(Nathan Laine/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
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 of higher ranking editors, independent of their merits,” he claimed.
The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But in 2022, the foundation reported earning $154 million in revenue, while paying $146 million in expenses.
A foundation page adds that 43% of the expenses go toward engineering improvements and product development while another 32% goes to paying grants, projects, and tools to support Wikipedia communities.
The feud occurs weeks after Musk decided to sue another nonprofit, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, for criticizing Twitter’s approach to stopping hate speech on the social media platform. Last month, Musk then threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League for allegedly encouraging advertisers to flee Twitter.
In the meantime, market research firm Similarweb estimates that traffic to Twitter has decreased around 15% year-over-year since Musk took over the social media platform.
UPDATE: The Wikimedia Foundation sent PCMag the following statement: "Wikipedia is the only website among the top 10 most-visited global websites that is run by a nonprofit, the Wikimedia Foundation. It is run at a fraction of the cost of those websites, and we invest every donation received back into serving Wikipedia, other Wikimedia projects, and the free knowledge mission."
"We are grateful that generous individuals from all over the world give every year to keep Wikipedia freely available and accessible," the group added. "The majority of our funding comes from donations ($11 is the average) from people who read Wikipedia. We are not funded by advertising, we don’t charge a subscription fee, and we don’t sell user data. This model is core to our values and our projects, including Wikipedia. It preserves our independence by reducing the ability of any one organization or person to influence the content on Wikipedia."