Wikipedia Co-Founder Urges Trump and Musk To Investigate Federal Employees Editing Online Encyclopedia on Taxpayers’ Dime

One of the co-creators of Wikipedia has publicly asked President Trump and DOGE head Elon Musk to investigate whether federal employees have been paid with taxpayer money to edit entries posted to the online encyclopedia.An original co-creator of one of the internet’s most used websites, Larry Sanger, took to social media on Wednesday and directly went to DOGE overseer Mr. Musk to look into the matter as he continues to root out government waste at Washington.“Hi @ElonMusk. Wikipedia co-founder here. May I ask you to determine what branches of the U.S. government — If any! — have employees paid to edit, monitor, update, lobby, etc., Wikipedia,” he wrote on X. “Such operations should be defunded, if any. If there are *none*, we’d like to know. Agree?”A few hours later, he made a similar request to Mr. Trump.“[C]ould I persuade you 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,” he wrote in another X post.Mr. Sanger has long criticized Wikipedia since leaving the organization in 2004, citing several concerns about its lack of neutrality and vulnerability to manipulation. He believes it’s worth investigating to see if government entities in America have taken advantage of the exploits.“Well, it’s just something that occurred to me yesterday, kind of out of the blue,” Mr. Sanger said in an interview with The New York Sun. “But what would have inspired it is just the work of Elon Musk and Doge identifying all of these programs where federal dollars are spent directly or indirectly on people engaged in propaganda.”He also calls out Wikipedia for being “practically” the “biggest propaganda organ” in the world.“I just wonder, you know, why isn’t anybody talking about that,” he says. “So, everybody suspects that ‘feds,’ I put that in quotes, are editing Wikipedia as part of their work in essentially molding the public discourse.”Mr. Sanger claims it is public knowledge that a central part of what the intelligence sector does is “manage public opinion.” He believes it is worth investigating whether Wikipedia is one of the means they use to achieve that goal.“Since we seem to have an administration that would be open to, to revealing the facts about such things, actually using what power it has over its own bureaucratic apparatus, they are perfectly positioned to lift the lid on what sort of, what sort of work is being done by federal dollars on Wikipedia.”Mr. Sanger did receive a response from Mr. Musk, who posted on X “Good Idea” in response to his request to Mr. Trump for an executive order on Thursday.The former Wikipedia executive says he’s “sick and tired” of the site and other resources used for unknown motives by “shadowy forces.”“I think we should be discussing the whole question of whether governments, and whether and how governments should be trying to influence public opinion as, you know, part of their regular work,” he said. “And I think governments everywhere need to be a lot more open about this.”

Wikipedia Co-Founder Urges Trump and Musk To Investigate Federal Employees Editing Online Encyclopedia on Taxpayers’ Dime

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