Elon Musk Urged People to Stop Donating to Wikipedia. [TRUE]

You know what I’m gonna donate even harder now

i look forward to reading the near-future headline "wikipedia sees surge in donations"

Grandson of Nazis, son of apartheid mine owners, revealing his true colors.

I try to donate a few bucks every year to Wikipedia ... my thinking is that if every person that uses Wikipedia just donated a dollar, they would have more than enough to fund their organization.

But after reading these stupid headlines ... I made a $50 donation for the first time. I use the site just about every day for reference ... I should be paying for it and I'm happy to.

Of course, by "restore balance" he actually means "silence leftists and promote nazis," just like he did with Vichy Twitter.

Wikepedia is good

But archive.org is in more dire need of resources

English Wikipedia = 100GB (without the videos)

archive.org has like TERABYTES with some reports of it being in PETABYTES, storage is costly, also they need to backup the archive in case of drive failures

also they need bandwidth to let people access the stuff there

also they just gotten hacked a few months ago, security could cost money

And constantly facing lawsuit from big corporation, lawsuits definitely cost a lot of money

I feel like they need it more

What I'm saying is: if you have $55 to give, give $5 to wikipedia, $50 to archive.org

I'm already signed up to donate monthly, and I just sent them $20 more because someone told me some dumb shit about how they refuse to donate to Wikipedia anymore because "I don’t agree with the financial decisions of Wikipedia’s management."

I definitely think there is an active effort to discredit Wikipedia going on Lemmy. Other things I've seen people say just over the last few days:

• "The website has a despicable procedure where they dox details of anyone whom they deem as alleged vandals."
• "Eric Barbour of Metasonix has collected a trove of Wikipedia’s affairs and scandals over the years which is only accessible through hard drive formats to journalists if asked. There’s even a book which has yet to be published and which could be the Hollywood Babylon of Wikipedia."
• "Wikipedia kowtows to every fascist government that asks them to. Remember when they banned users who called the Holodomer a genocide against the Ukranians by the Russians?"
• "Wikipedia makes a ton of money, way more than neccassary to run the site. The excess is getting funneled into the pockets of millionaires, in the ballpark of 300m/y"
• "Wikipedia is only a source for truth for people that either don’t know what it’s protecting or are in the genocidal cult it is protecting."
• "Wikipedia has poured efforts into bolstering western narratives, specifically against China and Russia, and to promote pro-NATO narratives."
• "The intelligence orgs and think tanks are also making up the source information. That’s how it works. They make up the initial info, launder it through a source, coordinate with the media to reference that source, get their editors to use the laundered info as a source in their wiki edits, etc. It’s a self-referential and self re-enforcing disinformation scheme."
• "Within the last maybe 10 years or so, the credibility of its sources have started to come into question, at least on some of their recently authored/edited articles."
• "It was notorious for advertising in such a way as to imply your funds would be used to keep wikipedia alive, whereas the reality was that only a small part of Wikimedia Foundation’s income was needed for Wikipedia, and the rest was spent on rather questionable things like funding very weird research with little oversight."
• "As contributions continue to grow, the spending category that is growing far faster than any other is salaries and wages. Their CEO made $789k in 2021, all while content is created by volunteers. I like Wikipedia and the content they host; however, I think any increase in contributions is just going to line the pockets of the executives."

The retreat from "they're betraying their users to fascist governments and funnel their donations into the pockets of millionaires" gradually becoming "they paid their CEO $789k in one year, if you pick the year when the CEO made the most in comparison to the other years, and I'm going to try as hard as I can to make that sound as sinister as I can."

It was, to me, really notable how the variety of different crazypants things that were easily disproval all coalesced into "they're taking your donation money and spending it frivolously on things they don't need to be spending it on," which still isn't quite what happened, but at least bears some passing relationship with the truth, and won't make people look as silly for saying it.

I donated specifically because of this asshat.

I've never donated to Wikipedia in my life.

Now I have a recurring monthly donation in place.

Fuck off Elon.

Well now I'm just gonna double my donation

Thanks for the reminder Elmo. Just donated.

Well, guess I better head over to Wikipedia and send some money their way.

Because of this I just set up a recurring donation. Get fucked.

You know, I just donated 10 bucks. But after reading all the comments, I think I gotta start paying monthly. I don't use Wikipedia, but I sure as hell know the internet will be even worse off without it, cuz it's one of the few websites where it's owners actually care

you know what ? I'm gonna start donating harder

What a shitbag

Thanks for the reminder to donate to wikipedia!

People doubted this?

He probably wants college citations to read 'quoted from xitter' instead of 'quoted from wikipedia'. Bastard.

that's why I did

Fuck musk

Fuck Wikipedia for pretending to be paupers every time I visit their site in winter, too. I know you guys don't need the money, stop playing poor

fuck elon, but also fuck snopes https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/20139932

I personally don't want to fund the DEI scam but until it affects the actual encyclopaedia I couldn't care less if anyone else wants to donate. in fact if you're ok with a percentage going to racist consultants please keep funding this amazing tool because someone has to.

Musk is delusional if he thinks any of this colours the facts. or he's playing 4D chess trying to get libs to donate out of spite ... I honestly wouldn't give him that much credit though.