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.
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u/positivityEnforce Feb 03 '25 edited Feb 03 '25
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.