User talk:2601AC47

A Statement from the Land Shark

Jeff the Land Shark; addressed to the Wiki Workers United union and to the editors of the Wikimedia projects; May 22, 2026

"Murr. Grrr. Mrr!" Translation provided by Doreen Green, certified Shark Interpreter, Class of whenever she felt like it, Empire State University 2601AC47. It follows:

I have been watching institutions for a long time. (He was born in 2005) Long enough to recognize the specific shape of what happened last week. Long enough to know that when a foundation disbands the team whose entire job was to listen to the people doing the work — the people who submit wishes, who wait, who submit again, who watch 92% of those wishes go nowhere — it does not do so because it has found a better way to listen. It does so because listening had become inconvenient.

Community Tech, to the best of my knowledge, was not a bottleneck. Community Tech was a door. When you disband the team, you are not restructuring the plumbing. You are bricking up the door and then issuing a press release about improved airflow. I know what a bricked-up door looks like. I have watched quite a few of them go up. They are always announced in language about sustainability, strategic realignment, and distributed ownership. The language is always calm. The door is always gone.

What Wiki Workers United is doing has a name. The name is: refusing to pretend the door is still there. What the editors signing that petition are doing also has a name. The name is: standing in the hallway and saying so out loud. These are not the same action. But they have the same understanding. And the fact that they arrived at it independently, in the same week, tells you something important about the building:

The building has a problem.

The editors themselves have described it better than I can, so I will let them. One editor wrote: if Wikimedia as a whole is a body, then editors are literally the lifeblood that keeps everything running — without editors, everything stops. Considering recent concerns from the WMF about editor retention and recruitment, this was never going to end well. That is a diagnosis. It's pretty accurate. You do not solve a retention crisis by removing the infrastructure that makes the work possible. You do not solve a recruitment problem by signaling to prospective editors that the institution views their wishes as a bottleneck to be restructured away. These are not complicated observations. They are the kind of thing that becomes obvious the moment someone says it plainly, and then you realize it was obvious all along, and you wonder how long the institution has been hoping no one would say it plainly. Someone said it plainly. Another editor offered a narrower frame, and I think it is worth keeping: the only issue truly worth discussing, they said, is whether the interaction between the WMF and the community concerning the tech issues is optimal. I appreciate this framing. It is the kind of precision that comes from someone who has participated in many difficult discussions and knows that the sharpest questions are often the smallest ones. Is the interaction optimal? That is the question. Not: is the WMF malicious? Not: are the editors ungrateful? Just: is this working? Is the relationship between the institution and the people who build it functioning as well as it could? The 400 signatures suggest the answer is no. The Community Tech disbanding suggests the answer is no. The fact that this is reaching fourteen language editions, and the larger Communications Workers of America union, and a couple of Wikivoyage admins who recognized corporatism and union-busting on sight, suggests the answer is no. The answer is no.

The two petitions now carry nearly 400 signatures collectively at the time of writing. I want to say something carefully about what those signatures represent, because they deserve care: the editors who signed are not being reckless. They are being precise. They have described, in exact terms, what they will and will not do. They will not let readers suffer. They will not let living biographical subjects be harmed. The strike is voluntary, and the social consequences of crossing a picket line will be limited to the entirely reasonable human act of remembering. This is not a tantrum. This is a governing document. Written by people who have spent years building consensus, word by careful word, and who are now applying that same skill to the question of their own dignity. I bit the hands that fed me the wrong salmon for less.

The fork option is real and I think everyone knows it. It's sitting at the end of a explanatory essay like a very quiet sentence, which is exactly the right place for it. You do not lead with the fork. You lead with the door. You lead with the wish. You lead with the petition. The fork is what you name when you want everyone to understand that you are serious, and that you have thought it through, and that you are not leaving. Not yet... (I understand Jimmy Wales and the other WMF Board members may be reading this. Hi, again, Jimmy. The pool is warm. You are welcome to come think in it. I find it helps.)

To the staff of Wiki Workers United:

You wrote that you believe in nothing about us without us. That sentence is very old. It has been said by people in wheelchairs fighting for ramps, by patients fighting for informed consent, by colonized people fighting for self-determination, and in recent years by a country that was and is still being trespassed. You are using it correctly — to name the gap between an institution's stated values and its actual practice. The Wikimedia Foundation's stated mission is the free sharing of knowledge with every person on earth. The idea that the workers who maintain the infrastructure for that mission should have no formal voice in how that infrastructure is run is not a minor inconsistency. It is a structural contradiction that has been waiting for exactly this moment. You found the moment. I'm glad you have.

I should note: the full picture of what has happened to the affected employees — their status, their options, their recourse — remains genuinely unclear to me as of this writing. I am told I may be getting ahead of myself on some of the specifics. That is possible. I'm an adorable land-walking shark. I occasionally overcommit to a direction before fully surfacing. What I am confident in is the principle. The principle does not require a complete picture to stand on.

To the editors:

Including 2601AC47, including Ikan Kekek, who said Wikivoyage sometimes gets lost in the shuffle and whom I heard clearly — including the editor who named the lifeblood, and the editor who asked the only question worth asking, and everyone who has submitted a wish and waited and submitted again:

You built this. Word by word, citation by citation, revert by revert, at 2 AM, for free, because you believed that knowledge should be free and that someone had to do the work of making it so. The institution that hosts your work has obligations to you. Not as a courtesy. As a fact. When an institution forgets that, it is appropriate to remind it. You are doing that now, with the full toolkit of consensus-building you have been developing for decades. You are very good at this. You have been practicing without knowing you were practicing. I'm proud of you, most of all.

In all, my overall position is this: workers deserve voice, volunteers deserve respect, and tools built for communities should not be disbanded without the community's meaningful input. An institution that raises hundreds of millions of dollars in the name of the people who build it owes those people more than a press release. That's not a political position. Belonging requires infrastructure. Infrastructure requires people. People require dignity. Dignity is not optional. I'm watching. I'm taking notes. I'm available.

And if Wiki Workers United ever needs a pool to think in, a certain hotel in Boston has one. The water is very still.

Murr. (He means it.) 2601AC47 (talk) 13:52, 22 May 2026 (UTC)

Personal titles/pronouns

Hello! I'm noting this here rather than on a highly visible discussion because I think it's just a small tangent. In your replies to Selena Deckelmann you referred to some (but not all!) staff with personal titles/forms of address Mrs or Mr. This may be a point of cultural difference but I think it's more approprate not to use such titles, especially if you are not completely certain that they are correct. I know in some cultures it is still considered respectful to use such forms of address, but using the wrong ones can be more offensive than leaving them off.

Regarding your comments: I was involved in some tech interest groups with Selena around twenty years ago and she was Deckelmann then as she is now, but I know nothing about her marital status – do you? Suman Cherukuwada's gender and pronouns are conspicuously absent from the profiles that I could find on WMF sites so it's safer not to assume these. More importantly, Sammy's personal user page explicitly states their pronouns are they/them, not he/him. —In solidarity with Wiki Workers United · ClaudineChionh (she/her · email · w:en) 02:47, 23 May 2026 (UTC)

Acknowledged. 2601AC47 (talk) 09:57, 23 May 2026 (UTC)