Wikipedia Enshitttification is interesting because Wiki software was normal 20 years ago and now it's just so so so shitty because it hasn't changed at all!! It's exactly the same as 2001!! And then their whole business model of only volunteers means everyone gets paid except that actual people who write and maintain Wikipedia articles.
This is from their own website:
"In terms of collaboration, joining and participating in Wikimedia communities can be challenging. The low barrier for entry from our early years has now become insurmountable for many newcomers.\17]) Some communities, cultures, and minorities have suffered from this exclusion more than others. Toxic behaviors and harassment have had a negative impact on participation in our projects. Our success has generated an overwhelming amount of maintenance and monitoring, and we have addressed these challenges with tools and practices that have turned good-faith community members away.\18]) Other types of contribution beyond editing aren't recognized as equally valuable,\19]) and the structures of our movement are often opaque or centralized, with high barriers to entry."
Ya think? This rant started when they pulled down our article about a refugee camp in South Sudan 3x's (Gorom Resettlement) and the "editor" was a racist troll.
We should have instead of "daily affirmations" we should have "daily Enshittification"
Wikimedia’s Africa Problem: Why One Executive’s Salary Is Worth More Than the Whole Continent
December 17, 2025
The Dusoma Foundation calls on the Wikimedia Foundation to double its support for Africa and start paying Black editors in early 2026.
The Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia and its global network of knowledge platforms, continues to operate under outdated assumptions about unpaid labor — assumptions that fail the equity test when it comes to Africa.
Currently, the only major Africa-focused grant from the Wikimedia Community Fund — the Wiki in Africa General Support Grant — totals just $919,176 over three years. That’s approximately $306,000 per year to cover an entire continent, and it’s less than the annual salary of many Wikimedia executives.
This means that one person in the U.S. is paid more than all of Wikimedia’s Africa investment combined. And yet, African participation remains low. Black editors remain marginalized. Volunteers are still expected to work for free, even in contexts of deep poverty.
The Dusoma Foundation - a humanitarian group based in Los Alamos, NM is building new funding and media models for systemic change - is calling for immediate reform.
We propose a simple action: Double the Wiki in Africa funding to $1.8 million and release it in early 2026. This is not charity — it is long-overdue structural correction.
We’ve seen firsthand how Wikimedia policies discourage participation from the Global South. We were once invited to contribute from inside a refugee camp in South Sudan — with the expectation that we’d provide unpaid content using expensive equipment that would never survive the journey.
Wikimedia’s leadership claims that paying editors undermines the project’s integrity. But the reality is this: when white Americans are paid and Black Africans are not, the problem isn’t integrity - it’s inequality.
What We're Doing
Our upcoming Starve Magazine feature story will investigate this further. We’ve invited Wikimedia Foundation leadership to provide comment. We’ll publish the outcomes of this discussion openly, along with proposed solutions.
We believe in confronting these issues publicly, transparently, and constructively. We write about what’s broken - and then we work to fix it. We create responses to John Oliver's Last Week Tonight and ask what people can do to change things beyond calling their senator.
About Us
The Dusoma Foundation is reimagining global development through a new lens: equity, transparency, and dignity. Our media arm, Starve Magazine, documents the systemic failures we aim to repair — and the communities fighting for something better.
We welcome dialogue with Wikimedia leadership, and with all who are ready to update their thinking about who deserves to be paid for labor that has value.
#wikipedia #UnpaidLabor #AfricanCreators #DigitalColonialism #KnowledgeEquity #AIJustice #DusomaFoundation #MarlaAI #StarveMagazine #TazaImpact #EthicalAI #FairTech #ReclaimTheNarrative #ButterflyEffect #RadicalTransparency #MadeInAfrica #DecolonizeTheInternet #AfricaDeservesCredit #AfricanVoicesMatter #GlobalSouth #DigitalSovereignty #AfricaOnWikipedia
Wikimedia Foundation Wikimedia Nigeria Africa Wiki Women
This is my daily enshittification rant. Tomorrow I'll talk about Google and translating African languages.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/wikimedias-africa-problem-why-one-executives-salary-worth-born-ecsjc/
Why do I feel like there is some kind of campaign against Wikipedia? Not so long ago there was a post criticizing their server costs vs what they get from donations. Obviously it went downhill because Wikipedia finances are public.
This strongly looks like someone wants wikipedia to look bad.
So the enemy of my enemy is not my friend. So yes, Musk launched Grokipedia and stole 900,000 articles ... and Wikipedia did nothing. But Musk is still the worst. And Wikipedia isn't the enemy, they are just bad the way Burning Man is bad - this elite idea that "If we paid people, then people would do it for the money, and not the love of the game." - and as time goes on, we see how entitled this is, and how attracts very weak people. Like you know people who sit on boards and they're absolute nightmares, but you can never get them off the board because no one wants to do it - because it doesn't pay?
So volunteering - I wrote about it a while back - but volunteering seems great until you really see what it does to workers. Remember, Wikimedia is a $160 MILLION dollar foundation.
How is this enshittification?
So my argument is 1. that Enshittification is not new. Automated voice menus was crap that got worse 20 years ago. And 2. Some things are shitty just because they don't get better - and that's wikipedia, top to bottom. It's the greed, unpaid labor and just shitty shitty technology. Their mobile Wikipedia editing system literally does not work.