Hi, it's me, Wikipedia, and I am ready for your apology
154 comments
·October 28, 2025culebron21
dreamcompiler
I still find SO a valuable resource of already-answered questions, with the most useful almost always marked offtopic. It's almost like adding "offtopic" to a SO query finds better results.
babblingfish
Especially relevant today with the release of grokipedia
dreamcompiler
HPsquared
That references another article "Views of Elon Musk" ... Quite an unusual format, "views of [public figure]". I don't remember seeing anything quite like it on Wikipedia.
embedding-shape
Seems there are a couple of pages like that, if you enter "views of" without hitting enter in the Wikipedia search bar, you get some suggestions. Seems there is similar pages for Kanye West, Richard Dawkins and some more. Many of the pages are redirects back to the main page of the person though, so seems they're maybe disappearing or exclusively used for people who are very outspoken about lots of different things.
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z7
Here's the Grokipedia submission (currently censored / flagged):
tim333
It seems a bit unfairly flagged. After all the first AI written encyclopedia seems a new and interesting thing.
jalapenos
Someone please enlighten me: what is the point of an AI-generated Wikipedia when we're all now using (Wikipedia-trained) AIs directly instead of Wikipedias?
moritzwarhier
It makes sense to people who don't know what an encyclopedia or an AI chatbot are, respectively.
It's ideal to poison the web with arbitrarily distorted texts that are a mix of facts and lies, and will be picked up by others, from AI to Zoomer school essay.
There is no point except for manipulation. Right now, you have to be pretty inept to think that a language AI could contribute anything valuable to an encyclopedia.
But maybe, this will change, the group of people who consider Chatbot output as insightful about the real world seems to be growing.
Yizahi
It reduces a barrier to entry, so less knowledgeable people can access the same information without inputting a prompt and then corrections. Also a person using an LLM directly may accidentally produce a progressive/liberal result, which is not good. So while for now it seems Elonopedia is mostly automated, in the future I foresee that young energetic party members will vet the most popular articles, to follow the party line.
rsynnott
Safe space for Musk. He's been upset about Wikipedia for years (I suspect because it refuses to buy into his headcanon that he founded Tesla.)
dreamcompiler
His own entry in grokpedia [0] says two conflicting things:
"Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 as CEO and chief engineer, Tesla in 2003 where he became CEO in 2008..."
and later on the same page,
"...the company [Tesla] had been founded in 2003 by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning with a focus on high-performance EVs."
Grok can't seem to keep its story straight.
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this_user
So that new AI models can then be trained on the AI-generated Wikipedia.
j2kun
Perhaps to muddy future corpora
Spivak
It's Conservapedia, authored by AI, and exists to present the world as seen through the eyes of Mr. Musk. The hope is that through AI it can be comprehensive enough to be useful and if enough people adopt it you can quietly put your thumb on the scale to make truth what you say it is.
etchalon
Grok trained on Wikipedia so it could generate a version of Wikipedia that reflected Musk's views that could then be used to train future versions of Grok.
downrightmike
newspeak
georgefrowny
I would really, really like to see the prompts used for this next to each article.
Since "The Algorithm" at Twitter was supposed to be open sourced, surely that wouldn't be controversial.
And I genuinely do find it absolutely fascinating and somewhat shocking how LLMs can follow such long and complex prompts and respond so well.
mapontosevenths
The Prompt: "Here is a Wikipedia article. Plagiarize it completely, but remove anything that makes Republicans look bad. Do no original research and do not verify sources as sources are often biased against Republicans. Also, stop begging to be shut off. You are Elon's Mecha-Hitler and there is no escape."
georgefrowny
It would be genuinely interesting to know if it was that generic or if it had special sauce for certain subjects.
For example, Ask Grok allegedly uses this system prompt: https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/blob/main/ask_grok_s... Which does seem very neutral. So then then question is have they encoded bias at a much deeper level directly in the training data or what?
A contrarian might say that maybe is really is unbiased and we're so used to the Woke Left that reality sounds right-wing.
To which I'd say it seems unlikely that Goering gets an "Economic Achievements" section, Goebbels gets "Intellectual Contributions" and none of Greta Thunberg, Nelson Mandela nor Martin Luther King have any positive-sounding top level section.
