Technology

A strike is when you withhold your labour in an effort to extract concessions from the people for whom you provide that labour.

No part of that actually requires an employment relationship. Volunteer strikes are not nearly as common as employee strikes are, but they're not all that uncommon either. They just require that the volunteers are providing, in the form of their labour, a significant amount of value to the organisation against which they are striking.

You may remember that Reddit moderators did it in response to admins removing API access. On that occasion, it failed in no small part due to a lack of discipline in the strikers themselves.

In Wikipedia's case, it's due to the Wikimedia Foundation disbanding the team responsible for dealing with the least of Wikipedia editors' feature requests, in favour of distributing that work across its regular dev teams. (Editors are volunteers, but developers are paid Wikimedia employees.) The fear is that these employees will inevitably prioritise their own internal work over the feature requests of editors, so features that editors are asking for will not be delivered. The degree of success will largely depend on how many of the highest-volume editors participate, and whether average, low-volume editors (a) join in in solidarity, and if not, (b) are able to pick up the slack.

Volunteer editors make up a vast majority of the workhorse in the encyclopedia. Here's a post on how the strike will look like.

At WP:VPWMF § Petition: Editors willing to join in collective labor action, I've suggested the possibility of Wikipedia's editorbase going on strike in solidarity with Wiki Workers United. As I stress at VPWMF, the details of such a strike would only be finalized in the event that a strike happens; supporting the conditional commitment to strike does not mean supporting exactly what I've written in this document. However, it seems prudent to sketch out an idea of how a strike might work, which is what I aim to do here.

What would the strike prohibit? Editors on strike would agree to refrain from any on-wiki activity that does not in some way further the goals of the strike, except as necessary to preserve the dignity of our readers, editors, and living biographical subjects. In particular, they would not: Edit or take other actions on content pages[a] or their talk pages, except to remove content that is so egregiously inappropriate as to require revision deletion, suppression, or speedy deletion as an attack page Revert, warn, or block accounts for routine violations of the vandalism policy, the username policy, or any content policies Participate in content improvement or curation processes such as Wikipedia:Good article nominations or Wikipedia:Articles for deletion How would the strike be enforced? The strike would be strictly voluntary. No one would be blocked or otherwise administratively sanctioned merely for not participating. However, nothing prevents striking editors from lobbying other editors to join, even in strongly-worded terms, so long as they are civil and do not harass people. Furthermore, nothing prevents striking editors from imposing social consequences against those who cross the picket line, for instance by saying that upon the end of the strike they will not review good article nominations or featured article nominations by former strikebreakers.

Would this require community consensus? Individual participation in the strike would not require community consensus. Organizing the strike and encouraging others to join would only require an absence of consensus forbidding it. If there is sufficient support for the strike among community members, community-level decisions could be made such as: Revoking authorization for bots that edit content pages Disabling software features that make editing easier, perhaps such as those that are maintained by Community Tech Authorizing a bot to notify users of the strike the first time they edit a content page Placing banner messages notifying readers of the strike

When would the strike end? A minimum criterion for ending the strike would be Wiki Workers United saying that it is no longer needed. However, the participants in the strike could !vote to add further criteria, such as greater accountability and community influence in WMF governance.

What if those criteria were never met? The community at all times reserves its fundamental right to fork the wiki if necessary.