It is Wikipedia’s fundraising season — the banners asking for a few dollars appear every December — and this year the world’s richest man has campaigned against it. Replying on X to a post by the account Libs of TikTok, which claimed that 29 per cent of the Wikimedia Foundation’s budget goes to “equity” and “safety and inclusion” programmes, Elon Musk wrote: “Stop donating to Wokepedia until they restore balance to their editing authority.” He also confirmed that his offer from October 2023 — a billion dollars if the site renamed itself “Dickipedia” for a year — still stood.
What the budget actually says
The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia and its sister projects, published its 2023–24 plan with a budget of about $177 million. Its own breakdown, restated in response to Musk:
- Infrastructure — servers, software, engineering: $86.1 million, 48.7%
- Effectiveness — the foundation’s operations, fundraising, finance: $39.2 million, 22.2%
- Equity — grants and programmes for underrepresented languages and regions: $31.2 million, 17.6%
- Safety and inclusion — legal defence, trust and safety, protecting editors: $20.5 million, 11.6%
Add the last two and you get the 29 per cent in the post. What the post did not say is what those lines pay for. “Equity” is mostly grants to volunteer communities outside North America and Europe — the money that funds edit-a-thons, training and technical support for Wikipedias in languages like Bangla, Swahili and Tagalog. “Safety and inclusion” is largely the legal department that fights government demands for editors’ identities (Wikimedia is currently in court in India over exactly that) and the trust-and-safety team that handles harassment of volunteers. Neither line writes or edits articles; the foundation has no editorial authority to “balance”. The articles are written by volunteers, and Musk’s real complaint — that his own article and those of his allies are unflattering — is a complaint about them.
Why it matters
Wikipedia is the last large website with no advertising and no owner, and its budget comes almost entirely from small donations averaging about $11. A campaign by a man with 200 million followers to cut off that money is not trivial, and Musk’s ownership of X, where the campaign runs, gives it reach that a foundation with no marketing budget cannot match.
The Bangla angle
The Bangla Wikipedia has about 150,000 articles and a few hundred active editors, and it exists in large part because of the “equity” grants that the post objects to: the Wikimedia Bangladesh chapter, its photography competitions, its university outreach and its editor training are funded from that line. A reader in Dhaka who uses Wikipedia in Bangla is a direct beneficiary of the 17.6 per cent. If the fundraising campaign falls short, the foundation has said it will protect the servers first; the grants to small-language communities are what gets cut.
Source: Times of India, via Prothom Alo.
