Talk:Wikimedia and unions

Future possible topics

We should not make use of primary sources, however here is a running list of potential things to keep an eye for.

• Wikimedia Deutschland, an affiliate of WMF, first formed a Works Council in 2014 according to Meta:Wikimedia Deutschland/2015 annual plan/en.
• On February 6 (two weeks after Bernadette Meehan had taken the reins as new Wikimedia Foundation CEO), longtime WMF employee Bryan Davis announced on Mastodon that he and several other staff had begun an effort to unionize:

Five years ago I made a Twitter post calling for employees of @wikimediafoundation to organize a union. Yesterday a group of us came out publicly to all other staff as being actively engaged in that effort. I’m proud of everyone who has helped get us to this new milestone and I look forward to being part of a recognized bargaining unit in the future.

— Bryan Davis,

• Art+Feminism Workers United! – an ongoing union effort after mass dismissal. Unfortunately they are in a much weaker position (refer to the power resource approach above). ~ In solidarity 🦝 Shushugah (talk) 23:10, 27 July 2026 (UTC)

Quick fixes despite involvement

I fixed Brooke's role (not in CommTech). Is is correct to describe the union drive in the US to have started later? The organisation must have started much earlier than the request for voluntary recognition. In solidarity, —Femke (talk) 🐦 07:50, 28 July 2026 (UTC)

Hi, as an advisor and former member of the union I can confirm the US union card drive began in January 2026. brooke (talk) 21:39, 4 August 2026 (UTC)

Link not permitted

It took me quite some time to find the petition, so I put a link to it in the article. With this edit, the link was removed by User:Eddie891 who wrote: "what is functionally an external link and not permitted in article body". I don't understand. Could you please explain, why is it functionally an external link, why is it not permitted, and would it be permitted to add the link as an external link? Friendly, Lova Falk (talk) 09:32, 6 August 2026 (UTC)

I'm not the person who removed it, but I agree with it. In my opinion wikilinks outside of project space are for our readers no different from external links (they take them away from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), and should therefore never appear inline in articles. -- Maddy from Celeste (WAVEDASH) 09:52, 6 August 2026 (UTC)

Thank you  Maddy from Celeste. I am not so much questioning the edit as simply not understanding it. How does the link take them away from Wikipedia? When I open the article, it still says: "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia". Or could it be that WP:... are considered external links? And would it be allowed to put the link in a section External links? If not, why? Lova Falk (talk) 10:01, 6 August 2026 (UTC)

Our public-facing product is the encyclopedia consisting of our articles, images, etc. The petition is not part of that, but an internal page for Wikipedia editors. When a reader clicks a wikilink, they expect to see a Wikipedia article about the topic, not to be teleported to internal Wikipedia backrooms, just as they do not expect to end up on any other website. -- Maddy from Celeste (WAVEDASH) 10:11, 6 August 2026 (UTC)

Brief comment as I was pinged here: @Maddy from Celeste said it pretty much as well as I could: pages with prefixes (beyond Article, I suppose) are not fundamentally different from external links in that they are not part of the web of encyclopedic articles, and per our guideline on the matter, should not appear as links in article bodies. Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 10:45, 6 August 2026 (UTC)

Thank you, makes perfect sense, I understand! I'll put it as an external link then. Lova Falk (talk) 12:11, 6 August 2026 (UTC)