Why Conservatives Are Attacking ‘Wokepedia’
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Winners may write history. But Elon Musk has often complained that losers author the Wikipedia entry.
Now conservatives are trying to change that, putting their focus on the unflashy website that gets more eyeballs than the largest U.S. media outlets, making it the latest institution to feel such pressure.
For those not chronically online, however, this past week’s tempest over Wikipedia can be jolting—especially given the site’s objective to remain trustworthy. For many, it is the modern-day encyclopedia—a site written and edited by volunteers that aims to offer, as 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 .
Some call it “ Wokepedia .” They talk as if its more than 64 million worldwide entries are fueled by mainstream media lies, pumping out propaganda that feeds online search results. For them, the threat is especially worrisome as Wikipedia is serving as a base layer of knowledge for AI chatbots.
“Wikipedia shapes America,” Tucker Carlson, the right-wing personality, said this past week on his podcast. “And because of its importance, it’s an emergency, in my opinion, that Wikipedia is completely dishonest and completely controlled on questions that matter.”
His guest was Wales’s former associate Larry Sanger, who helped create Wikipedia but left years ago. Since then, Sanger has often complained about the direction of Wikipedia, which, in theory, anyone can contribute to. The Wikimedia Foundation hosts the website, depending on donations to pay for its $207.5 million annual budget. That foundation doesn’t control the editorial processes. Volunteers, through consensus, do.
The Trump Justice Department earlier this year sent Wikipedia a letter inquiring about its nonprofit tax status, and the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee more recently announced an investigation into “organized efforts” to influence public opinion and sensitive subjects by manipulating Wikipedia articles.
One of the loudest voices in the MAGA movement against Wikipedia has been Musk. The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX earlier this year called for Wikipedia to be “defunded.”
His protests grew more intense after volunteers on the website updated an entry about him to include mention of hand gestures he made following Trump’s second inauguration. Some said these resembled a Nazi salute—a claim he has ridiculed.
“Since legacy media propaganda is considered a ‘valid’ source by Wikipedia, it naturally simply becomes an extension of legacy media propaganda!” he posted in January.
Sanger’s renewed criticism helped push Wikipedia back into the spotlight this past week at a time when the nation’s most august institutions are under pressure for the messages they put into the world.
In recent days, Google’s YouTube capitulated to President Trump with an almost $25 million settlement to end litigation brought for booting him from its platform. That followed X and Meta Platforms offering money in similar deals. NPR and PBS have been defunded by Congress; ABC and CBS News, embarrassed.
In an interview, Wales said he was ready to defend Wikipedia. “The thing about Wikipedia is everything about how we’ve designed it…gives us a really strong degree of intellectual independence,” he said. Wales added, “The First Amendment is very, very strong in the U.S.…and so that fundamental right of our community of freedom of expression is well protected in the U.S.”
Still, Wales said, the community takes criticisms about adhering to neutral points of view seriously and has a special working committee reviewing its practices. “The neutral point of view is nonnegotiable,” he said.
In particular, Sanger highlighted how certain right-leaning websites, such as Breitbart, are prohibited as source materials, while CNN, the New York Times and Mother Jones are allowed.
“What I can tell you is that over the years, conservatives, libertarians, were just pushed out,” Sanger said. “There is a whole…army of administrators, hundreds of them, who are constantly blocking people…that they have ideological disagreements with.”
Wales disputed the suggestion that Wikipedia’s volunteers are “crazy woke people,” telling me, “I know so many Wikipedians, and they’re just a bunch of really nice nerds and they’re not political activists.”
In its short history, Wikipedia has had its fair share of navel-gazing controversies—an entry detailing them has almost 400 footnotes. But, for many, Wikipedia wasn’t in league with the typical culture-war boogeymen: Disney , drag queens, Rachel Maddow’s dark-rimmed glasses .
For many years, in fact, Musk shared links to Wikipedia entries on topics that sparked his interest, such as one about the Drake equation (“ worth reading ”), the Fermi paradox and the Volkswagen emissions scandal. In 2021, he even joined in celebrating Wikipedia’s 20th anniversary, writing , “So glad you exist.”
But Musk’s tone changed on Twitter around the time he acquired the social-media platform that he renamed X. He began joining others on the right arguing Wikipedia had become a “weapon” amid concerns that Silicon Valley giants were biased against conservatives.
“Wikipedia is losing its objectivity @jimmy_wales,” Musk posted in 2022. At another point, Musk needled the site further, saying he would give Wikipedia $1 billion “if they change their name to Dickipedia.”
Wales responded in kind : “Reading too much Twitter nonsense is making you stupid.” More recently, Wales has said Musk is unhappy because Wikipedia isn’t for sale.
Even before the most recent kerfuffle, Musk was toying with the idea of creating a Wikipedia competitor. The idea came up during an appearance at the September All-In Podcast conference as he talked about how his startup, xAI, is using information on the internet to develop its AI chatbot Grok.
As part of that process, he suggested Grok was consuming Wikipedia pages, along with other sources, with an eye toward what was “true, partially true or false or missing,” then rewriting to add missing context.
Sacks, the Trump administration’s AI czar and co-host of the conference, stopped Musk mid-answer. “Well, Elon, by the way, could you just publish that?” he asked. “Wikipedia is so biased, it’s a constant war.” He suggested that Musk create what he called “Grokipedia.”
This past week, as the Wikipedia controversy reignited, Musk announced xAI would, in fact, offer up Grokipedia. Soon after, the Wikipedia page for Musk’s Grok was updated. The entry included a brief comparison to an effort almost 20 years earlier to create another Wikipedia alternative called Conservapedia.
In this new rivalry, the winners may very well write their own history.
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Hmmm ...Magapedia-X ... sounds like a stomach-page turner.
There's some MASSIVE projection!
I think its time to invoke the "reality has a liberal bias" theme.
I try to only read twitter posts from people I have curated myself. It isnt always possible when you search a specific topic, but one can mainly restrict what you read on twitter to what you want to.
Well, if it's true that Wickipedia isn't accurate, it's not a problem that it's blocked where I am.
its as accurate as anything else these days
I suppose you're right.
The tag line would be, "We make up the lies so you don't have too."
Why don;t the MAGAs just stick with Conservapedia? Could it be that it just doesn't have the amount of info that Wiki does
I tend to look at Wikipedia the same way I look at AI. With healthy skepticism. That doesn't mean I assume the information is bad or biased, but I just keep in mind this is simply something created by human beings and thus, not necessarily accurate when it comes to political or philosophical views.