Elon Musk announced this week that his artificial intelligence company, xAI, is developing an online encyclopedia called Grokipedia. He described it as an open-source alternative to Wikipedia. The announcement came as Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger raised concerns about bias, anonymous editors, and the site’s handling of news sources.
“Join @xAI and help build Grokipedia, an open source knowledge repository that is vastly better than Wikipedia!” Musk
posted on X. “This will be available to the public with no limits on use.”
Musk also shared a post from investor and PayPal co-founder, David Sacks.
Sacks
wrote: “Wikipedia is hopelessly biased. An army of left-wing activists maintain the bios and fight reasonable corrections. Magnifying the problem, Wikipedia often appears first in Google search results, and now it’s a trusted source for AI model training. This is a huge problem.”
In his post, Sacks shared an
interview between Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, and Tucker Carlson which aired on Sept. 29.
In response, Musk wrote: “We are building Grokipedia @xAI Will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia. Frankly, it is a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe.”
During Sanger’s interview with Carlson, he said that a small group of anonymous accounts has a significant influence over Wikipedia content. “Did you know that 85 percent of the most influential accounts on Wikipedia—the ‘Power 62’—are anonymous? We simply don’t know who they are. It’s a fact,” Sanger
posted separately.
In the interview, Sanger showed a list of blacklisted news sources and approved news sources, according to Wikipedia. News sources such as CNN, The New York Times, Mother Jones, TV Guide, The Nation, and The Washington Post are considered reliable and have the green light from Wikipedia, while news sources including The Epoch Times, The Daily Caller, Breitbart, Fox News, The New York Post, and The Federalist cannot be cited and are blacklisted, and are color coded red on Wikipedia.
As Musk announced
Grokipedia, he featured an image of himself as a grim reaper at Wikipedia’s door.
Musk also shared a
post from Sanger, in which the co-founder of the free online encyclopedia outlined what he believes are the necessary reforms for an unbiased information repository. He listed nine reforms: "End decision-making by 'consensus,' enable competing articles, abolish source blacklists, revive the original neutrality policy, repeal 'Ignore All Rules,' reveal who Wikipedia's leaders are, let the public rate articles, end permanent blocking, adopt a legislative process.
According to data from Wikimedia, in August alone, Wikipedia recorded nearly 12 billion page views, with the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Canada generating the most traffic. Contributors made 64 million edits over the year, with roughly 37,000 active editors on average each month.
