Elon Musk Starts Another Feud, This Time With Wikipedia
Elon Musk has a bone to pick with another nonprofit: Wikipedia. Over the weekend, the Twitter/X owner took several swipes at the encyclopedia site and its operator, the Wikimedia Foundation, accusing it of alleged bias and routinely asking users for donations.
“Have you ever wondered why the Wikimedia Foundation wants so much money? It certainly isn’t needed to operate Wikipedia. You can literally fit a copy of the entire text on your phone!” he tweeted on Sunday.
Musk neglected to mention it cost $2.7 million to host Wikipedia’s websites last year. Nevertheless, he decided to ridicule Wikipedia with his own donation offer. “I will give them a billion dollars if they change their name to Dickipedia,” he said in another tweet. “One year minimum [for the name change]. I mean, I’m a not fool lol,” he added. (The offer might be of interest to the bankers who are owed $13 billion, which Musk used to buy Twitter.)
The statements suggest Musk views Wikipedia as a rival to Twitter, which has been struggling to grow traffic. It also seems like Musk has gripe with Jimmy Wales, co-founder of the encyclopedia site. Days earlier, a company that Wales advises, NewsGuard, published a report that said much of the top misinformation on Twitter about the Israel-Hamas war comes from verified accounts.
The report undercut Musk’s own claim that Twitter has become the most reliable source of news and diverse opinions. Musk hit back, arguing Twitter’s own Community Notes feature, which relies on crowdsourcing to factcheck tweets, is already superior to Wikipedia in accuracy. (The feature only just started requiring contributors to provide sources for their entries.)
“Wikipedia is inherently hierarchical and therefore subject to the biases
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