I am one of the editors of Elon Musk’s Wikipedia page.

I’m confident that he does not understand Wikipedia at all. And (probably) neither do you.

Elon Musk has disliked Wikipedia for a long time. It appears to have started in 2019, when he said he had looked at his Wikipedia article and found it “insane”. This situation has escalated over the years, with the latest being Musk tweeting that Wikipedia should be "defunded" while referring to it as "legacy media propaganda".

His distaste for Wikipedia is so universally known that it has a section on the article “Views of Elon Musk”

If you don’t know what he’s upset about this time, it’s probably because you haven’t paid attention to any news, social media, or the internet in general this week: he’s mad because the words “Nazi salute” are contained within the Wikipedia article about him.

Here’s why you should read my point-of-view on this topic: I am one of the people who has been editing the Elon Musk Wikipedia article over the week, specifically regarding the “Nazi salute” controversy that began on Monday. I’ve also edited the pages for Nazi salute, Views of Elon Musk, and the newly created (and already-renamed-once) Elon Musk straight-arm gesture controversy (formerly known as Elon Musk’s arm gesture and likely to be renamed again, unless it ends up deleted.)

But I’m not here to talk about whether or not Elon Musk did a Nazi salute. I’m here to talk about how little Elon Musk understands Wikipedia—and that his level of ignorance seems to be the norm.

Why do so many people not know how Wikipedia works?

I was already thinking about writing the article you’re reading before the events of this week. I started working on a draft of this back in December, when Musk referred to Wikipedia as “Dickipedia” and tried to buy it.

I have been annoyed by what I see as a widespread misunderstanding of Wikipedia, which has been personified in particular by Elon Musk. For a person as successful and rich and ostensibly intelligent as Musk is, he knows very little about one of the biggest and most heavily trafficked websites on the planet.

But it’s not just him. Many people fundamentally misunderstand Wikipedia and I would like to do my part in changing that. Over the last week, I have seen people across the political spectrum reacting to Wikipedia as if it's a controlled monolith with a political agenda. This includes:

• Left-leaning Redditors who think Wikipedia uses “weasel words” or “gutless language”

• Right-leaning Redditors who think Wikipedia is “virtue signaling”

• Unregistered Wikipedia editors (editing or leaving comments with their public IP addresses) from across the political spectrum, who are offended that Wikipedia doesn’t perfectly align with their own worldview

• An angry conservative friend in my direct messages on Instagram

• Elon Musk

• Members of the general public who do not know the difference between an unpaid Wikipedia editor, an unpaid Wikipedia admin, and the rare paid Wikipedia employees who are generally not directly involved in the editing of Wikipedia articles

• And even some registered Wikipedia editors who seem confused as who to the other editors of Wikipedia are

Elon Musk is the best, most public example I’ve seen of someone who misunderstands Wikipedia, but he’s also normal in this way. He does not know the who, what or why of Wikipedia editing.

Which is why we’re going to start there. Let’s talk about what Wikipedia is and who edits it.

Who are Wikipedia editors?

I recommend taking a look at the “information page” on Wikipedia called “Who writes Wikipedia?” The answer provided by Wikipedia to readers of Wikipedia when asked who edits Wikipedia is simple:

“You do.”

I am personally a “registered” Wikipedia editor, meaning that I have an account.

But you don’t need an account to edit Wikipedia. You could do it right now, even if you’ve never edited Wikipedia before.

Not sure where to start? Check out Wikipedia’s list of Articles for improvement. Did you click that link? Right now, you could browsing that list instead of reading , looking for an article to improve.

You could be editing something like:

• Work-life balance

• Criticism of monarchy

• Suede

• Jack Black

• School spirit

You must have an opinion or knowledge on at least one of those things. Who doesn’t? It doesn’t matter if you’re pro-suede or anti-suede. Or if you’re just looking for ways to improve the writing or find new citations.

Yes, there’s a good chance that, if it’s your first edit, you’ll do a bad job and someone else will revert it. But then you’ll know more for next time.

If you go straight to Wikipedia right now and start editing, without logging in, you’ll be an “unregistered user”. If you make an account, you’ll become a “registered user.”

Then you can take a step farther and become someone like me: I am also what’s called an “extended-confirmed user”, meaning I’ve had an account for more than 30 days and have made more than 500 edits. This matters because some pages will be under “extended confirmed protection,” which means that only users who’ve had accounts for more than 30 days and made more than 500 edits can edit them.

