Toronto Full disclosure, I’ve sent Wikipedia a couple of dollars from time to time. Not because they are perfect, but because they are wildly useful. I use it all the time, which is why I thought I should give another nonprofit some support, rather than being a freeloader.
Sure, I’ve got beefs. Gary Delgado and I have tried to clarify an error in ACORN’s entry saying he was a co-founder over the years, but it’s whack-a-mole. Every five years or so we’ll correct it, and then someone, somewhere, will have repeated the error from some source that usually repeated the earlier Wikipedia error, and therefore made it seem valid. What goes around, comes around again and again. It’s no big deal though. So, they get some stuff wrong; we know the truth. Who cares anyway? Time and history will sort it all out someday, and in the meantime, who does it hurt? Not me or Gary, so let the rough edge drag.
But we don’t see Wikipedia as a competitor. It’s a tool, pure and simple, like any encyclopedia, except in this case it’s more current, nonprofit, and crowdsourced by unpaid volunteers. I like all of that, but I’m not Elon Musk or some other rightwing heavy breather who is trying to bury every evil or bonehead thing in their past. Musk seems to see Wikipedia as a competitor to X-Twitter as a place to get information. I had no idea that anyone really used X-Twitter to find the facts or lowdown on anything, but maybe that’s just me. Reportedly, he also doesn’t like the fact that his personal Wikipedia entry includes his infamous Nazi-like salute, when he was in the terrible throes of his Donald Trump crush. If he has a problem with that, maybe he should be more careful about hiding his sympathies that run so deep in that direction. It seems wrong to blame the messenger, when you were the one who sent the message in the first place. These days, if Elon Musk and his rich buddies don’t like Wikipedia, that’s almost an endorsement.
The Wall Street Journal sums up the current flurry of attacks on Wikipedia this way,
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales once said, free access to “the sum of all human knowledge.” To do that, Wikipedia adheres to three core policies that guide how entries are written. Each article must have a neutral point of view, be verifiable with information coming from published sources and no original research. In effect, those final two points mean information comes summarized from known media sources. Those policies—and how they’re enforced—are what upset opponents such as billionaire Musk, White House AI czar David Sacks and others who don’t like its perceived slant.
What a bunch of partisan crybabies. Some propose Breitbart as a source, which is ridiculous on its face, since that whole site is about an alternative reality without any fact or reality check.
Musk in his usual bully boy mode, says he is going to create Grokpedia, as a competitor, based on his entry into the artificial intelligence race with via Grok, which is hosted on X-Twitter. An investigation indicates that,
Elon Musk has said Grok, the A.I.-powered chatbot that his company developed, should be “politically neutral” and “maximally truth-seeking.” But in practice, Mr. Musk and his artificial intelligence company, xAI, have tweaked the chatbot to make its answers more conservative on many issues
Ok, we get it, Elon. The point is you want Wikipedia to be your slant, like Grok.
Save us Lord! I’ll live with Wikipedia’s mistakes forever before I’ll get Grokie with Musk. Word.