Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-01-15/Op-ed

On January 2, 2025, Molly White, aka GorillaWarfare, published a 4,500 word article titled "Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia" on her newsletter, Citation Needed. We decided to publish only the first half of the article to give our readers the major points, but we highly recommend you to read the second half, as well. Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

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.^[1] 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", the right's latest bogeyman, and urging her own substantial follower base to "Stop donating to Wokepedia".^[2] Musk agreed, amplifying her post with the comment: "Stop donating to Wokepedia until they restore balance to their editing authority."^[3]

That the "safety & inclusion" link is not purple in this screenshot taken from Raichik's tweet suggests she didn't even bother to visit the page to determine what that category encompasses.

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."^[4]

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.^[5] Then, in the early hours of December 31, Musk reposted a video from a self-described "Conspiracy Realist/Coincidence analyser" account, "@BGatesIsaPsycho", which had in turn taken the video from antisemitic conspiracy theorist and self-described "OSINT journalis[t] exposing globalism" Ian Carroll. "No more donations to Wikipedia until they start being truthful", Musk added, atop a video where Carroll claimed that "someone deleted all of Bill Clinton's connections to Jeffrey Epstein from Wikipedia", suggesting that Clinton himself was behind the edits. This, again, was a complete misrepresentation: the text was moved, not deleted, and not likely by Bill Clinton. If Carroll had cared to look at the public article editing history, he would have seen that the extremely long biographical article on Clinton was in fact split^[6][7][8] — as overlong articles often are^[9] — into separate subtopic articles, "Bill Clinton sexual assault and misconduct allegations" and "Post-presidency of Bill Clinton", both of which are linked from the primary page. The Epstein-related section was restored to the primary Clinton article by a different editor three weeks later,^[10] shortly after Carroll published his video but months before Musk reshared it.

Musk followed up the Epstein video retweet, two hours later, with a retweet of a video from an account called "End Wokeness", which is possibly run by white nationalist Jack Posobiec.^[11][12] The video was a clip from a three-year-old interview by The Epoch Times with Larry Sanger, a jilted co-founder of Wikipedia who left about a year after its creation, who has created a string of failed Wikipedia competitors in the more than twenty years since. Sanger's original complaints were about Wikipedia's whole ethos, namely that the project doesn't limit editing to subject-matter experts or other authority figures. However, over the last five to ten years his grievances have shifted, and Sanger now mostly complains that Wikipedia has become "leftist propaganda" — primarily due to his concerns that Wikipedia articles don't cite right-leaning publications like Fox News or The Daily Mail as much as he believes they ought. This axe-grinding, paired with the appeal to authority in his co-founder title, has earned him airtime on the right-wing media circuit, including on Tucker Carlson and elsewhere on Fox News, Christopher Rufo's Substack, and generally in the same places he's complained are not considered sufficiently reliable for Wikipedia. Musk's recent Twitter rampage reveals a man with a grudge against Wikipedia, looking for anything to support his position, regardless of accuracy. While Musk once spoke reverently of Wikipedia, you have to dig back years to find it.

His more recent mentions of the site include multiple direct appeals to founder and current WMF board member Jimmy Wales, beginning in 2022, to complain that the site is "losing its objectivity",^[13] is "overly controlled by mainstream media",^[14] and "has a non-trivial left-wing bias".^[15] He’s bashed the site at least ten times since then as "Wokepedia"^[16] and lamented its "capture" by the "woke mind virus".^[17] His requests that people not donate to the Wikimedia Foundation date back at least a year.^[18]

But why have Musk and others on the right chosen Wikipedia as a favorite punching bag?