Wikipedia Won't Let Elon Musk Fluff His Resume. Heritage Foundation Will Help By Terrorizing The Editors.

That sounds unlegal!

Photo by Oberon Copeland @veryinformed.com on Unsplash

If there’s one thing conservatives hate, it’s narratives they can’t control, not even with all the rage and money in the world.

Predictably, the shrillest among them — Elon Musk, “Libs of TikTok” stochastic terrorist Chaya Raichik, and the Heritage Foundation — are renewing their focus on Wikipedia, a nonprofit and the world’s biggest encyclopedia and fourth-most-visited website in the world. It’s got free, open, transparently edited crowdsourced content, and no less lofty of a goal than “a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” Anyone who signs up can edit it, and the edits are overseen by 847 volunteer administrators, all with pseudonyms.

The nonprofit is not for sale and the anonymous nature of the editors makes them difficult to intimidate. And it means that, say, Elon Musk, who was able to buy X and his very own president, cannot edit his own Wikipedia page or have his Musketeers rename him “Kekius Maximus” or call himself the “founder of Tesla” on there without having another editor or administrator revert the change, RRR GRR! And trolls get blocked, how dare they?!

That’s also all too much actual free speech for the Heritage Foundation, AKA the Christian Dominionist weirdos who brought us Project 2025. In documents obtained by Forward, they detail a creepy-as-fuck doxxing plan led by former FBI agent Tom Olohon to “identify and target Wikipedia editors abusing their position” by using hacked usernames and passwords, plus facial recognition software (!). The plan is to make fake Wikipedia user accounts, then try to trick editors into identifying themselves by sharing personal information, or by clicking on malicious tracking links. Whatever would they do with editors’ personal information? Send them fruit baskets, surely!

The stated justification for identifying and tracking volunteer editors is a nebulous accusation of “anti-Semitism,” though exactly what is meant by that they don’t specify. Perhaps because back in June, Wikipedia editors (which is anyone with an account that’s at least 30 days old and who’s made at least 500 edits) concluded that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was reliable on other topics, but “generally unreliable” on the topic of Israel and Zionism, because it is an advocacy organization, and content on Wikipedia is supposed to be written from a neutral point of view.

The Heritage Foundation is also likely not happy with Wikipedia’s Heritage Foundation page, which catalogs their many misdeeds with facts such as:

In May 2022, the Heritage Foundation completely reversed its position supporting military aid to Ukraine in its attempt to repel the Russian invasion of the nation, which it had previously supported.^[84]

In September 2022, one Heritage employee said he had been "required by management to remove a Twitter post condemning the January 6 United States Capitol attack."^[88]

On July 12, 2024, Heritage stated a conspiracy theory that Biden could attempt to remain in office following the 2024 election by force,^[90] and that the 2024 election was illegitimate in advance.^[91]

The Heritage Foundation has promoted false claims of electoral fraud. Hans von Spakovsky, who heads the Heritage Foundation's Election Law Reform Initiative, has played an influential role in elevating alarmism about voter fraud in the Republican Party, despite offering no evidence of widespread voter fraud.^[189][190] His work, which claims voting fraud is rampant, has been discredited.^[191]

And oh boy are Chaya Raichik and Elon Musk mad about their latest budget. Diversity and inclusion are what encyclopedias are all about, and that just doesn’t sit right with them.

There is no “editing authority” at Wikipedia, there is just the consensus of hundreds of editors, who debate each other in exhaustive discussions.

Also “equity” and “restore balance” would seem to be synonyms, but these dumbfuck snowflakes are hairtrigger-sure that it means “make the web site be mean to conservatives.” What Wikipedia actually means by this is an effort to recruit volunteer editors from regions of the world that don't historically access Wikipedia, which is a prerequisite to cataloguing all of human knowledge. But to how-dare-you right-wing shit-stirrers, these are double-plus-ungood thoughtcrimes!

And the double thoughtcrimes get double doubled, because AI models eagerly chew up and spit out Wikipedia information.

Wikipedia’s long been a burr in Musk’s behind, and he’s obsessed with how it portrays him, whine-tweet-pleading in 2019, “Just looked at my wiki for 1st time in years. It’s insane! Btw, can someone please delete ‘investor’. I do basically zero investing.” He would prefer to be known as a “founder” of companies, even though his “founding” activities have been ... investing. “Started Zip2 with ~$2k & ~$100k of student debt, rolled proceeds into X/PayPal, rolled proceeds again into SpaceX/Tesla, but these are all companies where I played fundamental founding role,” he huffed.

He later offered Wikipedia a billion dollars to change its name to “Dickipedia,” because he’s a late-middle-aged dad with the mind of a 12-year-old boy on Twitch. “Please add that to the [cow and poop emojis] on my wiki page,” he continued in another post. “In the interests of accuracy.” (The editors did not.)

Why don’t conservatives just make their own Wikipedia? They’ve tried! Phyllis Schafly’s son Andrew made Conservapedia, which is as ridiculous and grammatically challenged as you might expect, and full of slobbering praise for its heroes.

Bias in Wikipedia is a danger to a free society. This list covers a wide range of bias in the English Wikipedia, nicknamed “Woke”-ipedia, website. Although Wikipedia claims to have credibility because anyone can edit it, the website represents the views of its most strident and persistent, and that is, liberal editors. For example, on Christmas Day 2016 (NYC time), Wikipedia's entry for U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Maryanne Trump Barry prominently and falsely declared: “Her younger brother is [a] loan shark and liar Donald Trump,”^[1] something which remained for an unusually-long forty-eight minutes before it was corrected.^[2]

FORTY-EIGHT MINUTES! And that’s unusually slow? It’s sure faster fact-checking than you’re going to get on Facebook or X these days.

Well, good on ya, Wikipedia. Sounds like it’ll be more indispensible than ever in these post-truth times.

[Forward/ The Hill]