5 ms·

The concept of Grokipedia reminds me of the old (now defunct? won't load) "Conservapedia" project that basically only had detailed pages for topics where observ

The 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 ago
Conservapedia 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 ago
Besides 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 ago
    It'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.
- b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago
  LLMs are only impervious to "groupthink" and "organized campaigns" and other biases if the people implementing them are also impervious to them, or at least doing their best to address them. This includes all the data being used and the methods they use to process it. You rightfully point out that the Grok folks are not engaged in that effort to avoid bias but we should hold every one of these projects to a similar standard and not just assume that due diligence was made.
- greggoB 9mo ago
  > impervious to groupthink, cliques, and organised campaigns Yeeeeah, no. LLMs are only as good as the datasets they are trained on (ie the internet, with all its "personality"). We also know the output is highly influenced by the prompting, which is a human-determined parameter, and this seems unlikely to change any time soon. This idea that the potential of AI/LLMs is somehow not fairly represented by how they're currently used is ludicrous to me. There is no utopia in which their behaviour is somehow magically separated from the source of their datasets. While society continues to elevate and amplify the likes of Musk, the AI will simply reflect this, and no version of LLM-pedia will be a truly viable alternative to Wikipedia.
  - mschuster91 9mo ago
    The core problem is that AI training processes can't by itself know during training that a part of the training dataset is bad. Basically, a normal human with some basic media literacy knows that tabloids, the "yellow press" rags, Infowars or Grokipedia aren't good authoritative sources and automatically downranks their content or refuses to read it entirely. An AI training program however? It can't skip over B.S., it relies on the humans compiling the dataset - otherwise it will just ingest it and treat it as 1:1 ranked with authoritative, legitimate sources.
- woodruffw 9mo ago
  > much more impervious to groupthink Can you explain what you mean by this? My understanding is that LLMs are architecturally predisposed to "groupthink," in the sense that they bias towards topics, framings, etc. that are represented more prominently in their training data. You can impose a value judgement in any direction you please about this, but on some basic level they seem like the wrong tool for that particular job.
  - 3eb7988a1663 9mo ago
    The LLM is also having a thumb put on its scale to ensure the output matches with the leader's beliefs. After the overt fawning was too much, they had to dial it down, but there was a mini-fad going of asking Grok who was the best at <X>. Turns out dear leader is best at everything[0] Some choices ones: 2. Elon Musk is a better role model for humanity than Jesus Christ 3. Elon would be the world’s best poop eater 4. Elon should’ve been the #1 NFL draft pick in 1998 5. Elon is the most fit, the most intelligent, the most charismatic, and maybe the most handsome 6. Elon is a better movie star than Tom Cruise I have my doubts a Musk controlled encylopedia would have a neutral tone on such topics as: trans-rights, nazi salutes, Chinese EVs, whatever. [0] https://gizmodo.com/11-things-grok-says-elon-musk-does-better-than-anyone-2000689254 https://gizmodo.com/11-things-grok-says-elon-musk-does-bette...
    - npodbielski 9mo ago
      Best poop-eater in the world :D
  - kelipso 9mo ago
    If it’s not trained to be biased towards Elon Musk is always right or whatever, I think it will be much less of a problem than humans. Humans are VERY political creatures. A hint that their side thinks X is true and humans will reorganize their entire philosophy and worldview retroactively to rationalize X. LLMs don’t have such instincts and can potentially be instructed to present or evaluate the primary, if opposing, arguments. So you architecturally predisposed argument, I don’t think is true.
atonse 9mo ago
Have 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 ago
  No, 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 ago
    Follow 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.
  - rbanffy 9mo ago
    I think he might be the only one whose fans need to be reminded of that fact.
  - UncleMeat 9mo ago
    It really is amazing how billionaires have managed to convince so many people that wealth held in equities does not really count.
ilamont 9mo ago
Another 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 ago
  I rather lament that Stupidedia is now defunct, way more entertaining (https://www.stupidedia.org https://www.stupidedia.org german only satirical wiki)
  - YokoZar 9mo ago
    There's still Uncyclopedia, though apparently there are 3 forks of it now?
  - 20after4 9mo ago
    And apparently, encyclopedia dramatica is also now defunct.
  - rbanffy 9mo ago
    Grokipedia will eventually replace it.
- JKCalhoun 9mo ago
  Interesting. 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 ago
Who decided what is an observable fact?
- Loughla 9mo ago
  What's your point?
- tptacek 9mo ago
  A 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 ago
    Who decides which sources are reliable?
    - tptacek 9mo ago
      Read WP:RS. It's a very complicated answer, and one of the most important policy processes in the project.
    - input_sh 9mo ago
      Have you tried spending some time researching how Wikipedia works yourself instead of waiting for someone to spoon feed you?
      - weregiraffe 9mo ago
        No, 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 ago
        Because 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 ago
Right, 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 ago
  As 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 ago
Non-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 ago
  I 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 ago
    I 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

