‘Controlled By Far-Left Activists’: Elon Musk Urges People To Stop Donating To Wikipedia – News18

Last Updated:October 26, 2024, 12:37 IST

Earlier this year, the Delhi High Court issued a contempt notice to Wikipedia taking strong objection to its failure to disclose information about those made edits on the entry page of news agency Asian News International

SpaceX founder Elon Musk has urged people to stop donating to the internet encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, claiming it was being controlled by “far-left activists”.

In one of his latest posts on X, the owner of the microblogging platform cited a report published by Pirate Wires, a US-based news company, on how Wikipedia’s pro-Hamas editors hijacked the Israel-Palestine narrative.

The billionaire businessman-investor wrote, “Wikipedia is controlled by far-left activists. People should stop donating to them.”

The report shared by the staunch supporter of Republican presidential candidate and former US President Donal Trump stated,  “A seemingly coordinated campaign led by around 40 Wikipedia editors has worked to delegitimise Israel, present radical Islamist groups in a favorable light, and position fringe academic views on the Israel-Palestine conflict as mainstream over past years, intensifying after the October 7 attack.”

Earlier this year, the Delhi High Court (September 5) issued a contempt notice to Wikipedia — the widely used free online encyclopaedia — taking strong objection to its failure to disclose information about those made edits on the entry page of news agency Asian News International (ANI).

Irked by the non-compliance of its order in connection with a defamation suit filed by the news agency, the court told Wikipedia not to work in India if it did not like doing so, and that it would ask the central government to block the platform in the country.

ANI alleged that Wikipedia has failed to comply with orders to disclose information on subscribers who made defamatory edits on its entry page on the platform.

Last year, media reports mentioned that Wikipedia co-founded by Jimmy Wales took a jibe at Musk and his social media platform X recently, saying X was not a credible source for correct information. He added that he is glad about Large Language Models (LLMs) powering chatbots like ChatGPT, Bing and Bard reading up his website instead of Twitter (now called X).

A Fortune report stated that Wales was speaking at the Web Summit in Lisbon and was asked about his opinion on LLMs being trained on data from Wikipedia. Responding to the question, Wales said that he was happy about LLMs reading Wikipedia, and not Twitter as it (Twitter) isn’t a “great source of truth.”