Elon Musk will no longer donate to the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia after the organization spent more than $50 million on controversial diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. He called on his supporters.
“Please stop donating to Walkpedia until we restore the balance of editorial power,” Musk wrote on Tuesday to X, who has about 210 million followers.
The Tesla mogul and a key adviser to President-elect Donald Trump was responding to a post by right-wing commentator Libs of TikTok in which he shared a pie chart showing 29%. Wikipedia's $177 million budget for 2023-2024 targeted “equity” and “safety and inclusion.”“
According to the Wikimedia Foundation's website, it has set a goal to spend $51.7 million of its budget, of which 17.6% ($31.2 million) will go to equity and 11.6% ($20.5 million) to safety and inclusion. It is said that it will be spent on. Infrastructure accounted for the majority of the $177 million at 48.7% ($86.1 million), followed by effectiveness at 22.2% ($39.2 million).
According to the nonprofit, “Equity support is the second-largest portion of our programmatic activity, with grants and campaign support accounting for the majority of the budget within our equity goals.” ”
The Post has reached out to the Wikimedia Foundation and Mr. Musk for comment.
DEI is a set of business practices aimed at diversifying the workforce that has been criticized by conservatives as a way to practice reverse discrimination, penalizing white people and downplaying their benefits.
Following the police-involved death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020, some of the largest companies in corporate America enthusiastically embraced DEI.
But a public pressure campaign by right-wing influencers like Robbie Starbuck has led companies to reverse their DEI policies.
Walmart, Ford Motor Co., Molson Coors, Jack Daniel's parent company Brown-Forman, Boeing, and Harley-Davidson are some of the major brands that have scaled back their DEI efforts in recent months.
Wikipedia, a free, collaborative encyclopedia with 4 billion monthly website visitors, has long maintained that it is politically neutral. But research has found that it suffers from left-wing bias.
Earlier this year, Wikipedia removed references to Vice President Kamala Harris. One of its entries is “Border Emperor.” After President Joe Biden withdrew from the race and supported her running against President Trump.
Harris and her allies deny that she is a “border czar,” even though Biden assigned her the task of overseeing his administration's immigration policy during his presidency.
In June, Libertarian Manhattan Institute Report They found that Wikipedia had a “mild to moderate tendency to associate ideologically center-right celebrities with more negative sentiment than ideologically center-left celebrities.”
Wikipedia articles about right-leaning celebrities tend to include more “common associations of negative emotions” such as anger and disgust. In contrast, items about left-leaning celebrities are more likely to include “positive emotions” such as joy. According to the author's research.
In May 2012, American Economic Review published a study It looked at 28,000 articles about US politics on Wikipedia. According to the researchers, “Wikipedia's political entries are, on average, Democratic-leaning.”
Larry Sanger, who helped launch Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales in 2001, says Wikipedia's left-wing volunteer army blocks out news that doesn't fit their political agenda, and that “nobody should trust Wikipedia.'' Not,” he said.
In 2021, Sanger told the news site Unherd.com that he agreed with a “team of Democratic-leaning volunteers” who removed content they didn't like. post.
“Can you trust me to always tell you the truth? Well, it depends on what you think of the truth.” Sanger said.
Wales and Sanger have been at odds over the creation of the site. Sanger claimed to have co-founded the online encyclopedia with Wales.
Wales said Mr Sanger was a subordinate employee and not a co-founder.
Wikipedia users criticized Wales for going as far as editing Wikipedia's biographical entry to downplay Sanger's role in creating the site.
