Can Elon Musk’s Grokipedia compete with Wikipedia? An expert explains
Joseph Reagle, a Northeastern professor of communications studies and a Wikipedia expert, says Grokipedia will face an uphill battle.
Elon Musk is taking on Wikipedia, and he plans to use his AI chatbot Grok to do it.
The tech CEO and billionaire recently shared a post on X announcing his intention to build Grokipedia and compete against Wikipedia.
The announcement came in response to a post from David Sacks, a well-known tech investor and President Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar, who called out Wikipedia for being “hopelessly biased” and led by an “army of left-wing activists.”
Sacks himself was responding to an interview that right-wing podcaster and personality Tucker Carlson had with Larry Sanger, a Wikipedia co-founder who has made comments about what he calls the organization’s left-wing bias.
Grok is a large language model similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini. It was developed by Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI.
The chatbot was launched in November 2023 and can be accessed via an app or through Elon Musk’s social media service, X.
Joseph Reagle, a Northeastern professor of communications studies and a Wikipedia expert and historian, says it’s still too early to gauge the seriousness of Musk’s post announcing his intention to build the service.
But any challenger trying to take on Wikipedia likely will face a major uphill battle, says Reagle.
“It would be very challenging for an alternative website to overtake Wikipedia,” says Reagle, who has published research and written books on the organization. “The website has been around for a while and therefore enjoys significant network effects among contributors (who want to dedicate themselves to one website and system) and momentum among end users (people and services).”
Jimmy Wales, an internet entrepreneur, launched Wikipedia with Sanger in January 2001. The site was originally designed to be a supplement to Nupedia, a similar encyclopedia project that relied on subject matter experts for contributions. The goal of Wikipedia, in contrast, was to be free and “publicly editable.”
Over the past two decades, the website has become a behemoth, attracting more than 1.5 billion unique visitors a month, according to the Wikimedia Foundation.
There are plenty of reasons why the site has remained so popular over the decades, Reagle says. But the biggest one is that it still plays an important service for people looking for information online.
“It is also the last of the early generation websites that still serves the users instead of extracting value from them via advertising and algorithmic manipulation,” Reagle adds.
While Reagle says an AI-based Wikipedia competitor could certainly give Wikipedia a run for its money, Grok hasn’t done much over the past few years. Reagle says he hasn’t been impressed with Grok.
He points to the chatbot’s sharing of antisemitic posts on X, its allegiance to Musk, and its overall spreading of misinformation.
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“Grok was just so cringy this year,” he says. “I don’t know how anyone can take that seriously.”
Sanger himself in the past has attempted to create his own “conservative” Wikipedia, Reagle says. So have others.
“Wikipedia, because of the Creative Commons license associated with it, anyone can fork (copy) it,” he says. “So over 20 years, people have been forking Wikipedia for various reasons, including ideological ones. Have you ever heard of Conservapedia? There have been half a dozen ideological forks of Wikipedia over time. … They all have failed.”
Reagle points to the fact that Wikipedia has thousands of contributors around the world. It would be difficult to say whether it has one bias over another.
“Every Wikipedia article has been tried to be deleted at one point,” says Reagle. “There’s tens of thousands of Wikipedians always knocking heads with one another. So it’s stupid to attribute one Wikipedian’s behavior to Wikipedia at large when you look at the bigger picture.”
“Most people misunderstand Wikipedia, sometimes purposefully so,” Reagle adds. “Wikipedia has succeeded in part because of its policies of communicating a “Neutral Point of View” based on “Reliable Sources,” which means “No Original Research.”
Attempts at conservative versions of Wikipedia have often abandoned these principles, leading to the publication of “fringe content” of suspect accuracy, he says.
So does Grok and AI pose an existential threat to Wikipedia?
Maybe. But Reagle says there’s a reason Wikipedia has been able to endure the past two decades.
“People have predicted its death many, many times, and it’s still there,” says Reagle.