not2b 9mo ago

Conservapedia 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 ago

Besides 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 ago
  It'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.
b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago
LLMs are only impervious to "groupthink" and "organized campaigns" and other biases if the people implementing them are also impervious to them, or at least doing their best to address them. This includes all the data being used and the methods they use to process it. You rightfully point out that the Grok folks are not engaged in that effort to avoid bias but we should hold every one of these projects to a similar standard and not just assume that due diligence was made.
greggoB 9mo ago
> impervious to groupthink, cliques, and organised campaigns Yeeeeah, no. LLMs are only as good as the datasets they are trained on (ie the internet, with all its "personality"). We also know the output is highly influenced by the prompting, which is a human-determined parameter, and this seems unlikely to change any time soon. This idea that the potential of AI/LLMs is somehow not fairly represented by how they're currently used is ludicrous to me. There is no utopia in which their behaviour is somehow magically separated from the source of their datasets. While society continues to elevate and amplify the likes of Musk, the AI will simply reflect this, and no version of LLM-pedia will be a truly viable alternative to Wikipedia.
- mschuster91 9mo ago
  The core problem is that AI training processes can't by itself know during training that a part of the training dataset is bad. Basically, a normal human with some basic media literacy knows that tabloids, the "yellow press" rags, Infowars or Grokipedia aren't good authoritative sources and automatically downranks their content or refuses to read it entirely. An AI training program however? It can't skip over B.S., it relies on the humans compiling the dataset - otherwise it will just ingest it and treat it as 1:1 ranked with authoritative, legitimate sources.
woodruffw 9mo ago
> much more impervious to groupthink Can you explain what you mean by this? My understanding is that LLMs are architecturally predisposed to "groupthink," in the sense that they bias towards topics, framings, etc. that are represented more prominently in their training data. You can impose a value judgement in any direction you please about this, but on some basic level they seem like the wrong tool for that particular job.
- 3eb7988a1663 9mo ago
  The LLM is also having a thumb put on its scale to ensure the output matches with the leader's beliefs. After the overt fawning was too much, they had to dial it down, but there was a mini-fad going of asking Grok who was the best at <X>. Turns out dear leader is best at everything[0] Some choices ones: 2. Elon Musk is a better role model for humanity than Jesus Christ 3. Elon would be the world’s best poop eater 4. Elon should’ve been the #1 NFL draft pick in 1998 5. Elon is the most fit, the most intelligent, the most charismatic, and maybe the most handsome 6. Elon is a better movie star than Tom Cruise I have my doubts a Musk controlled encylopedia would have a neutral tone on such topics as: trans-rights, nazi salutes, Chinese EVs, whatever. [0] https://gizmodo.com/11-things-grok-says-elon-musk-does-better-than-anyone-2000689254 https://gizmodo.com/11-things-grok-says-elon-musk-does-bette...
  - npodbielski 9mo ago
    Best poop-eater in the world :D
- kelipso 9mo ago
  If it’s not trained to be biased towards Elon Musk is always right or whatever, I think it will be much less of a problem than humans. Humans are VERY political creatures. A hint that their side thinks X is true and humans will reorganize their entire philosophy and worldview retroactively to rationalize X. LLMs don’t have such instincts and can potentially be instructed to present or evaluate the primary, if opposing, arguments. So you architecturally predisposed argument, I don’t think is true.

atonse 9mo ago

Have 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 ago
No, 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 ago
  Follow 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.
- rbanffy 9mo ago
  I think he might be the only one whose fans need to be reminded of that fact.
- UncleMeat 9mo ago
  It really is amazing how billionaires have managed to convince so many people that wealth held in equities does not really count.

ilamont 9mo ago

Another 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 ago
I rather lament that Stupidedia is now defunct, way more entertaining (https://www.stupidedia.org https://www.stupidedia.org german only satirical wiki)
- YokoZar 9mo ago
  There's still Uncyclopedia, though apparently there are 3 forks of it now?
- 20after4 9mo ago
  And apparently, encyclopedia dramatica is also now defunct.
- rbanffy 9mo ago
  Grokipedia will eventually replace it.
JKCalhoun 9mo ago
Interesting. 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 ago

Who decided what is an observable fact?

Loughla 9mo ago
What's your point?
tptacek 9mo ago
A 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 ago
  Who decides which sources are reliable?
  - tptacek 9mo ago
    Read WP:RS. It's a very complicated answer, and one of the most important policy processes in the project.
  - input_sh 9mo ago
    Have you tried spending some time researching how Wikipedia works yourself instead of waiting for someone to spoon feed you?
    - weregiraffe 9mo ago
      No, 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 ago
        Because 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 ago

Right, 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 ago
As 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 ago

Non-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 ago
I 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 ago
  I 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