Elon Musk takes aim at Wikipedia

All under the guise of "free speech". Which, as we all know, means speech that align with Elon's currently held opinions.

I'm at the point now where I believe every possible thing he wants will be to the detriment of humanity.

He almost certainly does not want that

I think I'll do the same

Please do not assign reverse altruism to horrible actions being done by horrible people.

Same.

This news caused me to set up a recurring monthly donation, where I haven't actually donated to Wikipedia historically.

I will join you

Will no one rid me of this turbulent apartheidist?

One can dream.

Got any links on how to do that?

I'd like to see how much of an uptick in these they've gotten lately. I'm gonna do this myself

he’s not wrong about the concentration of power amongst editors

The classic problem of an open-edit document like Wikipedia is the manpower it takes to manage the project properly relative to the incentives to fuck with it by malicious actors. Elon's answer to this problem is to monetize the sinking ship to the hilt and then use the excess revenues to buy the next new thing. The Jimmy Wales approach is to build out a network of trusted administrators and semi-trusted volunteers to play wack-a-mole on this one single project forever.

Originally, the theory of Wikipedia was that you'd have far more good actors than bad. Therefore, the bulk of the encyclopedia would accumulate useful information that went largely unmolested and didn't need to be babysat by live humans. This... hasn't proven to be the case. So the costs of the website continue to expand as the content base does.

Automation of spammers, scammers, and malicious actors has made the problem even more difficult. And I have no doubt that Elon's own digital vandalism efforts have taken their toll as well. There's simply too much economic incentive to fuck with the public's understanding of the world for a project like Wikipedia to go ignored.

I'm afraid its days are ultimately numbered, precisely because too many people trust it.

Wikipedia is a good cause, but I feel like archive.org is in dire need of fundings.

Then English wikipedia is only about 100GB (excluding videos), archive.org is in the TERABYTES with some report of it being in PETABYTES. They need funding to keep up the maintenance of their storage and backups, and for the bandwith for people to access it. They've been attacked by hackers a few months ago so they'll need better security and that might cost money. They are under constant lawsuits over alleged copyright issues, lawsuits cost a lot of money. They're gonna need more funding than wikipedia to survive. I think Wikipedia already has enough funding to survive for quite a while.

Edit: What I means is, for every $5 wikipedia needs, archive.org might need like $50

So if you want to help both, the ratio of donations should be at least 10 to 1 (ratio between archive.org and Wikipedia)

Just sent them $50 as well. Thanks for reminding me, Musk!