The world's richest man has joined a growing chorus of right-wing voices attacking Wikipedia as part of an intensifying campaign against free and open access information. Why do they hate it so much?
https://www.citationneeded.news/elon-musk-and-the-rights-war-on-wikipedia/
Recent tweets by Elon Musk, Libs of Tiktok, Mario Nawfal, and others have claimed that Wikipedia is spending “$50 million for DEI”, misrepresenting Wikipedia’s actual budget and financial statements to claim Wikipedia is now “Wokepedia”.
Then, Musk amplified an erroneous and months-outdated claim that Bill Clinton had been deleting information about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein from Wikipedia.
Musk’s recent Twitter rampage reveals a man with a grudge against Wikipedia, looking for anything to support his position, regardless of whether it’s true. But why have Musk and others on the right chosen Wikipedia as a favorite punching bag?
Attacks on press freedom and free expression have become commonplace, even among the right’s self-described free speech champions. But neither Trump, Musk, nor anyone on the right can control Wikipedia as they wish.
The right’s frequent claims that right-leaning sources and viewpoints are “banned” on Wikipedia are also either misguided or intentionally deceptive.
Most of Musk’s ire towards Wikipedia stems from his anger that articles about him do not repeat his own attempts to write his personal and professional history.
Only after failing to rewrite his own history on Wikipedia did Musk’s criticism expand to broader complaints, such as Wikipedia’s supposed systemic bias.
However, even many of his complaints about supposed widespread bias still boil down to disgruntlement at how he personally is covered on Wikipedia.
Musk has occasionally brought up the question of why the Wikimedia Foundation needs such a large budget. (The Foundation’s annual budget for 2024–2025 is 0.3% of Musk’s proposed pay package, by the way.)
There certainly can be reasonable conversations about whether the Wikimedia Foundation needs to spend as much as it does, and the community has these conversations regularly. Most of the conversations I’ve seen from Musk and allies, however, are not such conversations.
Attacks on Wikipedia from Musk and his allies aren't just about an online encyclopedia — they're part of a broader assault on any information source that refuses to be controlled.
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@molly0xfff I did not realize you were GorillaWarfare. I respect your work but still disagree with your decisions around the Ars Technica Sakura Samurai / Robert Willis debacle, the article was not credible and should not be used as a reference. That said, overall your editing record is outstanding. I understood the decisions but it was one of those cases where discretion regarding a generally credible source was needed.
Pour être franc, Musk m'intéresse à peu près autant qu'Hanouna. Mon intérêt pour ce type de personnages est proche du néant !
@molly0xfff
300 #WikiMedia-like organisations or one #ElonMusk 🤔
@molly0xfff This post is the Inception of alt text.
The main text is a summary of the image — of text — and the image’s alt text describes the text of the image and the alt text of the image — of text — in the image.
😵💫
Elon Musk is a very dangerous person and he needs to be stopped.
@molly0xfff My recent donation to #wikipedia was inspired in large part by #Musk being such a tool. I'd love to see Wikipedia outlast Musk's leadershit* at Tesla. Like many others, there's no way in hell I'd get a Tesla at this point.
*Not a typo ;)
It is
1. A voluntary human source
2. It is free
3. With no market interests.
It is kind of scary how few prominent non-profit public interest projects there are on the internet. It wouldn't take much to shut then down 😦
We already saw archive.org shut down just before the US election, including its wayback machine that is often vital for fact checking.
We need more sites like this so that we aren't so dependent on each one.
ALSO: Streaming with DRM is putting posterity/history in the hands of the streaming companies, who can edit and wipe whatever they want. The only safe options are physical media & DRM-free digital media. If those disappear, piracy will be the only safe place for history.
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