Jimmy Wales fires back at Elon Musk’s “defund Wikipedia” campaign
00:00 Speaker A
I want to quickly go back to what you mentioned about Elon. What happens to the activity on your platform when it comes out publicly and calls you Wokepedia?
00:10 Speaker B
From the perspective of our volunteer community, very little. So, we just write our encyclopedia and move on. The day Wikipedia said you were cutting its funding, we had a huge surge of donations. So I say, you know, bring him to Elon.
00:32 Speaker A
It’s a way to raise money. So you’re not advertising on the site, right?
00:34 Speaker B
We don’t have ads and, you know, it’s not our favorite way to raise money, but that’s okay. You know, what we believe at the end of the day is, you know, one of the seven rules of trust is independence. It’s as if we’ve designed things to actually have intellectual independence. So we don’t take money from governments, that’s important. You know, we’re not funded by billionaires or big corporations. They contribute some. It is much appreciated. We are not against this. But the vast majority of the money comes from ordinary people who say, here’s my $20. Um and the appeal that really works best for people is really the reciprocity appeal, another kind of trust thing, which is, you use Wikipedia all the time, you should probably contribute. And I think a lot of people are like, oh yeah, that really makes sense. It’s great that it’s free, but I love it and I should contribute too. So, our community, you know, we’re not under pressure from anyone, Elon Musk, the government, anyone, because we ignore them. No problem. We will just continue to do our job.
