Wiki wars: How the fight for truth could shape your online reputation 

Elon Musk has long criticised Wikipedia, dismissing it as “Wokepedia” and urging users to stop donating, citing perceived editorial bias. Launching a rival once seemed far-fetched, but Musk is pressing ahead regardless. 

Grokipedia was unveiled to the public on 27th October and has already generated headlines about its own biases and critical thinking abilities. But what is it and why does it matter? 

Unlike Wikipedia, Grokipedia’s content comes from xAI’s Grok LLM rather than crowdsourcing. For anyone who has run into an overzealous moderator on Wikipedia, this may sound appealing – but decisions on whether to accept corrections lie with the Grokipedia team. Anyone who has prior dealings with the X team will have concerns about getting a timely response and whether there will be an appeals process if corrections are refused. LLMs are susceptible to hallucinations, so relying on Grok to create a fast-track (some would say rushed) alternative reference site is risky and relies heavily on users reporting errors. 

Grokipedia is at a very early stage of its development. At the time of writing, it has around 885,000 articles compared to Wikipedia’s 7 million English language articles. Currently, Grokipedia is English-only, a stark limitation compared to Wikipedia’s hundreds of language editions (including 19 language versions with more encyclopaedia entries than Grokipedia).  

The site’s domain authority is almost non-existent, and it ranks very low on search results where it ranks at all; the majority of its articles don’t appear to have been referenced by search engines yet. But if it starts to rank more highly (xAI will be doing everything they can to make sure it does), it will start to impact search engines’ AI-generated overviews and the answers given by LLMs such as ChatGPT and Copilot. 

At present, even Grok doesn’t bother with it. A search for Elon Musk offers multiple references to Wikipedia and not a single mention of Grokipedia. But surely xAI will ensure Grok favours their own reference source over a rival, in the same way that those LLMs with a content deal with Reddit feature its content more prominently. This will drive more traffic to it and help it to rank even higher on search results, which in turn makes it more likely to appear in answers on other chatbots. 

Our advice is to assume that Grokipedia will become an influential source and act accordingly. Musk is determined to ensure there is a serious rival to Wikipedia that is more aligned with his worldview, even pausing its launch to “purge out the propaganda”.  

The site is currently in beta testing (version 0.1) and will get more comprehensive over time. Start by reviewing what it says about you or your company and request corrections where necessary. If you’re not included yet, keep checking as it expands, as at present there is no obvious way to request that an article is added. In some instances you will want to seek legal advice if corrections are not forthcoming. As the encyclopaedia gets larger, xAI will be inundated with edit requests, so get in early if you can. 

There are many reasons Grokipedia might fail. It is incomplete, prone to error and when it tries to go beyond simply mirroring Wikipedia, the extra AI-generated detail often feels heavy and hard to read. Yet Musk’s backing makes it difficult to ignore and history suggests that when he sets his sights on success, he usually delivers.