Jess Wade (GR) is a physicist at Imperial College London and has created over 1,200 articles about women scientists on Wikipedia throughout the years.

One of the many wonders of Wikipedia is that it is created by people, for people. Wikipedia pages are concise, carefully cited, and balanced – Grokipedia pages are repetitive, sloppy, and reflect Musk's own political biases. Wikipedia pages are the result of groups of anonymous nerds who value intellectual integrity and precision; if something is presented as a fact, it is likely to have been verified through a bunch of independent sources. The same cannot be said for Grokipedia, which is as accurate as all other Large Language Models; statistical machines optimised on what the internet says is probable, rather than what is actually true.

While much of the content on Grokipedia is lifted from Wikipedia, the Grokipedia pages are longer, sloppier, and partisan. This can be seen by comparing the biographies of Meredith Whittaker (GR), Timnit Gebru (GR) and Joy Buolamwini (GR), academics who champion the ethical and transparent development of technology, on both platforms. For each researcher, Grokipedia adds thousands of words on "Controversies and criticisms," hiding its own biases in sentences that start "proponents of …" and "critics have also," presenting one-sided opinions (from interviews and social media posts) as facts. Grokipedia is reality through Musk's lens, manipulated narratives presented in a format that people have come to trust.

Steven Pruitt (GR), known as Ser Amantio di Nicolao on Wikipedia, has made over six million edits and loves Italian opera. He might have ignored Grokipedia if The Signpost hadn't asked for his opinion.

We've seen similar post-Wiki sites crop up before, and none of them have had any particular staying power. There's no reason to think that Grokipedia will be any different.

I looked up a handful of articles related to early nineteenth-century opera, mostly Italian, including several articles I created – Fanny Eckerlin, Le nozze in villa, Caroline Unger – as well as Isabella Colbran (which I did not). None have been transferred over, indeed, most of the articles I searched for were missing on Grokipedia.

I also looked up the article about myself. The article is quite a bit more prolix than that on the English Wikipedia, and not so well-organized. The wording is not identical to the English language Wikipedia. AI has been used to rewrite, or rework, large swaths of it, and introduced a handful of minor errors. The article is quite a bit longer than that on the English Wikipedia, due to the introduction of semi-extraneous, often critical, information. It goes into some detail talking about criticisms of my work, though really nothing concrete: there is an entire section, with several subsections, titled "Criticisms and debates". It's nothing I haven't heard before, but it seems to be stitched together from blogs, forums, and comments.

Grokipedia is half-baked at best, and I don't see much of a future for it in its current state. I doubt it will have much staying power without a severe overhaul.

Vysotsky is a newly retired Dutch academic librarian, who wrote the Serendipity column for The Signpost for about two years. He has contributed over 12,000 photos to Wikimedia Commons and has been editing Wikipedia since 2007. Here he comments on the article about the 2025 Dutch general election (GR):

This is Grokipedia's method of operation, according to Grok: "How it works: Articles are automatically generated based on training data, with Grok integration for real-time updates and fact-checking. Users can submit suggestions, but there's no crowdsourcing like Wikipedia." Well, I fact-checked the "real-time updates". I know it’s only Grokipedia v.0.1, but updating the outcome of Dutch national elections shouldn't be too hard for artificial intelligence. It’s data, after all.

But no: the Dutch general elections were held on 29 October. The next day, 30 October, the overall outcome was clear: Liberal Democrats (D66) won 26 seats, Nationalist anti-migration (PVV) 26 seats, Conservative Liberal party (VVD) 22 seats, Social Democrats+Greens (GL-PvdA) 20, Christian Democrats 18 seats, ten other parties won the remaining seats.