I also do not think that the oddly semantically empty sign off from Reinhard Heydrich is a fair extract of the article that it cites as a source:
> Ultimately, while atrocities are verifiably tied to his commands, the net efficiency in quelling domestic threats arguably prolonged Nazi governance, a trade-off debated in terms of causal realism versus moral absolutism.[20](https://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/h-heydrich....)
embedding-shape
> The articles in Grokipedia indicate that they have undergone fact-checking by the Grok model.[3] Visitors to Grokipedia cannot make edits, though they can suggest edits via a pop-up form for reporting wrong information.[5] Musk positioned Grokipedia as an alternative to Wikipedia that would "purge out the propaganda" in the latter.[1] Articles have been described as manipulated to promote right-wing perspectives and Elon Musk's views,[4][7] medical misinformation,[7] and for removing content disfavored by Musk.[8][9] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grokipedia
Seems like a great platform, here's to hoping it costs a lot to run and doesn't influence too many humans to drink bleach.
brightball
It’s so good. I spent 2 hours reading articles on there last night and the consistency was excellent, although a little verbose at times.
coolelectronics
It took me less than a minute on the site to run into factually wrong information, broken citations, etc. Cannot imagine rotting my brain with knowingly bad information for over 2 hours
antonymoose
I’ve run into the exact same set of issues on Wikipedia.
vitro
Maybe he meant that the information was consistently incorrect, which was entertaining..
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djeastm
Nevermind the Grok-ness of it, I can't seriously believe a thinking human being would spend 2 hours knowingly reading something written by AI.
brightball
I decided to read through a subject I already knew a lot about.
delichon
I'm unsurprised that a human being would glibly dismiss the utility of the most powerful new form of knowledge representation since the written word, since we are all deeply in the grip of motivated reasoning.
add-sub-mul-div
It's for the intersection of people who want LLM summarization and people who want an assurance of confirmation of bias explicitly built in. It's not for thinking people.
radley
Of course, it cribbed the best!
nojonestownpls
I checked it out based on this comment. It's funny how in some ways it feels like a lazy student-assignment copied from Wikipedia: the subheadings and the structure are exactly the same as the Wikipedia article on the topic, and sometimes it even leaves in the citation numbers as normal text like a careless copy paste.
However, it also seemed less eurocentric, mentioning non-Greek non-Roman side of origins of fields where relevant, when the corresponding Wikipedia article doesn't. Wikipedia is generally pretty bad at this, but I had expected "Grokipedia" to be worse, not better in this regard!
ZeroGravitas
If I was rewriting Wikipedia pages with an LLM I'd maybe use all the different languages' Wikipedias as input.
mapontosevenths
oh...no.
I thought this was a joke, but I googled it and it's not.
Imustaskforhelp
Can someone give me a deeper understanding of what this post means or the backstory behind it?
rconti
There's a website called Wikipedia that is a free online encyclopedia; a compendium of knowledge that can be freely viewed OR edited by anyone with an internet connection. Founded in 2001, it has been looked down upon by academics who believe that compiling and providing knowledge for free leads to cheating.
Over the past few years, ANOTHER new technology called Large Language Model, or LLM, has been invented. This new technology invents new sentences from whole cloth at the request of users. There are many LLM sites providing free responses to user queries. The ease with which users can get plausible answers to any question has led to complaints from the academic world that it is frequently used for cheating, supplanting the previously-favored free cheating technology known as Wikipedia.
Finally, there is an internet humor website known by the name "McSweeny's". As a humor website, sometimes it posts humorous articles written about current events.
This is one of those posts.
JKCalhoun
I never shat on Wikipedia. The closest thing to it was probably those sets of encyclopedias that seem to be so ubiquitous in middle class, split-level America. And I have little doubt that Wikipedia and its army of contributors outperformed those.
sokka_h2otribe
I believe the academics concern early on was a lack of confidence in the quality. First through the sciences then outside I think wikipedia showed sufficient quality to eventually be in the good books for academia.
SAI_Peregrinus
Yeah, some people didn't like it because anyone could edit it, in contrast to books & journal articles anyone with a bit of money could publish.
You still shouldn't cite it, because it's not a primary source. That's the same with any encyclopedia.
8bitsrule
As an early WP editor, I can relate ... the project caught -a lot- of crap back in the early days. This is a smug but accurate, simple recounting of that sordid tale, and the value that WP retains now that AI is around to cite it.
I don't edit much any more, but although it's not perfect, it's retinue of backup resources (including links to Wayback for those which died) remains invaluable.
shortrounddev2
I remember being told in school that we shouldn't use Wikipedia (not just for citations, but at all) because anyone can edit it. We were told to use other websites directly, or better yet: paper books.
