Anyone can be a Wikipedia editor, assuming you haven't done something egregious and gotten a lifetime ban.
It takes no time at all to set up an editor account and you don't even have to divulge your real identity to do so. The Wikimedia Foundation appears to go to great lengths to defend their editors and has gone to court to defend their editors' rights to pseudo-anonymity.
Note: I am a former employee of Wikimedia and everything I saw while I worked there supports that the vast majority of staff, including management, care a great deal about protecting editors, promoting free knowledge, and making the project as open and inclusive as possible.
>Anyone can be a Wikipedia editor, assuming you haven't done something egregious and gotten a lifetime ban.
Firstly, not all articles are open to editing by gen-pop. See: Extended confirmed protection on many.
Secondly, some pages that are hot on the political side can then become subject to broader Wikipedia contentious topics / discretionary sanctions rules, so even eligible editors who qualified for extended confirmed protection edits, must fall in line with the approved narrative or risk sanctions and have their edits reverted to what the WMF staff admins and Arbitration Committee or ArbCom decide who gets to have the objectively correct viewpoint in certain cases and who doesn't.
>The Wikimedia Foundation appears to go to great lengths to defend their editors and has gone to court to defend their editors' rights to pseudo-anonymity.
OK, but why are you bringing this up? I never claimed otherwise. All I said wikipedia is very selective with who gets to edit some topics and what its admins and arbcom consider as "valid sources" and which not, leading to entrenched biases on political topics. Wikipedia defending editors is a good thing but an offtopic derailment addition to what I was originally talking about which had nothing to do with this.
I don't think the union is motivated by fear of mass layoffs. Staff simply want some venue for solidarity and meaningful channels to have their grievances heard and by management without fear of retaliation. What I have gathered is that there have been some very questionable management decisions and arbitrary firings of people for reasons other than job performance. One specific case which appears to be reprisal for raising concerns about questionable/unethical behavior of certain senior management.
Discussions of unionization have been ongoing for many years, they only gained momentum recently due to the some recent events that, AFAIK, have very little to do with overall job security or any threat from economic forces or AI eating Wikipedia's lunch.
Wikimedia foundation actually have a rather large endowment¹ set up from donated funds to help sustain the organization through a hypothetical future downturn. I'm sure it wouldn't sustain the current level of spending but it would theoretically cover minimal operating expenses.
There are a lot of things to criticize about Wikipedia but lack of financial planning probably isn't top of the list.
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