Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, found himself on the receiving end of some fairly extreme criticism from Twitter CEO Elon Musk this past Tuesday in the wake of a group of leftist wikipedia editors starting to push to have the page taken down due to the release of “The Twitter Files” that happened last week.
Last week, Musk made public a series of internal company commuinications by releasing them to Matt Taibbi, a journalist, which highlighted the censorship practices of the company in regard to the Hunter Biden laptop story from the New York Post during the 2020 presidential election and about how the platform cut large swathes of content upon request of the Democratic Party.
The story first made its way to Wikipedia with the article title “Twitter Files Investigation” and highlighted the following short explanation of what has been discovered and made public so far:
Twitter Files is a Substack article by Matt Taibbi published in December 2022. It presented internal emails amongst Twitter employees who were discussing moderation of content related to the New York Post article that fomented the Hunter Biden laptop controversy. Officials of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party asked Twitter employees to remove tweets they flagged.
Ian Miles Cheong, the writier, marked the conversations being held by the editors of Wikipedia about the page for Musk to see on Twitter.
“Wikipedia is voting on the deletion of the entry for Elon Musk’s Twitter Files because the editors have deemed it a ‘nothing burger’ that is ‘not notable’ because the media didn’t give it enough coverage,” stated Cheong in a tweet. “These people work hand in hand with the MSM to shape the narrative.”
Cheong made sure to include in his series of screenshots from the editors of Wikipedia that sought to get the page taken down.
A selection of those comments from the editors included:
- “Delete: — under the scope of the laptop article.”
- “Delete: – this self-published blogpost (with a grandiose title) lacks significant coverage in reliable sources. If relevant, discourse relating to the blogpost could be covered under the laptop page. I don’t think a merge is necessary.”
- “I don’t know where to start explaining why this should be deleted. It’s a disaster. Maybe we can have a Twitter Files article, but not this one.”
- “Delete: This was generally ignored by the media (with good reason) and thus failed to establish notability.”
- “Delete: I would suggest a merge, but there’s not really anything here. Even as a stub it suffers from being unsourced in some places and poorly sourced in others, suggesting a lack of notability. It also doesn’t have a clearly defined topic. Is this about an investigation, or is this about a Substack article? While the title suggests the former and the lede suggests the latter, the content of the article is actually about neither. There is no investigation, and the article lacks any notable information about what the self-published article had to offer. The original revision was much larger than the current one because once you trim out the poorly written editorialized sensationalism there’s not really anything left.”
- “Delete: This is a three-sentence description of a self-published internet page. Not Notable.”
Musk issued his own response, “Most of Earth: ‘The MSM is biased.’ Wikipedia: ‘Cite MSM source to confirm this claim.’ ???????? Wikipedia has a non-trivial left-wing bias. @jimmy_wales, what are your thoughts?”
Most of Earth: “The MSM is biased.”
Wikipedia: “Cite MSM source to confirm this claim.” ????????Wikipedia has a non-trivial left-wing bias.@jimmy_wales, what are your thoughts?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 6, 2022
