Wikipedia co-founder asks Elon Musk to check if US govt paid employees to ‘edit, monitor, update, lobby’ the website

Wikipedia co-founder asks Elon Musk to check if US govt paid employees to ‘edit, monitor, update, lobby’ the website

Wikipedia co-founder asks Elon Musk to check if US govt paid employees to ‘edit, monitor, update, lobby’ the website ByAbhyjith K. Ashokan Feb 27, 2025 11:11 AM IST Share Via Copy Link Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger also wrote that “such operations should be defunded, if any,” in a post on X.

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has asked Elon Musk to find out which branches of the US government have asked employees to "edit, monitor, update, lobby" the online encyclopedia.

This comes at a time when Musk is heading the US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) which is aimed at cutting unnecessary spending of the federal government and thus, control the fiscal deficit.(Representational Image/Unsplash)

“Such operations should be defunded, if any,” Sanger wrote in a post on X. He also added that “if there are none, we’d like to know.”

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This comes at a time when Musk is heading the US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) which is aimed at cutting unnecessary spending of the federal government and thus, control the fiscal deficit.

In a separate post, Sanger even asked US President Donald Trump to “use an executive order to make it a policy that neither federal worker hours nor federal moneys may be used to edit Wikipedia or pay for Wikipedia editing,” adding that he voted for him.

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Sanger who has been open about his conservative beliefs also made statements earlier, claiming that Wikipedia has had a “long, slow slide into what I (he) would call leftist propaganda,” despite a neutrality policy being introduced before the website was even conceived.

Wikipedia was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001. At that time, Sanger was the editor-in-chief of a similar site named Nupedia.

He claimed that the situation is such because Wikipedia follows the news media and that “they've gotten rid of almost all conservative news sources as sources for their articles” in an interview with right-leaning US outlet, The Epoch Times.

Musk had even touted Sanger's interview on X, saying, “Don’t take it from me (I’m just a frog after all), take it from the co-founder of Wikipedia.”

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He once made fun of the site, offering it $1 billion if it changed its name to “Dickipedia” for a year at minimum.