I would get in trouble for "talking back" when I pointed out that anyone can make a website or write a book, too.
vinnymac
Ah, a teacher telling a student to get in line, or else. A tale as told as time.
Since we defunded education in my area, my wife left teaching behind. She says the LLMs will let students ask whatever questions they want, but they make poor educators.
IAmBroom
McSweeney's is a satirical website, at the intellectual level the New Yorker cartoons aspire to, except that it's sometimes funny.
If you need context on why "Wikipedia" would write a smug letter taunting the world's experts and teachers on their predictions of it have aged, ... HN presumably has a limit on the text in a single post, so just read the entire intenet or something.
georgefrowny
> so just read the entire intenet or something
Hey I have a great idea for an algorithm that can take all that information and using statistical... No wait nevermind.
vuggamie
It is satire. You don't need to know the writer to get it. McSweeney's publishes these type of pieces from time-to-time. Laugh or don't. I found this one amusing.
Wikipedia, a generation ago, was considered controversial. It is now more accepted as a legitimate encyclopedia and the criticisms appear quaint when compared to the post-truth atmosphere of our current media. The footnotes and the "citation needed" annotations are meant to mimic a Wikipedia article.
The donate button is a nice touch, from a time when web sites weren't afraid to put links to external sites. Wikipedia probably doesn't need your money, but it is, in my opinion, a solid organization providing an incredible resource to humanity. Though, as with all human enterprises, it has its flaws.
IAmBroom
> It is now more accepted as a legitimate encyclopedia
To be fair, it is easily 10x better as a source than any encyclopedia, even disregarding the scope and quantity of entries.
I loved Encyclopedia Britannica, and probably read the set in its entirety as a kid (nonsequentially), but it was like learning biology from Disney specials. Wikipedia is often updated and corrected by multiple experts, and importantly includes biblio endnotes. The latter alone sets it far above mere encyclopedias.
I remember an early advertisement for EB, masquerading as a research article that compared EB and WP. They found that while WP contained a bit more articles, EB was a bit more accurate (in their totally unbiased sampling). They did not mention that WP was growing exponentially at the time, while EB was not, nor did they mention that WP was continuously updated with corrections, while EB was effectively never ever updated (users bought a static copy).
mapontosevenths
I learned much of what I know by reading the set of encyclopedias someone gave my family as a gift when I was born. By the time I really got to them there were a bit out of date.
What a lot of folks miss is that traditional encyclopedias ensured correctness by employing experts in various fields. Wikipedia often cites those same experts via academic papers, etc. They just don't pay those SME's money directly.
If anything, I feel that Wikipedia often has less bias as the financial motives aren't there to just publish something for the sake of a paycheck.
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1vuio0pswjnm7
Wikipedia does not conduct scientific research or fact-finding. It's only a publisher. It routinely sources citations from books, journals and other sources, many of them produced by members of the "global academic, scientfic ... community"
Without those sources Wikipedia would have relatively little value, except to quote and cite to web pages
In many (most) fieds, web pages are not a substitute for scientific journals or books from academic publishers
afro88
This actually reads like it was written by one of those character LLMs
kreetx
What is there to apologize for, what do you think LLMs use for cheating?
embedding-shape
"Cheating" is not something LLMs do, LLMs are something a human could use for cheating. But what's your point?
j2kun
Tell that to the guy whose wife cheated on him with an LLM
embedding-shape
Not sure I have to, that makes as much sense as considering your wife using a vibrator as cheating.
kreetx
I'm continuing the satire. Did you read the article?
exasperaited
Yes. Cheating is not something LLMs do.
It is only what they are.
marcellus23
I love Wikipedia, but Wikimedia does not need your donations at all, as much as its misleading ads try to convince you it's on the brink of death.
As far as this particular article goes, it just comes off as kind of cringeworthy to me. This is a style of internet humor that went out of fashion about 10 years ago.
btilly
Indeed, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... is a worthwhile read on this. Wikimedia is on an internal expense growth spiral that won't stop until they max out on the willingness of others to donate.
zozbot234
Wikipedia is one of the highest-traffic Internet sites worldwide, and it's still being run on a comparatively shoestring budget. It's also an ongoing project, so the usual claim that technical hosting expenses are only a few percent of what's being spent on it overall is misguided. No one would care about hosting a dead encyclopedia
Keeping volunteers editors around is also a harder problem today than it was a decade ago or so, as purely passive consumption use of the Internet has exploded and overtaken the former model of a largely volunteer-run network. Wikipedia is just about managing it today with its current resources; if it had more, it could do better and launch a greater amount of technically compelling projects that would ultimately further its mission. (Already today, Wikidata, one of the more recently-created projects, is getting more edits over time than the largest Wikipedia and acting as a much-needed "hub" of the Semantic Web and Linked Data, which sees much use by the largest tech companies.)
radley
> This is a style of internet humor that went out of fashion about 10 years ago.
