Elon Musk launched Grokipedia as an alternative to "woke" Wikipedia. The billionaire so dislikes Wikipedia that he recently promised to make sure his own chatbot, Grok, doesn't link to it in giving answers to queries. But it surprises no-one to find that Grokipedia itself is significantly derived from Wikipedia, with hot-button articles rewritten to fit Musk's right-wing preferences. Jay Peters:
At the bottom of the page for the MacBook Air, for example, you can see this message: "The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License." In some cases, the cribbing goes farther than a rewrite: I've also seen that message on pages for the PlayStation 5 and the Lincoln Mark VIII, and both of those pages are almost identical — word-for-word, line-for-line — to their Wikipedia counterparts.
"Even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist," Lauren Dickinson, a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia tells The Verge. You can read Dickinson's full statement in full at the end of this article.
A reasonable assumption would be that Grokipedia is simply Wikipedia edited by Grok, and Grok is leaving a lot of it in there. There's nothing wrong with re-using Wikipedia content—it's published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License, after all—but you'd think conservatives smart enough to care about online encyclopedias would realize they're looking at slopaganda generated to reinforce their feelings, not inform them.
Here's the rest of Dickinson's statement:
We're still in the process of understanding how Grokipedia works.
Since 2001, Wikipedia has been the backbone of knowledge on the internet. Hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, it remains the only top website in the world run by a nonprofit. Unlike newer projects, Wikipedia's strengths are clear: it has transparent policies, rigorous volunteer oversight, and a strong culture of continuous improvement. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, written to inform billions of readers without promoting a particular point of view.
Wikipedia's knowledge is – and always will be – human. Through open collaboration and consensus, people from all backgrounds build a neutral, living record of human understanding – one that reflects our diversity and collective curiosity. This human-created knowledge is what AI companies rely on to generate content; even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist.
Wikipedia's nonprofit independence — with no ads and no data-selling — also sets it apart from for-profit alternatives. All of these strengths have kept Wikipedia a top trusted resource for more than two decades.
Many experiments to create alternative versions of Wikipedia have happened before; it doesn't interfere with our work or mission. As we approach Wikipedia's 25th anniversary, Wikipedia will continue focusing on providing free, trustworthy knowledge built by its dedicated volunteer community. For more information about how Wikipedia works, visit our website and new blog series.
Conservapedia still appears in search results, but was down when I checked this morning.
