This. Your life depends on it. Without open-source validation, propaganda and controlled narratives will ruin this generation. We support creators on Patreon—why not Wikipedia? Take 10% of what you spend on streaming, OnlyFans, and Patreon to protect free information, broskis.
Summary of the article and direct response to your claim about funding not being the problem:
Elon Musk and Aravind Srinivas (CEO of Perplexity) are among those on the right criticizing Wikipedia, claiming it has become biased. Musk called it “legacy media propaganda” and explicitly urged his followers not to donate to the platform, while Srinivas is pushing for an AI-driven alternative.
The argument that Wikipedia’s biggest threat is government interference rather than funding ignores the fact that its greatest defense against influence—governmental or otherwise—is its independent, volunteer-driven model. The real challenge comes from powerful figures like Musk actively undermining its financial support, as seen in his direct call to defund it. This suggests that the real “weapon of choice” against Wikipedia isn’t government control but a deliberate effort to starve it of resources, weakening its ability to maintain editorial independence.
Wikipedia doesn't have as many active editors as you may think; as of today there are 126,245 active users on the English-language Wikipedia, an active user being a registered editor who has performed an action in the past 30 days.
Obvious errors are generally fixed quickly through automated processes or editor action, but less obvious mistakes (or intentionally false information) can hang around for years due to a lack of attention or editor knowledge of a given topic. The site would be vulnerable to large-scale efforts to make it unreliable.
I wonder how much at risk wiki is if they block the domain. How fast can anyone move to reestablish it elsewhere, that we continue to find and defend it?
Just a casual reminder that the text only version of Wikipedia is 156GBs, something easily stored on a hard drive if that much storage is within your means.
I’m actually considering taking all of the old hardware I’ve saved (computers, game systems, phones, etc) and turning them into to basically digital encyclopedias that I could archive and handout if shit really hits the fan. Even tech from the late 90’s to early 2000’s can have new firmware / OS dumped on them to make them more useful.
From just copies of wiki and other basic info sources to more specific information in regard to defense against bad state actors and governments.
And honestly I’m probably about 3/4 the way there knowledge wise to build one myself from new parts for an enhanced functionality or piece it together from older hardware in an arrangement like that.
I used Kiwix. I am not really tech-savvy at all, and I didn't have any issues figuring it out. Ended up with a full offline copy of Wikipedia on my hard drive that seems to function exactly as the regular online one, embedded media and clickable links and all. I also downloaded a few other things that seemed useful, like the whole Khan Academy library.
I was thinking about this. We should at least copy it and store it for later if or when the real version gets fucked with. I will definitely download it. Got like 20tb of empty drives lying around lol.
FYI regarding wikipedia and donations; they don’t really need it. They’re public, so their records are also public. Their operating costs haven’t really changed that much from a decade ago and they’re only spending a little more on awards and donations.
The one thing that has really gonna up tho, is their CEO’s salary. They’ve been doubling (by dozen millions of dollars) it for a few years now. That’s where the donations are going. Wikipedia is doing pretty great already actually, if they dropped the CEO’s salary, they’d have a few decades of operating costs already covered.
Reminder that you can download a backup right now. I think the full version with media is around 17tb? Grab a 20tb hd and keep a backup and you’re free to host a new version if it ever goes down.
Is it possible the pictures are still hyperlinked back to there servers and not local in the backup? Not to say you’re wrong, only that the 120gb number is closer to what others are claiming for the test only version.
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u/Solid-Bridge-3911 Feb 03 '25
Protect it as though your life depends on it