WhenWhen armies invade, hurricanes form, or governments fall, a Wikipedia editor will typically update the relevant articles seconds after the news breaks. So quick are editors to change “is” to “was” in cases of notable deaths that they are said to have the fastest past tense in the West. So it was unusual, according to one longtime editor who was watching the page, that on the afternoon of January 20th, 2025, hours after Elon Musk made a gesture resembling a Nazi salute at a rally following President Donald Trump’s inauguration and well into the ensuing public outcry, no one had added the incident to the encyclopedia.
Then, just before 4PM, an editor by the name of PickleG13 added a single sentence to Musk’s 8,600-word biography: “Musk appeared to perform a Nazi salute,” citing an article in The Jerusalem Post. In a note explaining the change, the editor wrote, “This controversy will be debated, but it does appear and is being reported that Musk may have performed a Hitler salute.” Two minutes later, another editor deleted the line for violating Wikipedia’s stricter standards for unflattering information in biographies of living people.
But PickleG13 was correct. That evening, as the controversy over the gesture became a vortex of global attention, another editor called for an official discussion about whether it deserved to be recorded in Wikipedia. At first, the debate on the article’s “talk page,” where editors discuss changes, was much the same as the one playing out across social media and press: it was obviously a Nazi salute vs. it was an awkward wave vs. it couldn’t have been a wave, just look at the touch to his shoulder, the angle of his palm vs. he’s autistic vs. no, he’s antisemitic vs. I don’t see the biased media calling out Obama for doing a Nazi salute in this photo I found on Twitter vs. that’s just a still photo, stop gaslighting people about what they obviously saw. But slowly, through the barbs and rebuttals and corrections, the trajectory shifted.
Wikipedia is the largest compendium of human knowledge ever assembled, with more than 7 million articles in its English version, the largest and most developed of 343 language projects. Started nearly 25 years ago, the site was long mocked as a byword for the unreliability of information on the internet, yet today it is, without exaggeration, the digital world’s factual foundation. It’s what Google puts at the top of search results otherwise awash in ads and spam, what social platforms cite when they deign to correct conspiracy theories, and what AI companies scrape in their ongoing quest to get their models to stop regurgitating info-slurry — and consult with such frequency that they are straining the encyclopedia’s servers. Each day, it’s where approximately 70 million people turn for reliable information on everything from particle physics to rare Scottish sheep to the Erfurt latrine disaster of 1184, a testament both to Wikipedia’s success and to the total degradation of the rest of the internet as an information resource.
“It’s basically the only place on the internet that doesn’t function as a confirmation bias machine.”
But as impressive as this archive is, it is the byproduct of something that today looks almost equally remarkable: strangers on the internet disagreeing on matters of existential gravity and breathtaking pettiness and, through deliberation and debate, building a common ground of consensus reality.
“One of the things I really love about Wikipedia is it forces you to have measured, emotionless conversations with people you disagree with in the name of trying to construct the accurate narrative,” said DF Lovett, a Minnesota-based writer and marketer who mostly edits articles about local landmarks and favorite authors but later joined the salute debate to argue that “Elon Musk straight-arm gesture controversy” was a needlessly awkward description. “It’s basically the only place on the internet that doesn’t function as a confirmation bias machine,” he said, which is also why he thinks people sometimes get mad at it. Wikipedia is one of the few platforms online where tremendous computing power isn’t being deployed in the service of telling you exactly what you want to hear.
Whether Musk had made a Nazi salute or was merely awkward, the editors decided, was not for them to say, even if they had their opinions. What was a fact, they agreed, was that on January 20th, Musk had “twice extended his right arm toward the crowd in an upward angle,” that many observers compared the gesture to a Nazi salute, and that Musk denied any meaning behind the motion. Consensus was reached. The lines were added back. Approximately 7,000 words of deliberation to settle, for a time, three sentences. This was Wikipedia’s process working as intended.
It was at this point that Musk himself cannonballed into the discourse, tweeting that the encyclopedia was “legacy media propaganda!”
This was not Musk’s first time attacking the site — that appears to have been in 2019, when he complained that it accurately described him as an early investor in Tesla rather than its founder. But recently he has taken to accusing the encyclopedia of a liberal bias, mocking it as “wokepedia,” and calling for it to be defunded. In so doing, he has joined a growing number of powerful people, groups, and governments that have made the site a target. In August, Republicans on the US House Oversight Committee sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation requesting information on attempts to “inject bias” into the encyclopedia and data about editors suspected of doing so.
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