"When you join Wikipedia, it's to make the world a better place, not to bully or destroy."
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Under fire from Elon Musk, the online encyclopedia is now under attack in France. Criticism that should worry all defenders of freedoms, believes Samuel Le Goff, former president of Wikimedia France.
This article is an op-ed, written by an author outside the newspaper and whose point of view does not commit the editorial staff.
Created in 2001, Wikipedia has established itself as an essential tool. Present in 280 languages, the English version includes nearly 7 million articles. Overseen by the Wikimedia Foundation, which provides technical and financial management, it is run by tens of thousands of contributors who work to continually improve the content, in transparency and respectful debate.
For several months, the encyclopedia and its community have been the target of virulent attacks, the most visible of which come from Elon Musk. After praising Wikipedia, he abruptly turned around, moving to fierce hatred, calling for its funding to be cut, and calling it a den of "wokes" . He is followed by powerful organizations, such as the Heritage Foundation, linked to American ultraconservative circles. It wants to finance programs to track contributors who intervene on pages linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to reveal the identity of those who seem too favorable to the Palestinians.
Wikipedia is becoming a political battlefield and the attacks are starting to arrive in France as well. The magazine "Le Point" launched a campaign (six articles in eight days), where one of the journalists even threatened a contributor under a pseudonym to publicly reveal his identity and request a reaction from his employer. An attempt at intimidation that aroused indignation among the contributors, and which was denounced by an open letter, a rare step.
This virulence is fueled by at least two sources. The first is emotional, and is a relic of the old criticisms that Wikipedia suffered in its early days, from intellectuals and knowledge professionals. Destabilized by this newcomer, who democratizes knowledge and deprives them of their role as gatekeepers , they attacked the reliability of the encyclopedia. Then came the political and media figures as well as companies, unhappy not to have control over the article concerning them, and trying, often unsuccessfully, to modify them in a more laudatory sense. Many media figures who joined the petition recently launched by "le Point" have a complicated history with Wikipedia, and with, for many, a form of deep resentment.
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Elon Musk's attacks fall partly into this category. He also did not appreciate not having control over the content of his page, which mentions, among other things, his Nazi salute at Donald Trump's inauguration ceremony. Since the encyclopedia was completely out of his reach, since it was not for sale, he became angry, which made the ideological attacks even more spectacular.
A bastion that refuses to pay allegianceThe second source of attacks, the most serious and worrying, is ideological. Since its beginnings, Wikipedia has been a digital commons, an organizational UFO, self-managed, and which proudly claims its non-commercial character. We are light years away from the models advocated by a radical right that lives in the cult of vertical authority, tradition and the exclusion of the Other, seen as a threat! The Internet has evolved a lot since its beginnings, with the rise of platforms, first American and now Chinese. Wikipedia has gradually become the last significant space where the initial promise of a free and open Internet, that of the Californian pioneers of the web, remains alive. A bastion that refuses, unlike the big bosses of American Tech, to swear allegiance to power and to deny itself.
Suffice to say that this attitude can only provoke violent reactions from the far right. Faced with this situation, Wikipedia is both fragile and strong.
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