At Trump’s inauguration last month, the CEOs of the world’s six largest websites were awarded prime seats next to Trump’s family members. But the seventh largest website — Wikipedia — was not represented.
As if he doesn’t have enough to do by smashing the federal government to shreds, now Elon Musk is targeting the online encyclopedia as an “extension of legacy media propaganda!” In her article in The Atlantic, “Elon Musk Wants What He Can’t Have: Wikipedia,” Lila Schroff details how the richest person in the world is going after the only non-profit website with a huge global audience.
According to Schroff, Musk is conducting “an ongoing crusade against the digital encyclopedia. In recent months, he has repeatedly attempted to delegitimize Wikipedia, suggesting on X that it is ‘controlled by far-left activists’ and calling for his followers to ‘stop donating to Wokepedia.’”
Musk’s allegations are, of course, nonsense. Wikipedia’s content is created and edited by thousands of disaggregated volunteers worldwide with a system of checks and balances that keep inaccuracies and biases to a minimum.
It also is a model of transparency, including massive amounts of footnotes and documentation for the vast majority of its entries.
I use Wikipedia every day and I find it more reliable than any other source of general information on the web.
Of course, Musk isn’t interested in honest, reliable information — he trades in disinformation and right-wing propaganda to advance his agenda. What he would like to do is buy Wikipedia and convert it into an extremist platform like X.
But Wikipedia is not for sale.
“Even if he can’t buy Wikipedia,” Schroff observes, ”by blasting his more than 215 million followers with screeds against the site and calls for its defunding, Musk may be able to slowly undermine its credibility.”
She concludes: “Anyone who defends free speech and democracy should wish for Wikipedia to survive and remain independent. Against the backdrop of a degraded web, the improbable success of a volunteer-run website attempting to gather all the world’s knowledge is something to celebrate, not destroy.”
See also: Project 2025’s Creators Want to Dox Wikipedia Editors. The Tool They’re Using Is Horrifying. (Slate)
Thanks to T.
***
I took the photo up top of the 250-lb. birthday cake at Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary party in 2011. The Wikimedia Foundation, which publishes the encyclopedia, was my client at that time; I helped designer David Peters produce their annual reports. In this capacity, I had access to the inner workings of the organization, its data and its top executives. Here is what I wrote on my personal blog the night of the party:
“One of my favorite clients, the Wikimedia Foundation, tonight celebrated the tenth birthday of its largest project, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that is dedicated to becoming the largest repository of human knowledge, freely available to all, that the world has ever seen.
“Wikipedia strives to be objective, fair, unbiased. The movement that sustains it is dedicated to knowledge, which is a very different thing from opinion. In this way, Wikipedia is a living example of journalistic ideals.
“Truth has never been ‘left’ and never been ‘right.’ Truth is about respecting others, and including everyone in the search for answers to the questions that no one person on this earth possesses. Truth is what we all can agree to.
“Truth is what you can read on Wikipedia.” — DW 1/15/2011
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