i don’t post much about my work at wikimedia but i do work at wikimedia 3 days a week
i’m in the design team. i’m a prototyper.
i make a whole bunch of different prototypes to explore ideas. sometimes the prototypes are small and specific. sometimes the prototypes are big and bold.
i also make tools that help other people to make prototypes.
i see “prototyping” as way more than [just] a tech stack though: it’s a way of working and a cultural thing. so part of my work is also bringing / introducing this more todepondy approach to design.
and i sit outside the normal team structure. i’ve mostly worked with the Mod tools and Contributor growth teams, but I’m not part of them, so I get the privilege of connecting together work that’s going on across the organisation, and helping it to all make sense as one cohesive whole, which is hard (affectionate)!
most recently I’ve even been supporting the apps teams
it’s a pivotal moment to be working at wikimedia right now. with LLMs eating up wikipedias’ information and traffic, changes are needed to ensure its resilience into the future. it could once rely on traffic from google search, but that assumption now looks shaky.
fewer people are visiting the wikis themselves because they’re getting its information second-hand through claude or gemini or whatever. the fear is that this could lead to fewer people joining as editors, fewer people donating, fewer people getting involved in general.
meanwhile, experienced editors are an endangered species and some are battling an increasing pile of ai-generated edits.
colleagues at wikimedia are trying lots of different ways of improving the situation, but it’s full of challenges. one challenge is: we need more experienced editors. to get more experienced editors, you need to get more new editors. by increasing the number of new editors, you end up increasing the workload of the current experienced editors, because there’s more to moderate. this increased workload causes some experienced editors to leave.
this feels like a catch-22. but yes, many people here are trying to resolve challenges like this
another reason it’s a momentous moment(?) for wikimedia is all the unionising going on right now.
i’m [just] a contractor but i support my peers in getting recognised.
at a time where both trust and experimentation are needed more than ever, i think that the union can be a great way of building trust with the wiki communities: the union can be yet another check and measure on the organisation’s activities: it can be another advocate for “the mission”.
my contract has been extended twice, which is lovely. it has gone pretty well so far (touch wood) and wikimedia has asked me if i’d like to join full-time a couple of times, but i really want to stay as a contractor, and three days is ideal, because it lets me continue my keynote-yapping career and my algorave-tapping career. and i actually think i learn a lot from those things, which i bring back into my “real job”.
my goal is to never be employed ever again, but we’ll see how that goes.
i’d love to continue working at wikimedia as a contractor (or maybe a vendor?) in 2027, but we’ll see how that goes too.
when i went into contracting, i got lots of people asking me to come work with them. i decided to continue with wikimedia instead. it feels like The Place To Be in 2026.
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