There was only one point unclear: which party had obtained most votes? The Liberal Democrats, or the Nationalist party? That became clear on 1 November: the Liberal Democrats got most votes – and could take the lead in trying to form a new government. English Wikipedia reported the results on 30 October (with 99.7% of the votes counted). As of 4 November, Grokipedia still gives a two-week old prediction ("Projected Seats (Latest Aggregate, Oct 2025)“): PVV 40, GL-PvdA 24, CDA 24, D66 17, VVD 15). On top of the page: "Fact-checked by Grok last month". So much for the speed of fact-checking by Grok. The leader of D66 and projected Prime Minister, Rob Jetten, isn't mentioned in their article at all; his party D66 only once, in the table with predictions.

Most importantly: this reveals why we need humans, who are curious and dedicated to topics close to their heart, wanting to report on the matter as soon as official results are made available. Bots are neither curious, nor dedicated.

Mary Mark Ockerbloom has edited Wikipedia for almost 20 years, works as a paid Wikipedian in Residence for educational, scientific, and cultural organizations, and organizes the Philadelphia WikiSalon for new editors and others who wish to develop their editing skills.

Imagine you're a mother-to-be wondering whether to use baby bottles to feed expressed milk or formula. Would you rather read a Wikipedia article curated by humans, or an AI-generated one from Grokipedia? Baby bottle (GR) is one of many articles I've substantially rewritten as a Wikipedian in Residence. While working on it, I asked myself, "What information would someone be trying to find when they read this article?"

Answering that question requires a deep understanding of our concern as humans. LLMs are unlikely to do this well. They rely on the sources they are given, whether good, bad, or indifferent. They lack the underlying world knowledge that humans use to assess and prioritize information.

When I rewrote "Baby bottle", I added over 10,000 words and 154 references. I focused on things parents might want to know, like design considerations, materials, safety and use of baby bottles.

Grokipedia's first paragraph describes a baby bottle as having three typical components. Wikipedia cites a fourth, the protective cap used to keep bottles clean and prevent spills.

Grokipedia's second paragraph is one rambling sentence that begins with "prehistoric ceramic bottles", jumps to high levels of mortality in the 19th century, and concludes that safety has improved since then. This disjointed treatment of past events reflects LLMs' lack of real-world understanding of time. If you ask an LLM what is happening "today", it looks at millions of statements where the word "today" was used. Its answer may reflect what was said last week or ten years ago. It doesn't understand that "today" has meaning based on when it is asked.

Grokipedia's sentences are long, disjointed, and bombastic. Some of it reads like advertising. I'm thankful that Wikipedia editors have worked steadfastly to remove promotionally-toned additions to the "Baby bottle" page. I know which page I'd rather read, if I was a new mom.

User Oltrepier mainly edits the Italian-language Wikipedia and is a Signpost reporter, too. He did find something that Grokipedia has done better than Wikipedia. In fact, the enWiki article on the Detention of Johan Floderus (GR), which Oltrepier himself created in 2023, is getting out of date.

The Grokipedia article, including the sources, is definitely more up-to-date than the one on Wikipedia, but it's also verbose and drags on and on. The language used by Grok can be clunky, with strange word choices – for example, "documented cases exceeding 66 victims". Right from the start, the article focuses less on the actual key events involving the EU diplomat Johan Floderus and more on the hostage diplomacy used by Iran in recent years, to the point where it reads more like a political speech than an encyclopedia entry. It definitely doesn't help to feature phrases such as, "This persistence highlights the judiciary's subordination to political imperatives, where legal facades mask bargaining tactics amid the regime's prioritization of ideological control over impartial justice".

Betty Wills, known as Atsme on Wikipedia since 2011, also founded Justapedia, a Wikipedia fork which resembles Wikipedia more than Grokipedia. Justapedia welcomes both conservative and liberal editors, according to Wills. With a little help from Grok 4 beta, she summarizes the difference between Wikipedia and Grokipedia as follows:

Grokipedia is not human, can't relate to the human condition, and can’t initiate doubt as it's an LLM. Garbage in, garbage out

• It amplifies the biases in its training data (e.g., overrepresenting Western perspectives). It needs human oversight and prompts like "Analyze your response for bias."
• It will hallucinate plausible but false information (e.g., inventing non-existent historical events). It puts language fluency over accuracy, with no built-in fact-checking.
• It cites Quora, The Daily Mail (UK), Britannica, and Biography.com. Like Grok, ChatGPT, and the other AI bots, it will also cite Reddit and Wikipedia.
• It can't judge notability or importance and doesn't have the level of originality/creativity needed to create the kinds of new articles that will make it competitive with other encyclopedias.
• Even if it neutralizes what it considers "bias", it's not trustworthy. It doesn't have Wikipedia's New Page Patrol, or even editors helping to keep fake articles out.

