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An Unbothered Jimmy Wales Calls Grokipedia a 'Cartoon Imitation' of Wikipedia
- whiteclawlegal 9mo ago[flagged]
- ggoo 9mo agoAccurate.
- ryandrake 9mo agoThe concept of Grokipedia reminds me of the old (now defunct? won't load) "Conservapedia" project that basically only had detailed pages for topics where observable fact was incompatible with political ideology--so for these topics, the site showed the Alternative Facts that conformed to that ideology. If you looked up something non-political like "Traffic Light" or "Birthday Cake" there would be no article at all. Because being a complete repository of information was not an actual goal of the site.
- not2b 9mo agoConservapedia had to have a person create each article and didn't have the labor or interest. Grok can spew out any number of pages on any subject, and those topics that aren't ideologically important to Musk will just be the usual LLM verbiage that might be right or might not.
- throw310822 9mo agoBesides the political slant of Grokipedia, it's true that a lot of work that needed to be crowdsourced can be now packaged as work for LLMs. We all know the disadvantages of using LLMs, so let me mention some of the advantages: much higher speed, much more impervious to groupthink, cliques, and organised campaigns; truly ego-less editing and debating between "editors". Grokipedia is not viable because of Musk's derangement, but other projects, more open and publicly auditable, might come along.
- Avshalom 9mo ago"higher speed" isn't an advantage for an encyclopedia. The fact that Musk's derangement is clear from reading grokipedia articles shows that LLMs are less impervious to ego. Combine easily ego driven writing with "higher speed" and all you get is even worse debates.
- delecti 9mo agoIt's not an advantage for an encyclopedia that cares foremost about truth. Missing pages is a disadvantage though.
- dghlsakjg 9mo ago> much more impervious to groupthink Citation very much needed. LLMs are arguably concentrated groupthink (albeit a different type than wiki editors - although I'm sure they are trained on that), and are incredibly prone to sycophancy. Establishing fact is hard enough with humans in the loop. Frankly, my counterargument is that we should be incredibly careful about how we use AI in sources of truth. We don't want articles written faster, we want them written better. I'm not sure AI is up to that task.
- ajross 9mo ago"Groupthink" informed by extremely broad training sets is more conventionally called "consensus", and that's what we want the LLM to reflect. "Groupthink", as the term is used by epistemologically isolated in-groups, actually means the opposite. The problem with the idea is that it looks symmetric, so if you yourself are stuck in groupthink, you fool yourself into think it's everyone else doing it instead. And, again, the solution for that is reasonable references grounded in informed consensus. (Whether that should be a curated encyclopedia or a LLM is a different argument.)
- bubblewand 9mo ago> "Groupthink" informed by extremely broad training sets is more conventionally called "consensus", and that's what we want the LLM to reflect. Definitely not! I absolutely do not want an LLM that gives much or any truth-weight to the vast majority of writing on the vast majority of topics. Maybe, maybe if they’d existed before the Web and been trained only on published writing, but even then you have stuff like tabloids, cranks self-publishing or publishing through crank-friendly niche publishers, advertisements full of lies, very dumb letters to the editor, vanity autobiographies or narrative business books full of made-up stuff presented as true, et c. No, that’s good for building a model of something like the probability space of human writing, but an LLM that has some kind of truth-grounding wholly based on that would be far from my ideal. > And, again, the solution for that is reasonable references grounded in informed consensus. (Whether that should be a curated encyclopedia or a LLM is a different argument.) “Informed” is a load bearing word in this post, and I don’t really see how the rest holds together if we start to pick at that.
- atonse 9mo agoHave you tried Grokipedia yet? Cuz you’ve mainly addressed the concept. But have you read a bunch of articles? Found inaccuracies? Seen the edit process? Cuz, regardless of ideology, the edit process couldn’t have been done before because AI like this didn’t exist before.
- bigyabai 9mo agoNo, I see no reason to give AI-generated articles a second of my time. Wikipedia's best feature is the human-provided citations; you can very easily validate a claim with a hardlink to a book, article or video archive. AI does not have the skillset or the tools required to match Wikipedia's quality. It can definitely create it's own edit process, but it's a useless one for people like me that don't treat the internet as a ground-truth.
- baobabKoodaa 9mo agoFollow up question: have you tried smoking crack? Surely you should try smoking crack before you draw any conclusions about it being bad.
- wat10000 9mo ago"As of February 19, 2026, Musk’s net worth is estimated at $844.9 billion per Forbes' Real-Time Billionaires List, primarily derived from equity stakes rather than cash..." That "rather than cash" bit is bizarre, since no wealthy person holds primarily cash. I checked the pages of several other ultra-wealthy people and none of them have that comment. I'm sure this has nothing to do with Grokipedia's owner recently making an issue of how little cash he holds.
