Dana El-Kurd

speaker

4,891 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 30 May

Dana El-Kurd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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Behind the Bastards · It Could Happen Here Weekly 234 · 30 May 2026 podcast

I don't want to...

Actually, right now, I do want to discourage people from donating to Wikipedia.

Historically, I have not.

But yes, you should first off know if you've been feeling bad about not donating, they don't currently need it.

They're okay right now, and they shouldn't get more of your money until they stop doing the shit that I'm about to tell you about.

Because over the course of 10 days in May, the Wikimedia Foundation has engaged in what you could call major union busting, firing employees who are trying to organize their fellows and trying to, like,

represent those values within the Wikimedia Foundation.

And my main source for this is a pretty good article that Jake Orlowitz put out on Medium recently.

Big Tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia.

And it starts with the firing in mid-May of Brooke Vibber,

She was the very first full-time employee of the Wikimedia Foundation and its first CTO, the chief technical officer.

And for more than 20 years, she's like one of the main engineers that has made Wikipedia work, right?

And she's also a union organizer.

So she's a very important person

She's the lead developer for MediaWiki, which is the platform that runs Wikipedia and had been in since 2003.

And it's just a very big person, both in terms of how Wikipedia works and in terms of like the way in which like their unionizing efforts have gone.

She was laid off without any like real costs given.

And then a week later, on May 21st, the foundation disbanded the community tech team, which consisted of five engineers and a manager.

The community tech team had the job of listening to Wikipedia editors, which are, number one, the reason Wikipedia has content, and number two, volunteers, right?

So these are regular employees whose job has been to hear what Wikipedia editors want and then help make sure that the salary employees on the team fulfill those desires in as much as that is possible, right?

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