The Steele dossier article (GR) shows the differences in perspectives between Grokipedia and Wikipedia. Grokipedia tries to remove perceived biases to achieve a "neutral" POV, rather than covering all notable POVs.

Consuming AI-generated information is like quelling a growling stomach by downing a Whopper and fries from a drive-thru versus savoring a well-prepared, five course meal in an upscale restaurant.

I am Jake P. X. Gotts (known here by the initials JPxG); as the editor-in-chief of the Signpost, I was reading this article for a pre-publication copyedit and became curious. Well, nobody asked for my opinion, but here it is anyway:

Some years ago I wrote the Wikipedia article Powder House Island, here listed as a Featured Article, about an artificial island in the Detroit River built in the late 1880s to circumvent a court order forbidding storing explosives on an island a few hundred feet over. The whole island is barely big enough for a few trees, and its whole history constitutes a handful of events.

In the grand scheme of things, it's not a very important place, and they aren't very important events, but it's a neat little place and the story is interesting. It involved substantial amounts of research and analysis. Both my article and the island itself, incidentally: it was made to carry out the construction of a large shipping channel in the Detroit River. This channel served the busy port of a 19th- and 20th-century city bustling with every type of heavy industry. But Detroit's riverfront bustles no more; the world of industry is shaped differently now, and there is no place for it there.

I realize that current LLM systems have their limitations − I created WP:LLM − but I can find no solace with my head in the sand. I think it is straightforward to interpolate a trendline on something that sufficed as a party favor five years ago, a parlor trick four years ago, a research topic three years ago, an investment area two years ago, and a major economic influence today. At some point, it is inevitable that the process of 100% manual writing I carried out in this article (and the process I carry out here at the Signpost) will become an antiquated curiosity, as my previous occupations as a manual welder and manual forklift driver are presently becoming, and as the occupations of my forefathers as manual blacksmiths and manual harvesters long ere became.

So I went to see what the new computer god thought of Powder House Island, this sphinx of cement and silicon and backpropagation and attention heads — and —

“

This page doesn't exist... yet Grokipedia scans millions of pages daily to verify and curate trustworthy information. Return to home ⋅ Search for "Powder House Island"

”

I guess it hasn't had time to think everything through yet, which is convenient, because neither have I.

When the Grok chatbot, Betty Wills, and five other Wikipedians send out much the same message, it's hard to ignore. Grokipedia is extremely flawed, perhaps fatally so, because it's controlled by one biased person with extreme views and because it lacks human understanding and the human touch. Using AI to write an encyclopedia means that the "writers" do not think for themselves, cannot recognize a notable topic or a reliable source, hallucinate "facts", do not question their own writing, and cannot eliminate bias or find a neutral point of view.

What's Grokipedia missing? In a word, humanity.

We've covered controversy related to the Palestine-Israel topic area in the past several editions of this column; this issue's is the imbroglio on Gaza genocide and its talk page, starting from Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales' decision to dive in the conversation.

The first of the media to report was Scottish newspaper The National (on November 3), with the headline "Wikipedia row erupts as Jimmy Wales intervenes on 'Gaza genocide' page". They reported that Wales went to the talk page of the aforementioned article – you can read his full message at this link – to ask the community to watch out for POV-related issues after being "asked point-blank in a high profile media interview about the article", and reported that Wales said:

"[T]his article ... inappropriately, and contrary to our policy and traditions, takes sides in an ongoing controversy when it ought to accurately and fairly summarize all relevant views."

