<
https://www.citationneeded.news/elon-musk-and-the-rights-war-on-wikipedia/>
"When Elon Musk launched his latest crusade against Wikipedia this Christmas
Eve, it wasn’t just another of the billionaire’s frequent Twitter tantrums. His
gripes about the community-written encyclopedia expose something far more
significant: the growing efforts by America’s most powerful right-wing figures
to rewrite and control the flow of information. While Musk’s involvement began
with grievances about his own coverage on the website, his recent attacks
reveal his growing role in this broader campaign to delegitimize Wikipedia, and
the right’s frustration with platforms that remain resilient against such
control.
“Stop donating to Wokepedia,” Elon Musk urged in a tweet sent in the early
hours of December 24. This was only the opening shot: over the following week,
the world’s richest man and the United States’ new unelected First Buddy
unleashed a barrage of attacks aimed at convincing his 200 million Twitter
followers to boycott the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit supporting the
volunteer-maintained Wikipedia project. While Musk’s grudge against Wikipedia
stretches back years, his latest campaign borrowed its arguments entirely from
fellow travelers in the far-right conspiracy theory swamp he increasingly calls
home.
First was Chaya Raichik, also known as “Libs of TikTok,” who on December 23
screenshotted a pie chart of budget categories from the Wikimedia Foundation’s
2023–2024 annual plan. Apparently not bothering to read past the labels,
Raichik dashed off a tweet condemning the Foundation for spending $50 million
on “diversity, equity, and inclusion”,a the right’s latest bogeyman, and urging
her own substantial follower base to “Stop donating to Wokepedia”. Musk agreed,
amplifying her post with the comment: “Stop donating to Wokepedia until they
restore balance to their editing authority.”
“DEI” has been a recent addition to “CRT”, “wokeness”, and other dogwhistles
used by conservatives and those further to the right to gesture at, and broadly
oppose, racial and gender equality.
Rightwingers trying to come up with a slur against Wikipedia should really have
considered something that doesn’t so closely overlap with Wookieepedia, a
near-homograph that predates the “Wokepedia” coinage by twenty years, which
makes me do a double take every time. For those who aren’t familiar,
Wookieepedia is the answer to the question: “what if someone was so nerdy that
they didn’t just want to contribute to the exhaustive catalogue of
Star Wars
information on Wikipedia, but they wanted to do so in even greater detail and
from an in-universe perspective?”
Two days later, Musk retweeted Mario Nawfal, who had ripped off Raichik’s same
post to produce his own, with the bold and all-caps headline “Wikipedia blows
$50M on wokeness”. Nawfal added, “That’s $50 million for DEI instead of, you
know, improving the actual site. … Sure, inclusion is nice, but maybe they
could use some of that money to ensure they’re a reliable source of information
first? Just a thought.”
What Nawfal, Raichik, and Musk either failed to understand or deliberately
misrepresented was that these budget categories they’ve dismissed as “DEI”
directly support Wikipedia’s reliability. The funding goes to programs to
expand coverage of underrepresented topics, recruit editors with expertise in
neglected subject areas, develop tools to identify and counter coordinated
disinformation campaigns, improve article and source reliability, and protect
the project and its editors from attempts to censor or restrict access to
Wikipedia content. Far from detracting from Wikipedia’s mission, these programs
work to directly address the types of concerns Musk and others raise."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
