikipedia’s army of volunteers. The team developed tools and features that contributors use every day: things like plagiarism detectors, dark mode, or chart and graph tools. Editors and former foundation employees describe it as an approachable group — somewhere volunteers could turn if they needed help, or to have their voice heard.
Even so, this system could get backlogged. The WMF acknowledged that the process of responding to community requests for features and tools was not working perfectly, and said that having a centralized team was “leading to frequent bottlenecks and delays.” So going forward, that work would be distributed among multiple teams instead of through a centralized Community Tech team.
“Why aren’t you backtracking like hell right now?”
The reaction from the community was immediate and negative. Longtime contributors demanded the reinstatement of team and changes to the way the wishlist, a log of new features and tools the community requests, was run. Others suspected an ulterior motive. In recent months, Wikimedia staff had announced their intent to unionize, and some suggested the foundation was specifically laying off staff involved in the union drive. The breakup of the Community Tech team was also not the first instance of shocking, sudden departures. The union Wiki Workers United, which has not yet been recognized, declined a request for an interview.
Jimmy Wales, a cofounder of Wikipedia, argued with contributors on the site’s discussion pages, saying it was “time to get serious about meeting community needs,” and assuring volunteers that there would still be dedicated staff working on the wishlist. Volunteers did not find it comforting.
“If it’s not about the money, it’s not about the union, why aren’t you backtracking like hell right now?” says Hannah Clover, an editor and former Wikimedian of the Year. “Even Jimmy is trying to pass this off as somehow listening to the community, and that’s infuriating.”
In an email to The Verge, Nadee Gunasena, chief of staff at the Wikimedia Foundation, said that the restructuring was based on internal assessments dating back to September 2025. Gunasena said the restructuring will ensure that volunteer requests will be fulfilled by a variety of teams with expertise in different areas, and that it will seek to place the six Community Tech employees in other roles; if none are found, they’ll be laid off next month. Gunasena also denied that WMF has terminated any staff for union activities. If union supporters recruit enough staff to call for a vote — which hasn’t yet been requested — “we respect the rights of all eligible staff to vote, and if the majority of eligible staff vote in favor of representation, we will proceed to negotiate in good faith,” Gunasena said.
The relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and the volunteers that maintain Wikipedia had been improving consistently, says Femke Nijsse, a volunteer contributor — until the layoffs. Now, Nijsse says, it feels like the relationship is moving in the opposite direction.
“The wishlist has been broken for two, three years, and the response has not been to fix that, but to fire the people that are still making it sort of work,” she says. Nijsse has suggested a way to overhaul the process that has unsurprisingly prompted extensive discussion among volunteers. At the top of the list is to reinstate the Community Tech team.
Both editors and former employees worry that the work done by the Community Tech team will fall by the wayside without dedicated staff. One former foundation employee, who asked not to be named in order to speak freely, told The Verge that several of the employees on the disbanded team were “one-of-a-kind developers who know segments of the tech stack that no one knew.”
“This follows a pattern of breaking up community-facing teams with the idea that now everyone’s going to be responsible for it,” they say. “And what happens every time is no one’s responsible for it, and then it gets neglected.”
Tamzin Hadasa Kelly, another volunteer editor, said in a message to The Verge that it was clear immediately that the community was angry. Kelly created a petition in solidarity with the union in which volunteers are saying they are willing to engage in collective action — potentially even an editors strike — if WWU asked them to. It’s since been signed by more than 700 editors, most from Wikipedia’s English-language site, who are collectively responsible for writing tens of thousands of articles and making nearly 10 million edits. “The goal was not to do some performative stunt or just turn this into a community vs. WMF power struggle, but to put the power in the hands of the people who need it, which is WWU,” Kelly said.
A strike would likely not happen unless WWU called for one, and there’s no clear timeline for this. For now, the volunteer community is rapidly signing on to the petition, and will need to hammer out what a strike would look like via Wikipedia’s consensus-based guiding decision-making process. Some proposed actions don’t necessarily impact Wikipedia’s content. Contributors have discussed measures like blocking banners calling for donations to the WMF, which could cut into the foundation’s funds.
Routine vandalism, spam, errant sentences, and other less urgent rule-breaking would go unmoderated
The version of a strike proposed by Kelly, however, would call on editors to cease any activity on Wikipedia other than to remove the most egregious examples of abuse, like the posting of personal information, harassment, or adding fabricated and unsourced information about living people. Routine vandalism, spam, errant sentences, and other less urgent rule-breaking would go unmoderated. Pages might go blank, or quickly become outdated, says Nijsse.
The effects of any kind of work stoppage could be profound, given how much weight the site carries on an internet filled with sludge. “Wikipedia can very quickly become dated if there’s not hundreds and hundreds of people updating it every day,” Nijsse says. “Breaking news is probably where you’ll see a bigger problem, where articles just don’t get created.” Wikipedia is also a major source for AI tools like Google’s AI Overviews or ChatGPT. If Wikipedia breaks, the internet breaks — and Wikipedia needs the unpaid editors, whose anger is quickly mounting.
“There will be no Wikipedia. It will quickly deteriorate” if even a critical mass of volunteers stop working, says another former Wikimedia Foundation employee. “That would be a disaster, not for Wikipedia, but for humanity.”
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