Day: January 18, 2025

Image from Flikr.

This Russia Today article explains that Elon Musk is calling out Wikipedia for wasting an enormous proportion of its donations on woke DEI and “safety and inclusion” agendas, among other issues.

The article explains that Wikipedia receives 90% of its funding from donations, and in its 2023-2024 budget of $177 million, $50 million was spent on such woke agendas.

Other points talked about in the article:

— Musk wrote on X: “Stop donating to Wokepedia until they restore balance to their editing authority,” and he wrote that Wikipedia “sucks” for spending $50 million on DEI.

— Wikipedia claims it is “taking steps to address barriers to free knowledge caused by racial inequality, while also striving to close the gender gap and ensure equal representation of knowledge and people on the platform.”  They also claim that they seek to “defend our people and projects against disinformation and harmful government regulation” and other “external threats.”

— Elon Musk also called out Wikipedia in October for calling Donald Trump a “fascist,” where he said the site is controlled by far-left activists.

— Later that month Musk offered Wikipedia $1 billion if they would rename the site to be “Dickipedia” for at least a year.

— In 2023 Wikipedia’s co-founder Larry Sanger said that the platform is being used by US intelligence community as an instrument of “control,” and to further the agenda of left-liberal establishment.

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… All of that is depressing to hear.  I bet that angers many people who donate to it, and also people who contribute content to it.

I must admit that I find the website to be useful nonetheless.  Of course there is always a danger of its content being biased, but people should expect that because it is a wiki.  (And I do point out when I find issues with it.)

Other similar wikis also exist, and I will examine them more.  But I wouldn’t trust many of them to be much better and they likely don’t have as much content.

Following are links to the Wikipedia alternatives that are mentioned in this article:

Encyclopedia Britannica  (This does not seem to be a “wiki” however.)

Kiwix  (This is “downloader” for various wikis including Wikipedia, which could be useful.)

KnowledgePicker  (This seems to no longer be accepting new content, but its old content is still available as an archive.)

Oppia  (This didn’t work on my browser.)

Scholarpedia  (This one focuses on “academic” topics.)

Metapedia  (This one “focuses on culture, art, science, history, politics and philosophy.”)

World History Encyclopedia  (This one focuses on ancient history.  It is an NGO like Wikipedia, and it mainly focuses on providing information and content for teachers and students.)

Wikiless  (This is some sort of a custom Wikipedia front end that web developers can host themselves.  It says that it prevents Wikipedia from getting the IP address of the people who are searching it, and it is somehow “customizable” for individual users.  This article explains it more, and it gives a list of examples of its use.)

Wikispooks  (This one focuses on “conspiracy” related content.)

[Note I wrote this article a while ago.  I actually have a bit of a backlog of articles that I wrote but never got around to posting.  Many of them I didn’t post because I decided that they would distract from other new articles.]

I saw the movie Gladiator II recently, which I thought was well-made, but it did have issues such as with the fictional animals they fought and man-eating sharks being in the Colosseum for example.

The movie had corrupt twin brother emperors who were based on real emperors Geta & Caracalla, and they also incorporated aspects of madness into them as with the emperor Nero.  Nero was a homosexual however, but the filmmakers seemed to go out of their way to depict them as being heterosexuals despite their effeminate nature, where they weren’t even willing to just leave that up to speculation.

See a video that depicts how insane Nero was in this docudrama series.  (The documentary was previously available on YouTube but it is now on Amazon Prime.  The entire series is well-made, where each episode portrays a unique interesting aspect of ancient Rome.  Note that the written description for the video on the page is for a different video however.)

A “woke” movement actually exists claiming that “Nero wasn’t actually that bad,” however he definitely was bad.  Apparently he didn’t personally start the fire in Rome, but most of the other horrible things about him aren’t disputed.  But that doesn’t stop his proponents from claiming that he was “misunderstood” and some even ridiculously saying that he was “actually good.”

The issue with Nero being claimed to be “misunderstood” is another example of leftists attempting to do a “woke” re-writing of history, such as with Alexander the Great inaccurately being depicted as being a homosexual, (link) the Carthaginian general Hannibal being depicted as being black, (link and link) and the Crusades being depicted as Muslims being attacked by Europeans for no reason. (link and link)

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I also heard about the “gay comedy” superhero movie Deadpool and Wolverine, and I was surprised to hear that it was very popular and I was curious why.  So I saw it but I still can’t understand how it could have been so popular.  It is definitely a “gay” movie, and I just can’t imagine large crowds of heterosexual guys (or girls) lining up to see that.

The following are real promotional posters for the movie:

The movie was actually a “blockbuster,” supposedly grossing $1.338 billion worldwide, and it was the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time!  Why?  Did activists somehow coordinate with each other and buy ten or twenty tickets each?  I just don’t believe it.

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Another movie that I think has suspiciously inexplicable aspects is “The Dark Knight” that was made in 2008, which was seemingly universally hailed by critics as being “one of the greatest movies of all time!” despite just being a run-of-the-mill action movie except for the fact that it was particularly violent.  Even to this day it is ranked among “the greatest of all movies.” (link and link)  For some reason an agenda seems to exist to make sure it is artificially praised and ranked in such a positive way.