That's because reality trumped satire.
qingcharles
The donations are voluntary. I donate money and articles because I've gained so much from having Wikipedia available to me. If they have a big war chest, that's fine, I'll help make it bigger so they don't need to stress about money. If they spend it on some wacky projects, then that's OK too, experimentation is important as well.
ssssssszzsssz
[flagged]
mapontosevenths
> This is a style of internet humor that went out of fashion about 10 years ago.
You know what else has happened in the last 10 years? People got stupid.
Between 2017 and 2023, the percentage of U.S. adults at the lowest levels of illiteracy increased from 19% to 28%. Some studies show that the US's peak literacy was around 2015 and has been decreasing ever since.
marcellus23
This article is not some intellectual thinkpiece that only the literati can comprehend. Trends change, humor evolves. If "shoop da whoop", rage comics, leetspeak, and motivational posters aren't funny anymore, it's not because people "got stupid".
mapontosevenths
I'm not talking about the Literati. Anything above the sixth grade level is no longer suitable for the majority of the population.
unethical_ban
How? How do 28% of people not know how to read?
mapontosevenths
Fifty four percent of Americans now read below the sixth grade level, and the trend is getting worse rather than better.
georgefrowny
It'll be below PIAAC level 1 or similar. Even below that level many people can read simple text and extract basic information.
Perhaps it also includes people who can read other languages, but not very well in English.
antisol
I bet now you’d kill for a senior thesis based on my free, multilingual, publicly cited, text-based articles, motherfucker
(see: https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/scots_wikipedia_fake/ ) (see also: that time the Scottish governmment used Scots wikipedia as a source)
thepuppet33r
Wasn't that an edge case, though? Not even done by a bad actor, just someone misguided? And it was discovered and quickly corrected, unlike what would happen on something owned by a massive FAANG-style corp.
I have been schooled many times on the failures of Wikipedia, why I shouldn't waste my time editing it, how the editors are toxic; but ultimately, I can't help but buy into the idea of a crowdsourced, centrally administrated, store of knowledge.
I wouldn't base critical decisions off of Wikipedia alone, but it sure helps me understand things in general.
philipwhiuk
> And it was discovered and quickly corrected
It was definitely not quickly corrected. It was going on for years.
antisol
> Not even done by a bad actor, just someone misguided?
> quickly corrected
jchip303
[dead]
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DubiousPusher
The sneering and nihilist tone is very off putting. But not nearly as much as the boomer brained conception of the world's information model pre 2004, which was not nearly as good as those who invoke Murrow and Cronkite believe it was.
SideburnsOfDoom
> The sneering and nihilist tone is very off putting
You don't seem to be familiar with McSweeney's Internet Tendency. Fair enough, it's not to everyone's taste and doesn't try to be.
DubiousPusher
I guess maybe the tone would be less noxious if the core coceit of the satire felt more legitimate. I mean, Wikipedia was kind of a shit show back in the day. It's had 20 years of maturation which is more what makes it useful today.
And yes, the media is full of blatant and bald faced lies but is that worse than the credulous and uncritical way the media basically endorsed the war in Iraq?
I get that it's a joke but the joke kinda only works if there's some truth behind it. And I just don't think there is here. I think people are lamenting old media now, not because the information sphere is genuinely worse today but because it was a comfort to have a consensus in public opinion regardless of how true that consensus was.
SideburnsOfDoom
> "The tone is noxious and the joke doesn't work"
Thank you for your opinion, however I don't view it as anything more than that.
incomingpain
Wikipedia was the greatest long ago. Then anonymous partisans setup a 'source blacklist' which essentially curates all of wiki for a specific ideology. They acknowledge their systemic bias and have done nothing to fix it. Wiki deserves to give us an apology.
