Elon Musk Totally Triggered The Founder Of Wikipedia Over Definition Of One Word

Elon Musk, the tech billionaire, criticized co-founder Jimmy Wales and said that the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is “losing its objectivity” when the platform banned updating the “recession” article.

Wikipedia has lately been the subject of criticism after it halted additions to its page about recession and made it semi-protected.

On Friday, Elon Musk poked fun at the platform, saying it is “losing its objectivity.” In the Wikipedia policy, unregistered users and new users are not permitted to edit semi-protected pages.

Musk, reacting to a tweet that read, “Wikipedia is now a weapon,” late Friday, Musk wrote on the microblogging site, “Wikipedia is losing its objectivity,”@jimmy_wales.

wikipedia is now a weapon

— Mike Solana (@micsolana) July 28, 2022

Wikipedia is losing its objectivity @jimmy_wales

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 29, 2022

After the US economy revealed a negative GDP for the second consecutive quarter while the Biden administration avoided labeling the current economy a recession, the Wikipedia page for the definition of the recession became mired in a bitter editing battle.

Wikipedia has changed the definition of recession.

Wayback’s last capture was July 11, 2022.

Based on Wiki’s changelog, the line: “There is no global consensus on the definition of a recession” was added on July 27.

The page is now locked. pic.twitter.com/6tx1vPHEPM

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) July 28, 2022

White House Economic Advisor, Brian Christopher Dees has said:

Two negative quarters of GDP growth is not the technical definition of recession. It is not the definition economists have relied on. pic.twitter.com/4gRFIJKvyQ

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) July 26, 2022

Janet Yellen redefining the word “Recession”. Basically moving the goalposts! pic.twitter.com/Z5PfGpuXlb

— TickedOffOfLibs (@TickedOffOfLibs) July 26, 2022

Insisting that there is no economic slump, President Joe Biden cited statistics showing record job growth, low unemployment rates, and company investment. As reported by Reuters, Biden said, “That does not sound like a recession to me.”

Many analysts think that the economy is in a recession when there have been two quarters in a row of negative GDP growth. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a non-profit organization in the US, uses the widely-accepted definition of a recession as “a major fall in economic activity distributed across the market lasting more than a few months.”

The Wikipedia page on recession experienced more traffic as a result of this semantic conflict.

According to the history of the page, more than 180 modifications were made to the recession page on Wikipedia in a single week as a result of this semantic conflict. Before now, there has only been a total of 24 edits to the page in 2022. The lock icon in the top right corner of the recession page on Wikipedia now indicates that the page is guarded against edits from new and unregistered users.

Twitter users responded to Musk’s argument against Wikipedia’s objectivity in a variety of ways, with many of them joining in and supporting him. Wikipedia was charged for endorsing the Biden administration’s view of recession in several comments.

Sources: Conservativebrief, Nypost, CNN