TL;DR: In the last year, the Wikimedia Foundation has fired several union organizers, including those that worked on the Community Tech team - a team dedicated to building features for the volunteer community that edits Wikipedia.
As the Wiki Workers Union tries to get the Wikimedia Foundation to recognize their union, it is worth remembering that this is not the first time that the Foundation has worked against the community.
Wikimedia Enterprise is a betrayal of the volunteer movement community of Wikipedia editors, as the Wikimedia Foundation is providing privileged access to big tech AI companies to the Wikipedia corpus - a body of work that the Foundation does not own.
Movement volunteer communities contributed to Wikipedia under copyleft licenses - licenses that work to ensure that the work remains free (as in speech). The big tech AI companies do not license derivative works under copyleft licenses and often do not even attribute where the works came from.
This means that volunteers are working for big tech for free, and the Wikimedia Foundation is selling privileged access to that free labor.
It is against that backdrop that the current unionization struggle unfolds.
The volunteers’ work is in no way being stolen. All contributors agree to release their content in perpetuity under CC-BY-SA (or similar licences that preceded it), meaning that all content is free for anyone to use, including commercial uses and derivatives, with the only restrictions being requiring attribution (credit the original contributor) and releasing under an equivalent license. The WMF can’t restrict access to any use complying with that license. Meaning that if AI companies want to scrape Wikipedia’s content for a compliant use, they will and they are fully legally permitted to.
The Disney example is not apt: Disney produces content to make money, and reserves all rights to that content. It is not intended to be free nor to make money for third parties (absent a licensing agreement), and they were right to sue when AI companies misused their content. Wikipedia’s goals of creating a large collection of quality information and making it available to everyone for free are far from the same. The WMF does not own the content anyway, only the servers where the content resides.
The WMF negotiating paid privileged access to data streams for these large clients is a win for everyone. The purpose of Wikipedia is to disseminate information, not gatekeep it, and the WMF has literally no right to decide who can access it and who cannot. AI agents’ ridiculous server demands threatened to impede access for everyone else, and the deals they have made sidestep that impending problem while also generating some revenue for the WMF.
The Wikipedia community (its editors) could decide not to allow its content to be used by AI, but it has not. It would be very legally complicated, anyway, given the content’s license.
Why do you think the license allows for big tech to produce derivative works that are not licensed CC-BY-SA?
If WMF has no right to decide who can access it and who cannot, how can they sell privileged access to who can access it? Frankly, that assertion fails on its face.