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xAI’s Grokipedia, its Wikipedia-like online encyclopedia, is now live. The similarities go deeper than expected.
Grokipedia’s design is pretty basic right now; like Wikipedia, the homepage is mostly just a big search bar, and entries resemble very basic Wikipedia entries, with headings, subheadings, and citations. I haven’t seen any photos on the site yet. Wikipedia lets users edit pages, but it doesn’t appear that users can currently do that on Grokipedia; a big edit button at the top only appeared on a few pages for me, and when I clicked the button, it only showed edits that had already been completed without specifying who is actually suggested or made the changes, and I wasn’t able to suggest changes of my own.
Entries also claim that Grok has fact-checked them — a controversial idea, given how large language models tend to make up false “facts” — and how long ago the “fact check” happened.
However, despite Elon Musk promising that Grokipedia would be a “massive improvement” over Wikipedia, some articles appear to be cribbing information from Wikipedia. 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.
Image: Wikipedia (left), Grokipedia (right)
Image: Wikipedia (left), Grokipedia (right)
It’s not the first time xAI’s AI has been caught pointing to Wikipedia; last month, in response to an X user pointing out that Grok cites Wikipedia pages, Musk said that “we should have this fixed by end of year.”
Not all Grokipedia articles are based directly on Wikipedia ones, and some will be controversial.
While both sites have articles on climate change, for example, Wikipedia’s page points out that “There is a nearly unanimous scientific consensus that the climate is warming and that this is caused by human activities. No scientific body of national or international standing disagrees with this view.”
In Grokipedia’s entry, meanwhile, the word “unanimous” only appears in one paragraph: “Critics contend that claims of near-unanimous scientific consensus on anthropogenic causes dominating recent climate change overstate agreement due to selective categorization in literature reviews.” It suggests that the media and advocacy organizations like Greenpeace are “contributing to heightened public alarm,” and are part of “coordinated efforts to frame the issue as an existential imperative, influencing public discourse and policy without always grounding in proportionate empirical evidence.”
According to a ticker at the bottom of the homepage, Grokipedia has over 885,000 articles; Wikipedia currently maintains around 7 million English pages. However, this is an early version of Grokipedia — it has a v0.1 version number on the homepage.
Here is Dickinson’s full 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.
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English (US) ·