Other media soon followed with the following headlines.

• "Wikipedia co-founder slams 'Gaza genocide' page over 'egregious' anti-Israel claims" (New York Post, retitled)
• "Wikipedia's 'Gaza Genocide' article an example of how neutrality needs to be improved, founder says" (The Jerusalem Post)
• "Wikipedia co-founder joins editing conflict over the Gaza genocide page" (The Verge)
• "Wikipedia Article on Gaza Genocide Locked Over Alleged Bias" (Gizmodo)
• "Why did Wikipedia editor block edits to the 'Gaza genocide' page?" (Al Jazeera, retitled)

The article by The Verge included more insight into the controversy, featuring broader quotes from Wales' original talk page message and clarifying that the "high profile media interview" he likely referred to was recorded for a recent episode of CNN International Amanpour & Company (aired on November 3), where Walter Isaacson asked Wales about the Gaza Genocide article, and he replied by calling the page "one of the worst Wikipedia entries I've seen in a very long time" and saying it "doesn't live up to our standards of neutrality". The Verge also hosted an official statement by WMF spokeperson Lauren Dickinson, who said that Wales "has discussed multiple Wikipedia articles and topics, expressing his own perspectives and reflections", as "one of hundreds of thousands of editors, all striving to present information, including on contentious topics, in line with Wikipedia's policies".

Note that some media have erroneously reported that Wales had locked the Gaza genocide article. Indeed, the page was full protected from editing by anyone other than by administrators for a period of time, but not by Wales: user ScottishFinnishRadish actually did so on October 28, even before Wales himself joined the discussion on November 2. It should also be noted that Wales has not held administrator privileges for some time (see 2023 Signpost coverage). – B and O

This piece was first published by Tech Policy Press on November 3, 2025, with a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

Grokipedia, the AI-generated encyclopedia owned by Elon Musk's xAI, went live on October 27. It is positioned as, first and foremost, an ideological foil to Wikipedia, which for years has been the subject of escalating criticism by right-wing media in general and Musk in particular. With Grokipedia, Musk wants to produce something he sees as more neutral.

Much has already been written about the character of Grokipedia’s content. This essay aims to explore the nature of the project and its version of neutrality, as compared to Wikipedia. Technologically, it is one of many experiments designed to replace human-generated writing with LLMs; conceptually, it is less a successor to Wikipedia than a return to an older model of producing officially sanctioned knowledge.

Nearly every encyclopedia asserts some version of "neutrality." Wikipedia's definition is unusual: its "neutral point of view" policy aims not to pursue some Platonic ideal of balance or objectivity, but rather a faithful and proportional summary of what the best available sources say about a subject. Original ideas, reporting, and analysis on the part of its contributors are not allowed. Casting volunteers as "editors" and not "authors" is part of how "an encyclopedia that anyone can edit" is possible – by moving the locus of dispute from truth itself to which sources to use and how to incorporate them. As with the rest of Wikipedia, neutrality is less a perfect state than a continuously negotiated process wherein disputes are expected and common. While neutrality and sourcing discussions are often deeply fraught, with complicated histories that blur lines of reliability and result in lengthy discussions, they're also constructive – a 2019 study in Nature found that articles with many such conflicts tended to be higher quality in general.

On which sources to use, Wikipedia's guideline about identifying "reliable sources" details its priorities: a reputation for fact-checking, accuracy, issuing corrections, editorial oversight, separating facts and opinions, no compromising connection to the subject, and other traditional markers of information literacy that librarians have taught to students and researchers for more than a century. Secondary and tertiary sources are preferred, deferring to them for the task of vetting and interpreting primary sources. Independent subjects are also preferred for any non-trivial claim, as article subjects have a hard time writing about themselves objectively. Ideological orientation is not a factor except insofar as narrative drive affects this list of priorities. Both of the following statements can align with Wikipedia's definition of a "reliable source," even though they're opposed: "unicorns aren't real but I wish they were;" "unicorns aren't real and I'm glad they aren't." Either source would take priority over a source that claims "unicorns are real," regardless of the author's pro- or anti-unicorn sentiment.

