Elon Musk Still Doesn’t Understand How Wikipedia Works

We regret to inform you that Elon Musk, billionaire owner of a troubled website, has once again posted. On Sunday morning, Musk posted a picture of Wikipedia asking for a donation below a snoozing emoji. “Have you ever wondered why the Wikimedia Foundation wants so much money?” Musk asked in the next tweet. “It certainly isn’t needed to operate Wikipedia. You can literally fit a copy of the entire text on your phone! So, what’s the money for? Inquiring minds want to know…”

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These are, of course, questions that it’s remarkably easy to answer that betray an incomprehensible ignorance of the Wikimedia Foundation or the idea of operating a service as a public good rather than a for-profit institution. But harping on Wikipedia is a hobby horse that Musk keeps returning to, putting the widely-used resource on blast and fomenting conspiracy theories about it to his audience of millions. 

Wikipedia is one of the last good places on the internet. It’s a vast treasure trove of knowledge, copyright-free images, and important discussions. People across the planet can get a quick survey understanding of almost any topic in an instant in multiple languages. That this is still done in 2023 without dozens of ads littering the screen is nothing short of a miracle. A miracle made possible, in part, by donations from users.

And those users aren’t just readers. Wikipedia is far more than its public-facing website. Every day, millions of people gather on Wikipedia to fight over the facts displayed. Wikipedia doesn’t just preserve the some 22.14 GB worth of text displayed on its pages, it’s also preserving years of edits and arguments about how those words were written. Every page on the site is argued over, fussed about, and tweaked constantly. All those discussions are here, and can be pored over.

Running an ad-free website where millions of people gather every day to discuss facts and update scores of pages is a monumental task. It’s incredible that Wikipedia doesn’t often go down and has few technical problems. Most of the time, Wikipedia works without issue. The same is not true for X, formerly Twitter.

And where does the money go? The Wikimedia Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that publishes its financial records that are routinely audited by third parties. Every year, it publishes portions of this financial audit for the public. According to its 2022 report, it received about $160 million in donations. It spent $88 million of this on salaries and wages for its employees, $2.7 million on internet hosting, and about $1.2 million on travel. It’s very easy to see these reports with a cursory search. A community note on Musk’s own post says as much. 

How to fund Wikipedia has been a source of debate among its editors for almost the entirety of its run. There’s even a Wiki page that lays out the history of the debate, complete with a history of all the edits made to the page over the past two decades.

Wikipedia has issues, like any other website. But it’s obviously spending money on servers to keep things stable. And, unlike X under Musk, it’s not charging users $8 a month for the privilege of algorithmic placement, and $1 for basic functions, on top of running ads.