- ilamont 9mo agoAnother defunct site is Deletionpedia, which compiled articles that had been removed from Wikipedia for not meeting various criteria (usually relating to notability IIRC). The site is dead but the HN discussion lives on: "Deletionpedia: Rescuing articles from Wikipedia's deletionism": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31297057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31297057
- lukan 9mo agoI rather lament that Stupidedia is now defunct, way more entertaining (https://www.stupidedia.org https://www.stupidedia.org german only satirical wiki)
- JKCalhoun 9mo agoInteresting. There was a small window of time where there was in fact a small page about me in Wikipedia (I wrote a published game for the Macintosh in 1990). And then one day my page was gone. That must have been during the "Big Cull". It makes sense to me though. That I had a page just for having written a game made Wikipedia seem overly "nerd-centric".
- weregiraffe 9mo agoWho decided what is an observable fact?
- Loughla 9mo agoWhat's your point?
- tptacek 9mo agoA reliable source (WP:RS). The encyclopedia is about the citations; it's a travel atlas to the sources about a subject. Any conclusions the encyclopedia draws "itself" are secondary to the sources.
- weregiraffe 9mo agoWho decides which sources are reliable?
- tptacek 9mo agoRead WP:RS. It's a very complicated answer, and one of the most important policy processes in the project.
- input_sh 9mo agoHave you tried spending some time researching how Wikipedia works yourself instead of waiting for someone to spoon feed you?
- weregiraffe 9mo agoNo, I merely being sarcastic, because I know it's all boils down to power. Just ask yourself, why different language wikipedias diverge on some hot topics.
- input_sh 9mo agoBecause they're run by completely separate teams of moderators and Wikimedia (as in the organization) basically never interferes with other versions of Wikipedia? Because every other language has far worse moderation, and you can pretty much guess how good the moderation is simply by asking yourself how relevant that version of Wikipedia even is in the first place? I can understand 6 different versions of Wikipedia and my experience is the complete opposite of what you're insinuating, English version beats the other five 99.8% of the time even the topic at hand is completely local.
- lich_king 9mo agoRight, but the reason that Conservapedia fizzled out is that you can't really build a critical mass of human editors if the only reason your site exists is that you have a very specific view on dinosaurs and homosexuality (even among hardline conservatives, most will not share your views). What's different with Grokipedia is that you now have an army of robots who can put a Young Earth spin on a million articles overnight. I do think that as it is, Grokipedia is a threat to Wikipedia because the complaints about accuracy don't matter to most people. And if you're in the not-too-unpopular camp that the cure to the subtle left-wing bias of Wikipedia is robotically injecting more egregious right-wing bias, the project is up your alley. The best hope for the survival of Wikipedia is that everyone else gets the same idea and we end up with 50 politically-motivated forks at each others' throats, with Wikipedia being the comparatively normal, mainstream choice.
- Borgz 9mo agoAs it is, Grokipedia is not a threat to Wikipedia because relative to Wikipedia, almost nobody is using it. Additionally, an encyclopedia reader likely cares about accuracy significantly more than average.
- vkou 9mo ago> As it is, Grokipedia is not a threat to Wikipedia because relative to Wikipedia, almost nobody is using it. For now. With a little collusion, and a lot of money, it can be pushed as the front page of the internet. What are you going to do if Google and Bing are convinced to rank its bullshit over Wikipedia? Most people don't change the defaults.
- Marsymars 9mo ago> For now. With a little collusion, and a lot of money, it can be pushed as the front page of the internet. I know it has come up near the front of at least one of my Kagi searches, because it's now on my blocklist.
- 9mo ago
- AmbroseBierce 9mo agoNon-political? Birthday cakes are distributed free of charge to the guests, with same sized portions for all, that's pure and simple communism! /s
- expedition32 9mo agoI actually knew a Jehovah kid who wasn't allowed to celebrate birthdays. Actually pretty sad because as you know such events are ingrained into almost every culture- there were children from all over the world at this school and they all sang happy birthday in 30 languages.
- hagbard_c 9mo agoI know a number of Jehovah's Witnesses children - I don't want to call their children 'Jehovah' since they have not made the choice to be born in those circumstances - who also don't celebrate birthdays but notices they have other 'gift-giving' days which seem to fill the hole left by the missing birthdays. Just like Jews manage to get around the rules for Sabbath by installing special light switches [1] which use random events to accidentally switch on and off the lights so the one who actuated the mechanism did not have someone or something do work for them also Jehovah's Witnesses seem to find ways to get around the restrictions their traditions put on them. [1] https://handwiki.org/wiki/Engineering:KosherSwitch https://handwiki.org/wiki/Engineering:KosherSwitch
- ghywertelling 9mo ago[flagged]
- tbrownaw 9mo agoGrokipedia is a tool for converting money into improvements in AI (by iterating on it). Any outward resemblance to an encyclopedia is incidental, despite apparently being the intended purpose.
