No Wonder Elon Musk Is Now Attacking Wikipedia
Not content with trashing one treasured website this year, Elon Musk has turned his sights on another: Wikipedia, the crowdsourced encyclopedia founded in 1999 that has come to represent the very best of what the internet has to offer.
The world's richest person and owner of X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, seems to have been rattled by a report published by Newsguard, a company that rates the trustworthiness of information sources. Late last week it offered some troubling statistics around misinformation on X pertaining to the Israel-Hamas conflict almost a year after Musk bought the website for $44 billion. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is an advisor to Newsguard.
“Have you ever wondered why the Wikimedia Foundation wants so much money?” Musk wrote Sunday on X, referencing the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia and its appeals for user donations. “It certainly isn't needed to operate Wikipedia. You can literally fit a copy of the entire text on your phone! So, what's the money for? Inquiring minds want to know…”
Musk then suggested he would give Wikipedia $1 billion if it changed its name to a juvenile alternative. The Trumpian broadside was just the latest from Musk against sources of information that disseminate credible information. Yes, Wikipedia's articles can be updated by anyone, but they are tightly edited by a team of thousands of mostly volunteer editors, and its guiding principle has always been that every stated fact requires a citation from a trusted, verifiable news source with recognized standards. Millions of college graduates can vouch for the system.
Of course, in Musk's world, no media source can be considered trustworthy, particularly those that criticize him. Indeed,
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