Then there’s a deeper kind of Wikipedia editor: the Wikipedia admin. They have powers beyond those held by you and me. They can block accounts (usually vandals), protect pages (which are usually being vandalized), view deleted pages and delete existing pages. Wikipedia admins can also edit “fully protected pages”, which is a very small list (441). Many fully protected pages are about Wikipedia itself, i.e. “Help:Your first article”.

Others are pages that are being prevented from being created for the purpose of redirecting to the proper page, i.e. *NSYNC is fully protected so that it can redirect to NSYNC. If *NSYNC weren’t fully protected, it would inevitably turn into separate pages for NSYNC and *NSYNC.

Same goes for the pages “FUCK YOU” (fully protected) and “Fuck You” (semi-protected). The page for “Hitler” is fully protected, because it’s not a page but a redirect to “Adolf Hitler”, which is extended-confirmed protected.

Which brings us back to Elon Musk, Nazi salutes, and Elon Musk straight-arm gesture controversy. Elon Musk is an extended-confirmed protected page. Nazi salute is a semi-protected page. And Elon Musk straight-arm gesture controversy is not protected at all, as of now, which is why its edit history includes edits from users like 2a01:827:1719:6501:2883:76ff:fefc:841f and 71.30.131.128. (Those are the public IP addresses of unregistered users who’ve made edits to the page in the last day.)

The Musk page has been extended-confirmed protected since 2022. It was semi-protected before that, after first being marked extended-confirmed when Musk was actively encouraging his Twitter followers to vandalize his page in 2020.

(Note that the Elon Musk page has never been fully protected, meaning there has never been a time when only admins could edit. This means, yes, it’s easier to edit Elon Musk than it is *NSYNC, and has been for years.)

As for why Nazi salute is semi-protected but not ECP, it’s because there has historically been less drama within both the history of the Nazi salute article and the talk page. The page didn’t become semi-protected until January 20th 2024, after some repeated vandalism. (Ironically—in what, really, can only be coincidence—that was exactly a year before “Nazi salute” became the trending topic that it is.)

Which brings us back to the topic of my personal editing of Wikipedia.

Let’s talk about when I personally choose to edit Wikipedia

I never planned on editing Elon Musk’s Wikipedia page. My editing of his page (and other related ones) began after I saw the video of what I’ll refer to as his “alleged Nazi salute” on Monday, January 20, 2025. After seeing a video of it, I started trying to understand if I had seen what I thought I had seen. So I googled around and ended up on the Wikipedia article for “Nazi salute”, where I saw the following two, somewhat contradictory, sections.

First, in the “Post-1945” section, I read:

Then, in the “pop culture” section, I read:

While it annoyed me to see this incident listed twice on the page, with slightly different narratives each time, it did not lead to me immediately editing the article.

Instead, I jumped into the Talk page for Nazi salute. If you’re unfamiliar with what a Talk page is, it’s the page-behind-the-page, a “ space for editors to discuss editing that page”. And in the case of semi-protected Nazi salute—or more mundane semi-protected pages, like Antarctica or Avatar (2009 film)—the talk page is a place where anyone can contribute to the discussion, including unregistered editors.

But why did seeing these two sections being to compel me to first join the Talk page and then edit this article? Allow me to explain.

When I edit Wikipedia, I’m attempting to achieve clarity, accuracy and neutrality. I do not edit the majority of Wikipedia pages I look at. I’ve also gone months between edits (this is partially because I have never logged into Wikipedia on my phone; I think that would be a slippery slope. I only edit on my laptop.)

When I choose to edit a Wikipedia article, it’s because:

1. I see a tag suggesting an edit. Something like “citation needed” or “This article needs to be updated”. For a recent example of this, I made some edits to the “Suede” article.

2. I see a lack of neutrality. Neutrality does not always equate balance. If I’m editing a page about a book, any book, I do not seek an equal amount of positive reviews and negative reviews. But I do work to ensure that all Wikipedia articles I edit lack emotion, cite sources, and are written in an Encyclopedic style.

3. I see absent, outdated or incoherent information. Examples of this include my recent edits on the Search engine optimization and When We Cease to Understand the World articles.

The idea of neutrality is the one that has generated the most controversy lately, as far as the broader public is concerned.

Here is the Wikipedia policy on “neutral point of view”, which should be mentioned (but is often not) in any conversation about Wikipedia’s ostensible bias:

All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic.

