An Unbothered Jimmy Wales Calls Grokipedia a 'Cartoon Imitation' of Wikipedia

The concept of Grokipedia reminds me of the old (now defunct? won't load) "Conservapedia" project that basically only had detailed pages for topics where observable fact was incompatible with political ideology--so for these topics, the site showed the Alternative Facts that conformed to that ideology. If you looked up something non-political like "Traffic Light" or "Birthday Cake" there would be no article at all. Because being a complete repository of information was not an actual goal of the site.

I've found in at least two instances Grokipedia had something Wikipedia didn't.

One was looking up who "Ray Peat" was after encountering it on Twitter. Grok was obviously a bit more fawning over this right-aligned figure but Wikipedia had long since entirely deleted its page, so I didn't have much of a choice. Seems bizarre to just not have a page on a subject discussed every day on Twitter.

The other is far more impactful IMO. Every politician's or political figure's page on Wikipedia just goes "Bob is a politician. In 2025 <list of every controversial thing imaginable>". You have no idea what he's about and what he represents; you don't even have any idea if anyone cared, since all this was added at that moment in 2025 and not updated since. Grokipedia does not do this at all. If you want to know about someone's actual political career, Grokipedia weights recent controversies equal to past controversies and isolates it all to a section specifically for controversies. (The same also happens in reverse for hagiographies; Grok will often be much more critical of e.g. minor activists.)

Side note, but Kagi has a great feature where you can remove worthless sites like Grokipedia from your results so that you can safely forget they exist. Recommended.

Some other articles are fine, but its horribly unreliable.

I tried subject of the first wikipedia article in my browser history search. It was Malleus Maleficarum. The first part of the text was correct and a decent summary, the rest suddenly switched to an article about an album called Hammer of the Witch by a band called Ringworm.

Images are a weak point. No image of the Sri Lankan flag, a weird one of the flag of the UK, which the caption says "The national flag of the United Kingdom, known as the Union Jack" - bad! Wikipedia has a better image, and an entire article on the Union Flag.

The article on marriage vows (another one I have looked at recently) seems more extensive than WIkipedia's but only because it conflates vows with wedding ceremonies. Wikipedia's interpretation is narrow but covers the subject matter much better. Grokepedia would not have told me what I wanted to know, while Wikipedia does.

I do not see the point. If I want AI written answers a chat interface is better. That might be a real threat to Wikipedia, but an AI written equivalent is not.

Grokipedia is a tool for converting money into improvements in AI (by iterating on it). Any outward resemblance to an encyclopedia is incidental, despite apparently being the intended purpose.

Grokipedia is currently:

1) Less accurate than Wikipedia.

2) More verbose, harder to read, and less well organized than Wikipedia.

Pick a non-political topic and compare the Wikipedia page to the Grokipedia page. It's not even close.

If Grokipedia ever closes the #2 gap, then we might start to see a non-negligible number of users ignoring #1. At present, only the most easily offended political snowflakes would willingly inflict Grokipedia on themselves.

In terms of total size, it absolutely has a long way to go. How it ends up remains to be seen.

Much of the conversation around it has been disingenuous, focusing on growth percentages as opposed to actual size. Once upon a time, the Parler and Truth Social apps were also at the top of the charts based on growth.

Now when mechahitler needs a source to back that musky is indeed fitter than usain bolt he has a reference

IMO, these two things are both true:

a) Wales' co-founder Larry Sanger is largely correct about the bias of Wikipedia

b) Grokipedia is a joke

Accurate.

That is exactly what it is.

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