Turns Out, Wikipedia Isn't That 'Woke' as Grokipedia Rips Off Most of Its Pages
27 comments
·October 29, 2025Herring
This has been tried many times, eg conservapedia comes to mind. It rarely works. You generally have to take over a successful brand then drive it to the ground. You can't just start off with a shitty brand when there are alternatives.
array_key_first
Turns out having your ideology be fundamentally post-truth and anti-education means you don't make a very good knowledge base!
Whodda thunk?
Herring
They don’t care about quality. It’s like a hedge fund buying a struggling company and watering down the product. They hope to make a profit before loyal customers wise up. Pump and dump, Wall Street does it all the time.
America was struggling because of healthcare, college costs, rising rents, mortgages, overall inequality, China rising etc. Trump/Musk/etc saw their chance.
normalaccess
I think all Grokipedia is doing is exposing Grok's internal LLM "facts" into a preloaded and formatted site. Modern LLMs already have all of wikipedia internalized and can act as a wiki so why not make it an explicit feature?
Once that is in place you can make Grok eat it's own tail by using Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Grok with Grokaiedia (that is now crowdsourced for updates).
This may offset the side effects of model collapse from AIs consuming their own synthetic outputs with enough humanity sprinkled into the mix.
Herring
Yes and also Hitler is quite interesting outside the Nazi bit. I don't know why everyone obsesses over that.
normalaccess
I have no clue what you are referring too. The word Nazi gets used so much and for so many things that it has lost all meaning to me due to semantic satiation. You'll have to me more specific.
Semantic satiation -- a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener,[1] who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds. Extended inspection or analysis (staring at the word or phrase for a long time) in place of repetition also produces the same effect.sharperguy
While I recognize the dangers of splintering sources of truth into various fragmented opinion spaces, if you were to fork wikipedia it would make sense to simply clone all the information there and only change the parts that you consider false. Ideally, you make a reasonable case for why particular sources approved by wikipedia are invalid and why some sources considered invalid by wikipedia are indeed valid, and systematically remove all claims covered by invalid sources while verifying further modifications against the updated set of sources.
mikkupikku
I expected they would. I was curious if they'd copy the errors too, so I checked my go-to example of errors on wikipedia lasting for years.
Wikipedia's version:
> Brilliant Pebbles was a non-nuclear system of satellite-based interceptors designed to use high-velocity, watermelon-sized, teardrop-shaped tungsten projectiles as kinetic warheads.[79][80] It was designed to operate in conjunction with the Brilliant Eyes sensor system. The project was conceived in November 1986 by Lowell Wood at LLNL.[81] Detailed studies were undertaken by several advisory boards, including the Defense Science Board and JASON, in 1989.
Grok's version:
> The Brilliant Pebbles program, initiated in 1990 by the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO), represented a shift toward distributed, cost-effective constellations of micro-satellites, each approximately 45-100 kg and equipped with autonomous processors for onboard target discrimination and interception.
Both contain errors, although different errors.
xigoi
I find it curious that the Wikipedia article on George Floyd specifically mentions in the first sentence that the police officer was white. Grokipedia’s description seems more neutral.
timdaub
Hey, if anyone thinks this article was wrongfully flagged, please contact me via my email in the description and lets talk. I'm building a startup related to moderation on social media so I'd like to user interview you
burnte
Musk said it was full of partisans a bias, and the reality is the reverse. Too many confuse "you're biased" with "I don't like that."
JohnTHaller
Reality has a well-established liberal bias
bad_username
Bias is deviation from a baseline. What is the baseline here?
This sentence is meaningless.
CupricTea
I have only seen such statements made in bad faith to mean "my subjective political opinions are objective reality". It's quackery. I see people on the conservative end say it too.
tzs
It is not meaningless.
The meaning is that when things that should not be political questions because they have objectively correct answers do become political in recent years most of the time it is liberals whose positions match the objectively correct answer.
Note that this doesn't necessarily mean that liberals are more often correct than conservatives on how to deal with those things--that often is something that does not have an objectively correct answer and so is something that people can reasonably disagree over and so can reasonably become political.
For example consider climate change. How to address climate change is something that does not have an objectively correct answer and so you can't say that any given political group is right or wrong on that.
However, the question of whether or not the increases in the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere since pre-industrial time are most due to human activity is a question that does have an objectively correct answer. The C in CO2 comes in several different isotopes, and by looking at changes in the ratios between those isotopes in the C in atmospheric CO2 it is possible to determine that most of the increase has come from burning fossil fuels.
If a political group is taking the position that the rise in CO2 is not due to human activity they are objectively wrong, and the phrase that reality has a well known bias against that group is a way of highlighting that.
palmotea
> Reality has a well-established liberal bias
Only if you're a liberal who confuses the information you receive, usually filtered through other liberals, for reality (which many do).
tl;dr: if you think reality agrees with your politics, you're actually just in a bubble.
delaminator
except for the first 300,000 years
array_key_first
If you actually look back towards all of human history and analyze the conservative and progressive positions at the time, you will find yourself almost exclusively siding with progressives.
Conservatism, as an ideology, is built on the belief that conservatism has always been wrong, until about 20 years ago to just now. That's what they're trying to conserve: always the very, very near past.
AnimalMuppet
I don't think that's accurate. Many US conservatives think that the US Constitution and the Federalist Papers have ideas that are right and are worth conserving. Many would think that the ideas of limited government and government by the people are worth preserving.
SilverElfin
Ripping off most of its pages doesn't mean it isn't woke. You can copy content on most of the noncontroversial topics that don't have political or ideological angles, while still offering different content on the topics that do.
lenerdenator
We need more Jimmys and fewer Elons.
bad_username
We need more Larry Sangers.
kulahan
I'm 99.999% sure this is already the case. I can't think of even one other Elon. I guess some billionaires come close, but he's a pretty unique dude, for better or for worse.
happytoexplain
The parent's condition was relative, so it can't be statically true. Even if the number of Elons was zero, that would only make it unsatisfiable - not true.
lenerdenator
> I can't think of even one other Elon. I guess some billionaires come close, but he's a pretty unique dude, for better or for worse.
Nah there are already too many people who take pride in taking public resources and locking them behind a paywall/data mining platform because they seem to have a personality that drives them to get more money even though they already have more than they could conceivably spend in many, many human lifetimes.
Elon just does it while being a terminally online edgelord. If he were just a terminally online edgelord without the money, I wouldn't care. The average western high school is full of people like that.
That's what I meant by "we need fewer Elons".
It's an open secret that encyclopedia authors, dictionary authors, and map makers all plagiarize one another, to the point where cartographers have added fictitious "trap streets" to catch others from plagiarizing their maps, and lexicographers have added Mountweazels.
It doesn't surprise me nor does it upset me that Grokipedia would include Wikipedia as an input source, nor do I feel like they're hypocritical for doing so given their stated goals. If you think a source has a bias problem, it makes sense to use that source for reference while applying your own bias checking to it.