The reason no one cares about Grokipedia

8 hours agoLast Updated: October 31, 2025

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The reason no one cares about Grokipedia

By Rob Walker | Published: 2025-10-31 09:45:00 | Source: Fast Company – co-design

Elon Musk is the kind of businessman who likes to have an enemy as a motivator – traditional automakers, the mainstream media, and the “deep state.” His latest project, which he launched on October 27, is no exception: Grokipedia Grokipedia is positioned as an alternative to Wikipedia, which Musk claims is biased and “woke.” It’s a product of Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, and the inner workings of Grockipedia are unclear, but the idea is that it’s just an AI-generated compendium of what Musk calls “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

One of the main factors that makes Grokipedia different from other Mask competitors is that Wikipedia is very popular, well-liked, and widely trusted. There is no significant dissatisfaction or opposition to Wikipedia resulting in increased demand for an alternative. On the contrary, in the world of mass market information, it is one of the strongest brands out there.

(Screenshot: Grokipedia)

This was not always the case. Since its founding in 2001, Wikipedia’s crowdsourced alternative to the traditional encyclopedia was treated with a degree of skepticism throughout its first decade or so, as consumers weighed the merits of formal expertise against what came to be called crowdsourcing. But by the mid-2000s, its confidence had grown even as established information brands were struggling

For example, in A YouGov UK poll64% of respondents said they trust Wikipedia “a great deal” or “a fair amount,” ahead of the likes of the BBC and The times; Five countries reconnaissance In 2019, trust in Wikipedia was 78% or better. For technology optimists, Wikipedia has been described as a harbinger of a utopian Internet future for collective action. In a world where top-down information “gatekeepers” are no longer trusted, Wikipedia has acquired a Web-age version of Gravitas, a crowd-sourced version of Walter Cronkite.

This vision has been replaced by the divisive facts of social media, but Wikipedia has survived, remaining one of the most popular sites in the world, recognized as one of humanity’s great collective efforts, built on a robust internal discussion structure of thousands upon thousands of individual contributors around the world.

Before launching Grokipedia, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was involved Talk to New York Times About his new book, which “attempts to apply the lessons of Wikipedia’s success to our increasingly partisan world in which trust is depleted.” On the subject of Musk, Wells shrugged: “We’ll be here in a hundred years, and he won’t.” As long as we remain on Wikipedia, people will continue to love us

The fact is that the rise of artificial intelligence in general He could Pose a threat to Wikipedia: AI summaries in Google searches are already said to be cutting off Wikipedia traffic, and this could impact the pool of donations and volunteers that keep the effort going.

But for Grokipedia itself, the site got off to a rocky start. Wired Found It “pushes far-right talking points” on gender and other issues. Atlantic He noted that the entry for Musk himself apparently neglected to mention his pro-segregationist grandfather, but noted that he had lost 20 pounds. some Found that Grokipedia has, in several cases, paraphrased its competitor’s entries, while others saw it as a bland copycat, the exact opposite of Wikipedia Human touch And originality.

(Musk’s xAI hasn’t been transparent about exactly how entries are selected or grouped, however Reports indicate They appear to have been generated by some iteration of Grok’s own chatbot, and it appears to be running on Wikipedia entries in at least some cases.)

But even Cronkite had his skeptics, and so does Wikipedia, of course. Musk’s complaints about the online encyclopedia (specifically his own entries) are in line with A Broader conservative line of attack. These critics insist that Wikipedia suffers from “systemic ideological biases – particularly a leftward bias in coverage of political figures and topics.” (Or at least that’s what it is Grokipedia says.)

In the war for credibility, Wikipedia has become a formidable adversary, perhaps especially for Musk. “For a lot of people, their level of trust in Elon Musk is very low because he says wild things all the time,” Wells said. The times. “When he attacks us, people donate more money.”

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(tags for translation) AI

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