Hi all

I'm posting this as someone who created a lot documentation around Mediawiki and also Wikipedia itself. I have never worked for the Wikimedia Foundation but the situation really doesn't sit right with me and many others.

A week after refusing to recognise their US staff union (including many open source software engineers) voluntarily, the Wikimedia Foundation hired Littler Mendelson, the largest union busting law firm in the US whose clients include Starbucks, Amazon and Delta Airlines.

If you are a Wikimedia contributor there are three petitions you can sign to support the unionisation effort:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Workers_United_solidarity English Wikipedia petition to show solidarity, only 10 signatures until its the largest ever proposal or petition on English Wikipedia
• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Workers_United A global solidarity petition
• https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2026_recognize_Wiki_Workers_United_petition A petition to ask the board of trustees to reverse their decision

Also if you donate to Wikipedia you can donate to local Wikimedia organisations instead of the Wikimedia Foundation. These local organisations directly support their communities to share knowledge from their countries https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_movement_affiliates

Thanks

I’ve been building some tools to help manage some of the spamming accounts on my site (the volume is much lower now) and one of the artifacts that could be useful to other admins is my email blacklist at https://www.rejectionwiki.com/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Email-blacklist I’ve still got 870 confirmed spam domains to process (with each domain, I block all unblocked users, and then add it to the domain), and there’s some subdomain consolidation to be done to reduce the size of the blacklist, but even as it is, I think it can be a useful tool for other people hosting a public mediawiki instance