Wikipedia Vs Grokipedia: How Both Online Encyclopedias Differ

Throwing down a challenge to Wikipedia, tech mogul Elon Musk unveiled a new online encyclopedia powered by xAI's Grok, called Grokipedia, on Monday.

Previously, while criticising Wikipedia for its alleged bias, Musk had announced xAI was working on Grokpedia.

“We are building Grokipedia @xAI. Will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia,” he had said.

Here is a look at the major differences between the two:

Grokipedia functions quite differently from Wikipedia in one notable way: it lacks identifiable human contributors. 

Wikipedia relies on volunteer editors, many of whom remain anonymous, but Grokipedia claims its content is verified by Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Musk’s xAI.

The Verge has highlighted the contentious nature of using an AI tool to verify information, alluding to the problem of hallucination common to most AI chatbots. 

Users aren’t permitted to alter entries directly on Grokipedia, though they can submit correction requests through an on-screen form if they spot inaccuracies.

Some of the Grokipedia articles acknowledge that their information originates from Wikipedia. “The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License,” a disclaimer says at the bottom of some entries.

Many Grokipedia pages, including the one on Monday, seem to replicate their Wikipedia counterparts almost verbatim, reported NBC News.

Musk has said that he wants to end Grok’s reliance on Wikipedia pages as reference material by 2025-end.

As per NBC News, Grokipedia’s page on Elon Musk does not refer to the hand gesture he displayed at a rally in January, an act that many historians and political figures interpreted as resembling a Nazi salute. In contrast, his Wikipedia page contains multiple sections discussing the incident.

According to Wikipedia, its English database hosts around 7.1 million articles, whereas Grokipedia currently lists about 8,85,000 entries at launch. The platform is marked as version 0.1, suggesting that future expansions and updates are expected.

Lauren Dickinson, a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, told The Verge, “Even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist.”

“Wikipedia’s strengths are clear: it has transparent policies, rigorous volunteer oversight, and a strong culture of continuous improvement…This human-created knowledge is what AI companies rely on to generate content; even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist,” she told The Verge.