Elon Musk urged his supporters not to donate to the nonprofit 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 key adviser to President-elect Donald Trump, was responding to a post by the right-leaning commentator “Libs of TikTok,” who shared a pie chart that showed 29% of Wikipedia’s $177 million budget for 2023-24 was targeted for “equity” and “safety & inclusion.“
The Wikimedia Foundation site said that it set a goal of spending $51.7 million in its budget: 17.6% ($31.2 million) on equity, and 11.6% ($20.5 million) on safety and inclusion. Infrastructure got the bulk of the $177 million with 48.7% ($86.1 million), followed by 22.2% ($39.2 million) on effectiveness.
“Supporting equity represents the second largest part of our programmatic work, with grants and Movement support representing the majority of the budget within the equity goal,” according to the nonprofit.
The Post has sought comment from Wikimedia Foundation and Musk.
DEI, a set of business practices aimed at diversifying the workforce, has been criticized by conservatives as a means to implement reverse discrimination that disadvantages whites and de-emphasizes merit.
Some of the biggest players in corporate America enthusiastically embraced DEI following the May 2020 police-involved death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
But public pressure campaigns by right-leaning influencers such as Robby Starbuck have spurred firms to roll back DEI policies.
Walmart, Ford Motor Company, Molson Coors, Jack Daniel’s parent company Brown-Forman, Boeing and Harley Davidson were among some of the major brands that have cut back on DEI initiatives in recent months.
Wikipedia, the free, online collaborative encyclopedia that boasts a whopping 4 billion visits to its website per month, has long maintained that it is politically neutral. But studies have found that it is plagued by a left-leaning bias.
Earlier this year, Wikipedia removed 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 that she was a “border czar” despite the fact that Biden assigned her the task of overseeing the administration’s migrant policies during his presidency.
In June, a report by the libertarian Manhattan Institute found that Wikipedia has a “mild to moderate tendency…to associate public figures ideologically aligned right-of-center with more negative sentiment than public figures ideologically aligned left-of-center.”
Wikipedia articles about right-leaning public figures also tend to have more “prevailing associations of negative emotions” such as anger and disgust — in contrast with entries about left-leaning public figures that are more likely to include “positive emotions” such as joy, according to the author’s study.
In May 2012, the American Economic Review published a study which examined 28,000 articles about US politics on Wikipedia. According to the researchers, “Wikipedia’s political entries lean Democrat on average.”
Larry Sanger, who played a role in the launch of Wikipedia alongside Jimmy Wales in 2001, has said that “nobody should trust Wikipedia” because its army of left-leaning volunteers cut out any news that doesn’t fit their political agenda.
In 2021, Sanger told the news site Unherd.com that he agreed with the claim that “teams of Democratic-leaning volunteers” remove content that isn’t to their liking — including the revelations in the Hunter Biden laptop scandal that was first exposed by The Post.
“Can you trust it 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 alongside Wales.
Wales, 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 own biographical Wikipedia entry in order to downplay Sanger’s role in creating the site.