Jake Orlowitz, in his piece Big Tech’s Anti-Labor Playbook Has Come for Wikipedia:
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.
Highly recommend reading the full piece. They also fired Brooke Vibber, the engineer who’s kept Wikipedia’s technical infrastructure running for over twenty years, and disbanded the one team whose job was to build what volunteer editors actually asked for. Most of them were union organizers.
This is a case study in how meaningless “mission-driven” tech is. This isn’t a problem of “ethics,” it’s how the system works. Non-profit is a tax designation. The profit motive doesn’t disappear; it just gets laundered through a donation banner.
Wikipedia is an amazing resource and should be publicly owned. Solidarity strikes are being threatened. Good. That’s where the leverage is.