The encyclopedia anyone can edit may soon be edited by no one — on purpose.

Over 800 Wikipedia editors have signed a petition promising collective action after the Wikimedia Foundation disbanded a six-person engineering team that built the tools volunteers actually use: plagiarism detectors, dark mode, chart and graph features. The Community Tech team was one of the few bridges between the foundation’s paid staff and the site’s unpaid workforce.

On May 20, the WMF announced it was dissolving the team, calling the centralized structure a source of “frequent bottlenecks and delays.” The work would be distributed across other teams. Editors were not persuaded.

“If it’s not about the money, it’s not about the union, why aren’t you backtracking like hell right now?” said Hannah Clover, an editor and former Wikimedian of the Year.

The union comment is not incidental. Foundation staff recently announced their intent to organize as Wiki Workers United. The WMF denies the layoffs are connected, telling The Register the decision was “not in any way connected to discussions about unionizing.” The timing has done it no favors.

What does a Wikipedia strike look like? Under one proposal, editors would remove only the most egregious abuse — personal information, harassment, fabricated claims about living people. Routine vandalism, spam, and minor rule-breaking would go unmoderated. Pages could go blank or drift out of date.

Volunteers have also discussed sabotaging the donation banners that appear across Wikipedia — either disabling them or repurposing them to critique the layoffs. The foundation pulled in over $200 million last fiscal year and employs roughly 700 paid staff.

Co-founder Jimmy Wales has been arguing with contributors on discussion pages, telling them it’s “time to get serious about meeting community needs.” Volunteers, by and large, were not comforted.

A former WMF employee put it more bluntly to The Verge: “This follows a pattern of breaking up community-facing teams with the idea that now everyone’s going to be responsible for it. And what happens every time is no one’s responsible for it, and then it gets neglected.”

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