Elon Musk asked his supporters not to donate to the non-profit organization that runs Wikipedia after the organization budgeted more than $50 million to spend on controversial diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
“Stop donating to Wokepedia until they restore balance to their editing authority,” Musk wrote Tuesday on X, where he has nearly 210 million followers.
The Tesla mogul, and a top adviser to President-elect Donald Trump, was responding to a post by right-leaning commenter “Libs of TikTok,” who shared a pie chart showing that 29% of the $177 million budget Wikipedia’s 2023-2024 dollars was targeted at “equality” and “safety and inclusion.”
The Wikimedia Foundation website said it had set a goal of spending $51.7 million on its budget: 17.6% ($31.2 million) on capital and 11.6% ($20.5 million) on security and inclusion. Infrastructure took the largest share of the $177 million at 48.7% ($86.1 million), followed by 22.2% ($39.2 million) for effectiveness.
“Capital support represents the second largest portion of our program work, with grants and Movement support representing the largest portion of the budget within the capital goal,” according to the nonprofit.
The post has requested comment from the Wikimedia Foundation and Musk.
DEI, a set of business practices aimed at diversifying the workforce, has been criticized by conservatives as a means of enforcing reverse discrimination that disadvantages whites and does not emphasize merit.
Some of the biggest players in corporate America enthusiastically embraced DEI following the police-involved death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020.
But public pressure campaigns by right-leaning influencers like Robby Starbuck have prompted firms to abandon DEI policies.
Walmart, Ford Motor Company, Molson Coors, the parent company of Jack Daniel’s, Brown-Forman, Boeing and Harley Davidson were among some of the major brands that have scaled back DEI initiatives in recent months.
Wikipedia, the free, collaborative online encyclopedia that boasts 4 billion monthly website visits, has long claimed to be politically neutral. But studies have found that it is plagued by a leftist bias.
Earlier this year, Wikipedia removed a reference to Vice President Kamala Harris as a “border czar” in one of its entries after President Joe Biden bowed out of the race and endorsed her to run against Trump.
Harris and her supporters denied she was a “border czar” despite the fact that Biden tasked her with overseeing the administration’s immigration policies during his presidency.
In June, a report from the Manhattan Libertarian Institute found that Wikipedia has a “mild to moderate tendency…to associate public figures ideologically aligned with the center-right with a more negative sentiment than public figures ideologically aligned with it left of center”.
Wikipedia articles about right-leaning public figures also tend to have more “predominant associations of negative emotions” such as anger and disgust – in contrast to entries for left-leaning public figures that are more likely to include “emotions positive” like joy. according to the author’s study.
In May 2012, the American Economic Review published a study which examined 28,000 articles about American politics on Wikipedia. According to the researchers, “Wikipedia’s political entries are moderately Democratic.”
Larry Sanger, who played a role in starting Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales in 2001, has said that “no one should trust Wikipedia” because its army of left-leaning volunteers pulls out any news that doesn’t match. with their political agenda.
In 2021, Sanger told the news site Unherd.com that he agreed with the claim that “teams of Democratic-leaning volunteers” removed content they didn’t like — including revelations in the Hunter Biden laptop scandal that was exposed for the first time. seen by the Post Office.
“Can you trust her to always give you the truth? Well, it depends on what you think the truth is,” Sanger said.
Wales and Sanger have been at odds over the site’s founding. Sanger claimed that he co-founded the online encyclopedia with Wells.
Welsh, for his part, has said that Sanger was a subordinate employee and not a co-founder.
Wikipedia users criticized Wales for going so far as to edit his Wikipedia biographical entry in order to downplay Sanger’s role in the creation of the site.
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Image Source : nypost.com