[blindriver]

The biggest problem to me is that they are profiting off the completely free labor of their volunteers. The billions of man-hours spent adding content is being used to make money for a bunch of execs that have questionable value. Chief Creative Officer for a site that hasn't changed in decades? Chief Advancement Officer? Could these not be volunteer positions as well and save millions of dollars a year?

It's the exact same thing as Reddit, where the moderators that create the look and feel of each subreddit get the "privilege" of moderating for free, while the engineers and execs of Reddit are going to become millionaires off the free work of the mods and commenters.

Even better, not only will they make money from ads, they will take the content from commenters and then monetize that to AI companies like OpenAI and Google. It's the gift that keeps on giving, and everyone is doing creating content on Reddit for free, and aren't seeing a cent of it.

[orev]

Volunteer editors/mods are clearly also getting something out of doing it, even if not monetary, and they’re free to stop whenever they want. It’s completely up to them to decide if what they’re getting is worth the effort.

Editors/mods are not dumb and they understand they’re creating content on sites that belong to others. Small contributions to something that would have never received any attention now at least have a chance of being seen by others. The trade off is not getting paid, or maybe better stated as the payment is the site providing storage, network, search, etc. for that user’s content.

[avg_dev]

Just because someone does something because they find satisfaction in it or they enjoy doing it does not make it right to exploit their work for huge personal gain and especially when none of that will ever go back to the people who did the actual work.

[blindriver]

Yes, the volunteers should be happy with the self-satisfaction of helping the more important classes of our society attain their dreams of becoming multi-millionaires. God forbid that the actual revenues be shared with the actual content creators!

[doubloon]

right, every other media company like the NY Times, Britannica, Guardian, do the following

     Pay writers

     Offer legal protection against defamation lawsuits

Now I ask why Wikimedia does neither? It seems a lot like basically just another Section 230 exploitation tech company, where all liability is shifted to users (editors / content creators), so its not really a media company. This does I think make it more like Facebook, Youtube, Insta, TwitterX, etc, because it is not in the business of content, it is in the business of watch-time or engagement or whatever.

Now people say "well Wikipedia writers dont get paid they are volunteers its very important" -> what this actually ends up in, in real life, is that public figures and corporations pay people to monitor and edit their Wikipedia articles on the down low. So Wikipedia writers do, in fact, get paid. They are just being paid by the subject they are writing about rather than by the media organization hosting / publishing the content. It's not overt but it's also not that hard to research if you really wanted to. And it's something no reputable media organization in the world would allow. (edited many times)