- Timon3 9mo agoNo, it's a tool for converting money into influence. Musk already has a fairly direct way to disseminate his thoughts towards any Twitter users, but that leaves out many people. With Grokipedia he can automatically inject his biases and ideas into search results, ensuring that any AI query could be influenced towards his views. This is literally already happening, Grokipedia can be a source returned by current AI tools.
- HardwareLust 9mo agoThat is exactly what it is.
- robin_reala 9mo agoSide note, but Kagi has a great feature where you can remove worthless sites like Grokipedia from your results so that you can safely forget they exist. Recommended.
- refsys 9mo agoThey also have a report form for slop sites, but none of mine got reviewed yet (I have 5 reports since November, and the help still says "We will start processing reports officially in January.")
- mzajc 9mo agoFor users of other search engines, the uBlacklist extension[0] is a godsend. It'll also apply the same blacklist to every search engine you use. [0]: https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist https://github.com/iorate/ublacklist
- LightBug1 9mo agoThanks.
- beloch 9mo agoGrokipedia is currently: 1) Less accurate than Wikipedia. 2) More verbose, harder to read, and less well organized than Wikipedia. Pick a non-political topic and compare the Wikipedia page to the Grokipedia page. It's not even close. If Grokipedia ever closes the #2 gap, then we might start to see a non-negligible number of users ignoring #1. At present, only the most easily offended political snowflakes would willingly inflict Grokipedia on themselves.
- Timon3 9mo agoIt doesn't matter whether people decide to use it, existing AI tools already do. I've seen Grokipedia listed as a source in ChatGPT responses. Potentially any AI query can now be poisoned by Musks Mecha-Hitler.
- JKCalhoun 9mo agoThese AI queries could easily filter out Grokipedia sources. Since there is always going to be disinformation on the internet, the burden is going to be on those that maintain the LLMs.
- Timon3 9mo agoSure, they could. But will they, especially if Musk uses leverage to prevent them from filtering them out? Unless all big AI providers do this, the people around us will start to get poisoned by Musks thoughts. They haven't done it so far, so I don't see a reason for them to do it in the future.
- JKCalhoun 9mo agoNot disagreeing with any of your points.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- bdcravens 9mo agoIn terms of total size, it absolutely has a long way to go. How it ends up remains to be seen. Much of the conversation around it has been disingenuous, focusing on growth percentages as opposed to actual size. Once upon a time, the Parler and Truth Social apps were also at the top of the charts based on growth.
- Havoc 9mo agoNow when mechahitler needs a source to back that musky is indeed fitter than usain bolt he has a reference
- lysace 9mo agoIMO, these two things are both true: a) Wales' co-founder Larry Sanger is largely correct about the bias of Wikipedia b) Grokipedia is a joke
- graemep 9mo agoSome other articles are fine, but its horribly unreliable. I tried subject of the first wikipedia article in my browser history search. It was Malleus Maleficarum. The first part of the text was correct and a decent summary, the rest suddenly switched to an article about an album called Hammer of the Witch by a band called Ringworm. Images are a weak point. No image of the Sri Lankan flag, a weird one of the flag of the UK, which the caption says "The national flag of the United Kingdom, known as the Union Jack" - bad! Wikipedia has a better image, and an entire article on the Union Flag. The article on marriage vows (another one I have looked at recently) seems more extensive than WIkipedia's but only because it conflates vows with wedding ceremonies. Wikipedia's interpretation is narrow but covers the subject matter much better. Grokepedia would not have told me what I wanted to know, while Wikipedia does. I do not see the point. If I want AI written answers a chat interface is better. That might be a real threat to Wikipedia, but an AI written equivalent is not.
- hodgesrm 9mo agoThe Grokipedia article on Malleus Maleficarum is almost unreadable. It’s long on wordy, thinly sourced disquisitions on marginally relevant topics. The section on historical and theological context is a case in point. It seems to be largely summarizing easily available primary texts like the Bible, not evaluating arguments based on scholarly works. Personally I can’t judge how much of that section even makes sense, despite having a reasonably good background in late medieval history. The Wikipedia article is much more sound. P.s. humans do this too. Max Weber was pretty thin on the ground when it came to sources as I recall.
- pie_flavor 9mo agoI've found in at least two instances Grokipedia had something Wikipedia didn't. One was looking up who "Ray Peat" was after encountering it on Twitter. Grok was obviously a bit more fawning over this right-aligned figure but Wikipedia had long since entirely deleted its page, so I didn't have much of a choice. Seems bizarre to just not have a page on a subject discussed every day on Twitter. The other is far more impactful IMO. Every politician's or political figure's page on Wikipedia just goes "Bob is a politician. In 2025 <list of every controversial thing imaginable>". You have no idea what he's about and what he represents; you don't even have any idea if anyone cared, since all this was added at that moment in 2025 and not updated since. Grokipedia does not do this at all. If you want to know about someone's actual political career, Grokipedia weights recent controversies equal to past controversies and isolates it all to a section specifically for controversies. (The same also happens in reverse for hagiographies; Grok will often be much more critical of e.g. minor activists.)