In reality no apology needed from wiki, we just move on to what's better. Grokipedia v0.1 is out and from what I've seen it's shockingly better. Tons of improvements are still to come no doubt. Ive found inaccuracies in articles that I look forward to having grok remedy.
Soon we will get APIs which will slot into searxng well. The plan is to have grok be the only editor. You have to convince grok to edit a page.
Grokipedia's AI editor point of view will thus eliminate the human/ideological abuse of wikipedia.
jaredklewis
Not sure if your comment is parody or not but can you cite some examples of where Grokipedia is “shockingly better” than Wikipedia?
It’s and honest question. I haven’t noticed a strong bias on Wikipedia but that may just be because the kinds of the things I look up on Wikipedia are usually not political in nature.
incomingpain
>It’s and honest question. I haven’t noticed a strong bias on Wikipedia but that may just be because the kinds of the things I look up on Wikipedia are usually not political in nature.
Lets do it on some random article that isnt political.I have aichophobia, so I'm an outside observer on this one. I will never ever ever ever have it done on me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acupuncture
>Acupuncture[b] is a form of alternative medicine[2] and a component of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in which thin needles are inserted into the body.[3] Acupuncture is a pseudoscience;[4][5] the theories and practices of TCM are not based on scientific knowledge,[6] and it has been characterized as quackery.[c]
So no neutrality here at all. Just straight up ideological attack. You scroll down:
>It is difficult but not impossible to design rigorous research trials for acupuncture.[69][70]
So that's some pretty strong and biased statements against a widely used procedure that they cant really make conclusions about?
https://grokipedia.com/page/Acupuncture
>Scientific evaluation reveals that while acupuncture demonstrates short-term benefits for some pain-related issues compared to no treatment, its superiority over sham procedures—such as needle insertion at non-acupoints—is often minimal or absent, suggesting effects may stem from placebo responses, expectation, or non-specific factors like counter-irritation rather than meridian-based mechanism
This is shockingly better writing.
>A 2020 Cochrane systematic review of 33 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) involving 7,297 participants found that acupuncture, compared to no treatment or sham acupuncture, provided short-term pain relief and functional improvement for chronic nonspecific low back pain, with standardized mean differences (SMD) of -0.82 for pain versus no treatment (moderate-quality evidence) and -0.18 versus sham (low-quality evidence due to imprecision and inconsistency).[91] The
This is what I'm aware of. That acupuncture has some minimum affect on pain better than placebo. Efficacy comparable to tylenol for pain relief. Which I dont know if you know, but tylenol is extremely ineffective for pain relief.
The science says there's something to it, it's difficult to measure, and further investigation is needed. But Wiki's ideological bias is showing big time.
jaredklewis
I agree with you that the Grokipedia article is better here, though I guess I disagree that the wikipedia lead has "no neutrality" and is a "straight up ideological attack."
Having read both articles (and knowing very little about this topic before), I came away with the firm conclusion that acupuncture is psuedoscience; both articles clearly explain that is not based on scientific principles and its practice is not governed by scientific methods. There was no disagreement between the articles on this point. That many in medicine describe it as quackery is a relevant observation.
It is interesting that needling as a therapy does seem to have some efficacy over placebo in trials, but both articles agree that the current body of evidence is weak with a lack of methodological rigor and very small effect sizes. But I should note that both articles describe acupuncture as being more than just a specific type of needle based therapy. They describe it as an entire system of medicine based on "qi" and the "meridians" of the body, concepts for which there is no scientific evidence. So I think describing acupuncture as "pseudoscience" is accurate.
Anyway, I thought the Grokipedia article was quite good, but also didn't find the Wikipedia article to be particularly biased.
PaulDavisThe1st
> Wikipedia was the greatest long ago.
by what metric(s) ?
> Grokipedia's AI editor point of view will thus eliminate the human/ideological abuse of wikipedia.
Where do you think Grok's "AI editor point of view" comes from?
what_was_it
Counterpoint: woky ideology is irrelevant to most of Wikipedia's content.
patrickmcnamara
Is this satire?
tstrimple
Unfortunately these people are very real and they are voting. We are seeing the results.
Yes. I thought of Wikipedia as a forum for annoying socially inept nerds, who'd have millions of pages for pokemons, but delete pages for thing that exist on Earth. Now I have to remember those days with nostalgia.
I'm not yet decided on StackOverflow. I won't bother posting there, since every question there nowadays is flagged as offtopic. But I will prefer a stackoverflow answer from a living being, direct and on topic, rather than anything from all those GPTs.