Let’s break that down.

All content must be written from a neutral point of view, which means representing

1. All the significant views

   1. Fairly

   2. Proportionally

   3. Without editorial bias

“All the significant views” is the most important part, when it comes to these hot-button, boiling-over, emotionally charged topics like “did Elon Musk do a Nazi salute?” or “was the 2003 invasion of Iraq justified based on evidence”? Or, to remind you of one of the (from an outside point of view) milder examples of a Wikipedia controversy: “Is it Star Trek Into Darkness or Star Trek into Darkness”?

“All the significant views” has led to my personal opinion of what makes a Wikipedia article good: no one should read a Wikipedia article and say “yes, this perfectly articulates my exact opinion and only my opinion on this issue.”

Okay, now let’s get more specific about the edits I’ve made to the articles for Elon Musk, Nazi salute, and Elon Musk straight-arm gesture controversy.

In total, I have made about 150 edits to Wikipedia over the last week (including edits to Talk pages). The pages I have edited, in alphabetical order, are:

• Elon Musk

• Elon Musk straight-arm gesture controversy

• “In the Pines”

• Nazi salute

• Lead Belly

• List of Wikipedia controversies

• Revenge of the Tipping Point

• Suede

• Views of Elon Musk

• Work-life balance

I won’t go through the full list of all the edits I’ve made. That would be exhausting and annoying. This is already long enough.

In the case of the four articles on the above list related to Musk’s latest controversy, my focus has been:

1. Trying to clean up as much as possible, for clarity and grammar. This situation has brought a lot of people out of the woodwork, many of whom are passionate and emotional. I’ve seen many typos and incoherent additions across the 4 pages I’ve edited related to this controversy.

2. Attempting to neutralize biased wording

3. Adding in more accurate information and reputable sources from across the spectrum

In the case of what this should be referred to—for both the article that’s currently called Elon Musk straight-arm gesture controversy and the subsections on Elon Musk and Nazi salute—my argument has been “alleged Nazi salute”.

My reasoning for this, in my opinion, is simple: Elon Musk has been and is being accused of having made a Nazi salute, by a large number of people.

While the Anti-Defamation League and several other organizations and people have said he did not make one, many others (across the political spectrum) have said he did or at least that it looks like he did.

If no one was saying that Musk made a Nazi salute, there would not be a conversation at all. Therefore, to call this a “straight-arm gesture controversy” is inherently misleading, because that does not mean anything. To call it an “alleged Nazi salute controversy” is far clearer, whether you interpret his action as a Nazi salute or not.

For an example of why I think this makes sense, consider this Fox News article: Media outlets accuse Elon Musk of giving 'fascist salute' at Trump inauguration rally. If one were to use this right-leaning article as a reference for the Wikipedia articles for “Nazi salute”, “Elon Musk” or “Elon Musk straight-arm gesture controversy”, it might go something like this:

Several media outlets, including CNN, PBS News Hour, and the Jerusalem Post, described Musk’s gesture as appearing to be a Nazi salute. Meanwhile, the Anti-Defamation League suggested it was an “awkward gesture” made unintentionally.

And yes, I have added a Fox News article as a source to the Wikipedia article, just as I’ve added articles as references from across the political spectrum. And the reality is, by doing this, I’m working to ensure that the Wikipedia article does not perfectly align with the views of a single person who reads it.

Why is it so hard to see Wikipedia say something we don’t agree with entirely?

I see this debate as summing up the core issue of information in our current era.

All consumers of media—which is what we are, when it comes to the news: consumers—expect to see our own views reflected back to us. Confirmation bias, as its known. We log into Instagram or Facebook or TikTok or Twitter or go to our favorite news website or turn on our preferred television channel or listen to our preferred podcast, where we see or hear our own worldview reflected back at us. If you use Reddit, you stick to the subreddits that will upvote your opinions. As the AI search experience becomes more prominent, those too will function as confirmation bias portals (just as Google often does.)

Wikipedia might be the last place on the internet that, by design, does not function as a confirmation bias machine. This does not mean it’s perfect. But if it fulfills its mission, it will continue to be a user-generated encyclopedia whose job is to attempt to be the one place providing neutral and notable information on everything from Star Trek Into Darkness to Eiffel Tower replicas and derivatives to Elon Musk straight-arm gesture controversy or Elon Musk alleged Nazi salute controversy.

And if you don’t like what you see on Wikipedia, I have a simple solution for you: start editing.