this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2025
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Wikipedia is extremely resistant to this kind of thing. They've been dealing with it for decades now. All kinds of people have had that idea, sometimes professionally being paid by some company/country/individual to the tune of quite a bit of money. Sometimes they do succeed in bending the narrative slightly in particular ways, but the simple "overwhelm everyone's resources" approach that works a treat on Lemmy or Facebook can get simply brushed aside on Wikipedia because of its strong culture and good design features.
As an editor with advanced rollback rights on Wikipedia; I can agree with the above statement.
It is Extremely Difficult; even with slighly escalated rollback rights such as mine; to push an agenda on Wikipedia.
WP:NPOV is a good read and the editing community and contribution culture on Wikipedia enforces it strongly.
EnWiki itself for certain has some very strong Page Protection policies that prevent just any editor from munging up the encyclopedia or changing history.
It's safe to say that Wikimedia cannot be bent or broken easily by special interest groups...Vandalism and PoV pushing is quickly quelled by sysops on Wikipedia. There are more of us editors than Elon could ever possibly hope to take on.
Not even Elon Musk gets to ignore Wikimedia policies. That will never change. They are written in blood and sweat and cannot be manipulated. The entire foundation is set up in a way that it always, eventually, cracks down on corruption and greed. Not even a cabal of admins, bureaucrats and Wikimedia Stewards can help you.
I hope this is true. By the end of Trump's term, ICE may be able to simply storm the Wikimedia offices and shut everything down if they don't adhere to Trump's official truth.
I assume they have enough international presence that things will be able to continue, but their core office being in the US is no longer the pretty-good protection against authoritarian regimes trying to force them to alter what they're presenting. I'm sure they will fight, but a lot of the tools they used to use to fight with are being attacked, with quite a bit of success, right now.
It is not only true; it is required by the WMF. Wikipedia and Wikimedia will go dark before it compromises those values.
Wikipedia can always be revived by it's massive worldwide community; on Tor even. Trump taking down the WMF servers won't help; the databases probably get backed up daily and would likely end up on torrents within moments of it being taken down.
You can buy all of wikipedia for like 100 bucks on a flash drive and can download the whole thing for free.
It ain't going nowhere
Yeah, as long as you exclude media like images, the entirety of Wikipedia can be compressed into hilariously small sizes. The “only current revisions and no talk” version is only 86GB uncompressed, and compresses down to 19GB.
There are even specialized readers that can read the compressed data on a page-by-page basis so you don’t need to decompress the entire thing to browse it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
So, when he dies?
Because if ever there was US president who intends to try for "President for life", it's this guy.
I was careful with my phrasing for exactly that reason. I think that, either, before the end of his current term things will blow up in such cataclysmic fashion that all bets are off for what comes next, or else Trump will be starting his third term in 2029.
As much as I am scared for it, I am hoping it is the first.
Thank you. That was informative. I didn't know.