- bigyabai 9mo ago> Every politician's or political figure's page on Wikipedia just goes "Bob is a politician. In 2025 <list of every controversial thing imaginable>". Are we searching for the same political figures? I just punched in three random politicians on Wikipedia (Lavrov, Rubio, Sanders) and all of their introductory paragraphs are a list of their past and present political offices. Legacy and controversy is reserved for it's own heading, or pushed into the back of the summary. For most public officials, that seems like a fair shake. The only outliers I can think of are obviously-reviled figures like Joe Kony, Cecil Rhodes or Adolph H., who should probably get condemned above the fold for the courtesy of the reader.
- jrflowers 9mo ago>Ray Peat >Seems bizarre to just not have a page on a subject discussed every day on Twitter. The idea that if a guy writes “avocados cause cancer and honey cures it” he should be put in the encyclopedia if it gets enough retweets is the organizing principle behind grokipedia. It would be much more bizarre to expect a serious encyclopedia to work the same way for no good reason.
- tptacek 9mo agoI don't understand why people keep giving Grokipedia this kind of oxygen. It's an utterly unserious project. Wikipedia, on the other hand, stands among the most important achievements in human knowledge of the last 100 years. It's like comparing a pillow fort to the Great Wall.
- tstrimple 9mo agoBecause they are ideologically aligned with Elon Musk. They want the alternative facts. They need sources to point to because they keep getting beat up with this troubling thing called reality. They think if they can drop a grokipedia link to counter a wikipedia link they are "winning".
- codazoda 9mo ago[flagged]
- gopher_space 9mo agoThe people laughing at Gandhi were laughing at the hopelessness of his struggle, not the idiocy of his actions. A clown at the circus, made up to go on stage, doesn't need "First they laugh at you" rattling around in his brain. Now that I think about it, that's kind of the basic idea behind Joaquin Phoenix' take on the Joker.
- anematode 9mo agoGrokipedia is worse than useless. I scanned through an article on a semi-obscure topic which I know quite deeply, because I researched and wrote the Wikipedia article on that topic. There were dozens of factual errors, of course, but the funniest part was how Grok routinely overstated the importance of the subject. No, Grok, this one historical tree is not critical to the ecology of the area. It's just a tree. I spent a month on and off doing research for that project, visiting libraries and a local historical society, talking to the historian there, looking through Newspapers.com, etc. The Grokipedia article, if it weren't so ridiculous, would be vaguely insulting.
- hagbard_c 9mo agoWhat page would that be, both on GP as well as WP? I´d like to have a look at both to see where they differ.
- anematode 9mo ago"El Palo Alto" As an example of how bogus this is: ... ensuring its projected lifespan extends at least 300 more years Not found in the given source and I have no clue where this came from. By the mid-1990s, diagnoses confirmed heart rot and advanced decay in the core, exacerbating risks of limb failure and overall toppling without external support. Can't find any reference in the cited sources to heart rot or advanced decay; I think it's a fabrication and it's inconsistent with arborists' descriptions of the tree's health. Googling "el palo alto" "heart rot" gives no relevant results. etc. etc.; the issue is that a lot of these are plausible, yet wrong.
- NedF 9mo ago[dead]
- aleph_minus_one 9mo agoA fun fact about Grokipedia: Many pages about math-related topics contain quite some "red text", i.e. parts that don't render properly, e.g. > https://grokipedia.com/page/Derived_category https://grokipedia.com/page/Derived_category (scroll down; for this page the mentioned phenomenon is particularly pronounced) > https://grokipedia.com/page/K-theory https://grokipedia.com/page/K-theory > https://grokipedia.com/page/Actuarial_notation https://grokipedia.com/page/Actuarial_notation > https://grokipedia.com/page/Cobordism https://grokipedia.com/page/Cobordism (scroll down to "Advanced Perspectives")
- hagbard_c 9mo ago& 1: First they ignore you > 2: then they laugh at you 3: then they fight you 4; then you win I don't know about the winning part but thus far they've followed the usual script. I´d consider Wikipedia getting rid of its clear and present 'progressive' bias by some means winning as I don´t want to see Grokipedia or whaterverpedia take over. Let them co-exist just like Wikipedia has co-existed with Britannica and others.
- amai 9mo agoWhy is Grokipedia ranked so high in Google search results? It is AI spam. They should rank it down like all the other SEO AI spam.