The Right Takes Aim at Wikipedia - Columbia Journalism Review

"Might Wikipedia, the ever-evolving online compendium of human knowledge, become the latest target in the new administration’s crackdown on public sources of information? Last week, Elon Musk lashed out at the nonprofit after his Wikipedia page was updated with a description of his controversial hand gesture during Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day celebrations. (Many observers perceived it as a Nazi salute; Jon Allsop wrote about the episode in this newsletter.) “Since legacy media propaganda is considered a ‘valid’ source by Wikipedia, it naturally simply becomes an extension of legacy media propaganda!” Musk wrote on X, urging his followers not to donate to the site....

Musk, however, appears to be attacking one imperfect content-moderation system while praising another imperfect one—the difference being that the latter is built into the platform that he owns. Indeed, the development of Community Notes—now the sole fact-checking system in place on X, which relies on anonymous volunteer contributors to identify misleading information—was partly inspired by Wikipedia’s collaborative approach: both rely on the notion that a crowd can make better estimations than a single or a few highly knowledgeable individuals. Musk claims that Community Notes can circumvent the sort of biases that Wikipedia might have because it requires people with historically different points of view to agree in order for Notes to be shown to the public. But, according to the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), that same design choice allows polarizing posts that are incorrect or misleading to escape moderation. “The problem is that for a Community Note to be shown, it requires consensus, and on polarizing issues, that consensus is rarely reached,” the nonprofit wrote in an analysis. (Musk sued the CCDH in 2023 after it published a report alleging that X financially benefits from toxic content on the platform; a judge later dismissed the lawsuit.) ..."