However, sourcing is also at the center, implicitly or explicitly, of many allegations that Wikipedia is not actually neutral. Some of these claims focus on Wikipedia's "perennial sources list", which includes dozens of sources whose reliability is frequently discussed, highlighted according to the outcomes of those discussions. The idea is to be able to point to a central page where someone can find links and summaries of past discussions rather than have volunteers explain for the umpteenth time why e.g. InfoWars is not a reliable source.

I agree with criticism of this page to the extent it has given rise to a genre of source classification discussion applied not just to extreme cases like InfoWars but to sources that require some nuance, indirectly short-circuiting debates that should take place on a case-by-case basis. But even if the list were to be deleted altogether, it wouldn't turn unreliable sources (according to the guideline) into reliable ones; it would just require more of those debates to play out rather than let someone point to a line in a table. There's an optics argument to be had, too: it's not that there aren't more unreliable right-wing sources than left-wing sources; it's just that people try to use unreliable right-wing sources more frequently in Wikipedia articles.

But in large part, allegations of bias are a straightforward extension of a decades-old argument: that academia, science, mainstream media, etc. are broadly biased towards the left and/or untrustworthy. Whether through Rush Limbaugh's "four corners of deceit" (government was the fourth corner) or some other articulation, the frame is well established. The extent to which it is true is outside the scope of this essay, but anyone who holds this view will inevitably see that bias in Wikipedia, which summarizes academia, science, and media. Musk made this point earlier this year when he called Wikipedia "an extension of legacy media propaganda".

It should not be surprising, then, that the sourcing used by Grokipedia is often radically different from Wikipedia's. It's not clear how reliably Grok will explain its own internal processes, but it should at least communicate the way its developers want Grokipedia to be seen. So I asked it to explain the way it prioritizes sources for different kinds of content, and it provided a table that's worth including here; see below.

The most obvious trend is its preference on most topics for primary, self-published and official sources like verified X users' social media posts and government documents. These are put on par with or at higher priority than peer-reviewed journal articles, depending on the category. The only examples it provides among high-priority sources, apart from X users, are ArXiv (itself contending with an influx of LLM content) and PubMed for scientific/technical topics and Kremlin.ru for historical events.

Some of Wikipedia's fiercest critics contend that its version of neutrality unfairly endorses "Establishment" views on issues like vaccines, climate change, or the results of the 2020 US Presidential election, omitting minority positions or describing them in unfavorable terms. If many people hold a view, the argument goes, it is worth presenting on its own terms rather than deciding one set of sources is better than another. Grokipedia appears to align with this perspective, as its low-priority source criteria explains that it is sensitized to "emotional bias," labels like "pseudoscience," and anything that doesn't present alternative perspectives.

There is another characteristic of the sourcing that will be immediately apparent to anyone who has tried to do a literature review on a subject using a chatbot: it relies on sources available on the open web (or sources widely described by sources available on the open web). Commercial sites with good search engine optimization, apparent content farms, and personal blogs appear alongside traditional media sources. Grok can find extant text on the web faster than Wikipedia's human editors, but does it have access to the books and articles that aren't internet-accessible?

All of this is ultimately subordinate to Grokipedia's unavoidable prime directive of neutrality: neutrality is whatever Elon Musk says is neutral.

According to The New York Times, Musk has been directly involved with Grok's development, nudging it to the right on several issues. Not only does Grokipedia extoll Musk's personal worldviews, but, as pointed out by many of the news articles about the project, it "breathlessly" promotes him and his products. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter what the training data is, how it's weighted, how it negotiates points of view, etc. when the last step is necessarily some sort of post-processing/output filtering/reranking intervention based on Musk's final word.

