At X Monday, he announced “a massive improvement over Wikipedia. Frankly, it is a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe.”

One is tempted to say that, with goals so big, something is sure to go wrong.

That said, Wikipedia’s built-in biases have become an increasing impediment to its use as a source. Musk was responding to a complaint about how much it has changed since the days of co-founder Larry Sanger, who has since dissociated himself from the project.

Sanger, for his part, posted a thread at X on Monday, beginning with:

I am nailing Nine Theses to the door of @Wikipedia. This has been my project for the last nine months. There has never been a thoroughgoing Wikipedia reform proposal—this is the first. If it doesn’t work, we need to organize an alternative.

The “GASP bias” image posted here summarizes, in his view, the online resource’s conceptual distance from most users.

A couple of things (among many) that most of us don’t know emerge from Sanger’s thread, which followed an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s channel:

Wikipedia maintains a list of “Perennial sources,” which serves as an ideologically one-sided blacklist of media sources. You can’t cite the New York Post or Fox News, or [Tucker Carlson], on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia’s most powerful editors remain overwhelmingly anonymous despite wielding enormous influence over one of the world’s most powerful media platforms. These leaders must be publicly identified for accountability (and given liability insurance).

Wikipedia’s practice of blocking accounts permanently is unjust and ideologically motivated. Indefinite blocks should be extremely rare, require multiple administrators to agree, and face periodic review.

The reason any of this matters is that Google, Bing, Apple, Siri and other bots scrape “answers” from Wikipedia. It an excellent tool for maintaining a consistent narrative that is understood as “the science” or “the mainstream view,” whatever its relationship with reality.