Entrepreneur Elon Musk has a new goal in his sights: the digital encyclopedia Wikipedia. The head of Twitter fuels conspiracy theories about this, which he describes as “woke.”
“Have you ever wondered why the Wikimedia Foundation wants so much money? They certainly don’t need it to run their site. You can literally save a copy of every page on your phone. So what’s the point? Money? Minds inquisitive people want to know…”
As our colleagues at Numerama have discovered, through this conspiratorial-looking tweet, Elon Musk suggests that the Wikimedia foundation has the hidden objective of censoring the service of the States. A hypothesis that he supports by contrasting Wikipedia’s contributions to the Community Notes on Twitter, a recent function that allows you to contextualize a publication and confirm or deny it.
“Wikipedia is, by nature, hierarchical and therefore subject to bias from higher-ranking contributors, regardless of their merit. Community Notes require that people with historically different points of view, depending on how they have rated and written the notes, validate the publication of the notes,” says the billionaire.
Except Wikipedia contributions are even verified and moderated by a certain number of contributors. The Notes model and the online encyclopedia model are actually very similar.
“Dikipedia”
The genesis of this dispute started by the billionaire actually comes from a tweet by Jimmy Wales, head and founder of Wikipedia, who deplores the new Twitter features and the misinformation that derives from them.
“So many quick, contradictory statements, and Elon Musk has removed all features to distinguish real journalists from fake ones.”
Wales is referring to the new version of Twitter’s blue badge, which, now paid, can be assigned to anyone without real authentication. A novelty that sows misinformation on the social network. Twitter is currently the subject of an investigation by the European Commission, due to misinformation and “illegal content” shared there.
To this accusation, Musk contented himself with a brief response: “please fix Wikipedia.” Wokipedia is a play on words that mobilizes the term Wikipedia and the term “woke”, which he had already used a few days before.
To once again signal his disenchantment with the online encyclopedia, Musk offered yesterday, October 22, to make a $1 billion donation if it agreed to change its name, “Dickipedia,” a vulgar pun on the word ” with”. in English.
Source: BFM TV