For much of Wikipedia's history, journalists and academics have enjoyed comparing it to historical encyclopedias like the Natural History, the Encyclopédie, and of course Encyclopaedia Britannica. Sometimes, like with Jim Giles' influential 2005 Nature study, it's to compare their factual accuracy, but usually it's to look at their structural and conceptual differences: Wikipedia is larger; Wikipedia is online; Wikipedia is accessible for free by anyone with an internet connection; Wikipedia is editable by anyone. But the most important distinction frequently gets lost: unlike nearly all historic encyclopedias, Wikipedia doesn't need anyone's permission to publish. There is no ideological test for participation or publication. There is no emperor, bishop, investor, or CEO who must approve of ideas expressed within, and there is no owner.

Whether due to the great expense of producing, copying, and distributing voluminous works or because of tight control that structures of governance have exerted on sources of knowledge, encyclopedists as far back as Pliny the Elder, in the first century AD, have always needed the support and consent of powerful people (Pliny had relationships with both emperor Vespasian and emperor Titus) in order for their work to be read. In this way, while Grokipedia is technologically new, with enthusiasm in some ways reminiscent of Wikipedia's early days, its epistemic hierarchy is more old-fashioned.

That brings me to my biggest question: who is Grokipedia for, other than its owner? How big is the market for corporate, for-profit general knowledge sources that promote their own products and strictly adhere to the views of a billionaire founder? I know that if any corporation/billionaire has that kind of caché, built-in audience, and resources for a sustained push, it's X/Musk. But what happens when other CEOs decide they don't like their article on Wikipedia or Grokipedia and get into the encyclopedia game? McDonaldspedia and BritishPetroleumpedia vie with Grok for dominance?

Beyond the corporate nature of Grokipedia, my impression is that most people are not excited to completely trade human-created knowledge sources for fully machine-generated ones. The format of Grokipedia obscures that it is fundamentally just structured large language model (LLM)-generation, and thus succeeds and fails in similar ways as any other chatbot query, trading the limitations of human judgment for the limitations of LLMs. Given how much AI resentment has been bubbling up in various corners of the internet, I'm frankly surprised "Slopipedia" wasn't trending from launch.

For better or worse, and I increasingly think it's for the better, Wikipedia has developed something of an allergy to AI in general and chatbots in particular. Don't use them to write articles, don't use them to illustrate articles, don't use them to prepare arguments on talk pages, etc., or risk getting banned. There are a handful of non-LLM AI uses, but Wikipedia is human-centric to such an extent that it may miss opportunities to scale labor and improve user experience.

Perhaps Wikipedians are a potential audience. Even if, as argued by 404 Media's Jason Koebler, Grokipedia "is not a 'Wikipedia competitor' [but] a fully robotic regurgitation machine," its experiments in LLM-based encyclopedism may be valuable as an example of what Wikipedia could do if it wanted to. Does Grokipedia shed any light on particular topics that are better suited to LLM-generation than others? Does it confirm Wikipedia's status quo that LLMs have no business writing articles at all?

The most instructive experiment may be the opening up of primary and self-published sources for use in articles. There is no shortage of companies, influencers, and politicians interested in having their own words used to craft an encyclopedia article about them. That doesn't usually serve a general reader very well, but the downside is it omits a lot of potentially useful detail, too. Take a journalist, for example. There's not a lot of writing about journalists, but a policy that welcomes primary and self-published sources could draw information about the person and their work from their own writing, and it would remain more up to date than articles that have to wait for a secondary source. What else is worth comparing?

Wikipedia, for all its many flaws, has always aimed to "set knowledge free" – by giving volunteers the ability to create and apply principles from the bottom-up, using technology to create a knowledge resource as well as to give it away for free, based on the belief that free knowledge is empowering. Opinions will vary about how successful it has been and where its blind spots are, but it's hard to dispute its idealism. In contrast, Grokipedia's defining feature as an encyclopedic project is the use of technological power to re-exert top-down authority over information and knowledge.

This traffic report is adapted from the Top 25 Report, prepared with commentary by Igordebraga, Shuipzv3, GeorgeBailey and CAWylie.