Elon Musk continues to play his role as the richest troll in the world. The South African businessman, now owner of (late) Twitter, took advantage of the weekend to attack Wikipedia.
In one of his now usual outbursts, Elon Musk took advantage of the weekend to send a dig at Wikipedia. The boss of Tesla, and of the social network that should now be called star doesn’t need that much money. An old conspiracy cliché repeated by one of the richest men in the world.
A controversy as old as the Web
Starting by publishing a screenshot of Wikipedia’s call for donations accompanied by a snoring smiley face (to show his disinterest in the matter), Elon Musk then published a second tweet which pretends to question: ” Why does the Wikimedia Foundation want so much money?“. According to him, nothing to do with Wikipedia’s hosting costs since “you can literally fit a copy of the entire text on your phone!“.
The boss of X is breathing new life into a controversy as old as Wikipedia itself. Since its arrival on the Web, the online encyclopedia, and especially the foundation behind it, has been regularly accused of embezzling funds and asking for donations from its users when all the work is provided by volunteers. Implied, the Wikimedia foundation is a huge scam intended to rob Internet users thanks to a vague veneer of respectability.
Where does Wikipedia’s money go?
Elon Musk is right on one point: it is indeed possible to fit the entire text of Wikipedia on a smartphone, since the encyclopedia (in its English version) weighs 22.14 GB at the latest news. However, this is only the raw text. The images, illustrations and other graphics, all hosted on the Wikimedia Commons service, weigh approximately 428.36 TB. Enough to run a few busy servers. Servers for which you have to pay the bill of course. Add to that the bandwidth required to maintain one of the most visited sites in the world and you already have an idea of why Wikipedia regularly needs money.
To maintain all of this, in addition to other Wiktionary, Wikiquote or Wikisource-type projects, the Wikimedia foundation employs 700 employees and contract workers, who must also be paid. Wikipedia is certainly not broke, the latest annual financial report indicates that the Wikimedia foundation has $245 million in net assets, but this sum is mainly used to ensure the daily operation of the site (which does not display advertisements) and to finance various projects, in addition to ensuring a safety cushion in the event of an unforeseen event.
If Elon Musk really wanted to know where the money donated to Wikipedia was going, all he had to do was go to the Wikimedia Foundation website where all expenses are detailed and where an annual financial report reviewed by a third party organization is published.
Source : Elon Musk on X.com
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