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"text": "><i>"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.</i><p>><i>"The encyclopedia belongs to everyone. The labor that sustains it deserves the same protection."</i><p>If Wikipedia has excess reserves, that money should be directed to a worthy cause, not just the people at its office. The labor that sustains it is made up of many more people than those who are employees; trying to milk monopoly rents out of Wikipedia will be its (long and slow) death sentence.",
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"body": "> \"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.\" If Wikipedia has excess reserves, that money should be directed to a worthy cause, not just the people at its office. The labor that sustains it is made up of many more people than those who are employees; trying to milk monopoly rents out of Wikipedia will be its (long and slow) death sentence.",
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"text": "My usspicion here is that there are deeper issues for which union-busting is a symptom and not the main issue. There's a battle to control what information gets recorded and distributed, an effort to silence anything that contradicts US foreign policy, basically.<p>Wikimedia Foundation CEO Bernadette Meehan has very much a Beltway insider, working for the the US foreign service, the Obama administration (NSC), the Obama foundation and the Biden administration (Ambassador to Chile). Personally, I deeply distrust anyone having a lot of influence over what is essentially the world's actively recorded history book.<p>There's history here too, specifically the 2016 secret project to essentially label infomration on the Internet as "reliable" [1]. It became controversial because it violated the Foundation's transparency rules so there's cause for concern over transparency.<p>We're all familiar I'm sure with some of the lamest edit wars [2]. But this stuff matters. STates actively interfere with Wikipedia to whitewash or outright falsiy the record or reputation of states or people.<p>Not Wikipedia, but the Turkish government fairly famously was caught manipulating Google search results to surface propaganda as the first link on the Aremanian genocide [3].<p>Wikipedia has been the target of these influence campaigns too eg [4][5].<p>[1]: <a href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35668352\" rel=\"nofollow\">https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35668352</a><p>[2]: <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars\" rel=\"nofollow\">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars</a><p>[3]: <a href=\"https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-google-searches-are-promoting-genocide-denial/\" rel=\"nofollow\">https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-google-searches-are-prom...</a><p>[4]: <a href=\"https://wassermanschultz.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=3330\" rel=\"nofollow\">https://wassermanschultz.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?...</a><p>[5]: <a href=\"https://www.adl.org/resources/report/editing-hate-how-anti-israel-and-anti-jewish-bias-undermines-wikipedias-neutrality\" rel=\"nofollow\">https://www.adl.org/resources/report/editing-hate-how-anti-i...</a>",
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"body": "My usspicion here is that there are deeper issues for which union-busting is a symptom and not the main issue. There's a battle to control what information gets recorded and distributed, an effort to silence anything that contradicts US foreign policy, basically. Wikimedia Foundation CEO Bernadette Meehan has very much a Beltway insider, working for the the US foreign service, the Obama administration (NSC), the Obama foundation and the Biden administration (Ambassador to Chile). Personally, I deeply distrust anyone having a lot of influence over what is essentially the world's actively recorded history book. There's history here too, specifically the 2016 secret project to essentially label infomration on the Internet as \"reliable\" [1]. It became controversial because it violated the Foundation's transparency rules so there's cause for concern over transparency. We're all familiar I'm sure with some of the lamest edit wars [2]. But this stuff matters. STates actively interfere with Wikipedia to whitewash or outright falsiy the record or reputation of states or people. Not Wikipedia, but the Turkish government fairly famously was caught manipulating Google search results to surface propaganda as the first link on the Aremanian genocide [3]. Wikipedia has been the target of these influence campaigns too eg [4][5]. [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35668352 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars [3]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-google-searches-are-prom... [4]: https://wassermanschultz.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?... [5]: https://www.adl.org/resources/report/editing-hate-how-anti-i...",
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"text": "My usspicion here is that there are deeper issues for which union-busting is a symptom and not the main issue. There's a battle to control what information gets recorded and distributed, an effort to silence anything that contradicts US foreign policy, basically.<p>Wikimedia Foundation CEO Bernadette Meehan has very much a Beltway insider, working for the the US foreign service, the Obama administration (NSC), the Obama foundation and the Biden administration (Ambassador to Chile). Personally, I deeply distrust anyone having a lot of influence over what is essentially the world's actively recorded history book.<p>There's history here too, specifically the 2016 secret project to essentially label infomration on the Internet as "reliable" [1]. It became controversial because it violated the Foundation's transparency rules so there's cause for concern over transparency.<p>We're all familiar I'm sure with some of the lamest edit wars [2]. But this stuff matters. STates actively interfere with Wikipedia to whitewash or outright falsiy the record or reputation of states or people.<p>Not Wikipedia, but the Turkish government fairly famously was caught manipulating Google search results to surface propaganda as the first link on the Aremanian genocide [3].<p>Wikipedia has been the target of these influence campaigns too eg [4][5].<p>[1]: <a href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35668352\" rel=\"nofollow\">https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35668352</a><p>[2]: <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars\" rel=\"nofollow\">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars</a><p>[3]: <a href=\"https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-google-searches-are-promoting-genocide-denial/\" rel=\"nofollow\">https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-google-searches-are-prom...</a><p>[4]: <a href=\"https://wassermanschultz.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=3330\" rel=\"nofollow\">https://wassermanschultz.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?...</a><p>[5]: <a href=\"https://www.adl.org/resources/report/editing-hate-how-anti-israel-and-anti-jewish-bias-undermines-wikipedias-neutrality\" rel=\"nofollow\">https://www.adl.org/resources/report/editing-hate-how-anti-i...</a>",
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