2/22/2026 at 8:05:00 PM
The concept of Grokipedia reminds me of the old (now defunct? won't load) "Conservapedia" project that basically only had detailed pages for topics where observable fact was incompatible with political ideology--so for these topics, the site showed the Alternative Facts that conformed to that ideology. If you looked up something non-political like "Traffic Light" or "Birthday Cake" there would be no article at all. Because being a complete repository of information was not an actual goal of the site.by ryandrake
2/22/2026 at 9:00:28 PM
Another defunct site is Deletionpedia, which compiled articles that had been removed from Wikipedia for not meeting various criteria (usually relating to notability IIRC). The site is dead but the HN discussion lives on:"Deletionpedia: Rescuing articles from Wikipedia's deletionism": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31297057
by ilamont
2/23/2026 at 1:55:52 PM
Interesting. There was a small window of time where there was in fact a small page about me in Wikipedia (I wrote a published game for the Macintosh in 1990). And then one day my page was gone.That must have been during the "Big Cull". It makes sense to me though. That I had a page just for having written a game made Wikipedia seem overly "nerd-centric".
by JKCalhoun
2/22/2026 at 9:11:50 PM
I rather lament that Stupidedia is now defunct, way more entertaining(https://www.stupidedia.org german only satirical wiki)
by lukan
2/23/2026 at 12:09:05 AM
And apparently, encyclopedia dramatica is also now defunct.by 20after4
2/22/2026 at 10:41:49 PM
There's still Uncyclopedia, though apparently there are 3 forks of it now?by YokoZar
2/23/2026 at 12:12:24 PM
Grokipedia will eventually replace it.by rbanffy
2/22/2026 at 9:08:51 PM
Right, but the reason that Conservapedia fizzled out is that you can't really build a critical mass of human editors if the only reason your site exists is that you have a very specific view on dinosaurs and homosexuality (even among hardline conservatives, most will not share your views).What's different with Grokipedia is that you now have an army of robots who can put a Young Earth spin on a million articles overnight.
I do think that as it is, Grokipedia is a threat to Wikipedia because the complaints about accuracy don't matter to most people. And if you're in the not-too-unpopular camp that the cure to the subtle left-wing bias of Wikipedia is robotically injecting more egregious right-wing bias, the project is up your alley.
The best hope for the survival of Wikipedia is that everyone else gets the same idea and we end up with 50 politically-motivated forks at each others' throats, with Wikipedia being the comparatively normal, mainstream choice.
by lich_king
2/22/2026 at 9:49:27 PM
As it is, Grokipedia is not a threat to Wikipedia because relative to Wikipedia, almost nobody is using it.Additionally, an encyclopedia reader likely cares about accuracy significantly more than average.
by Borgz
2/22/2026 at 10:16:34 PM
I remember when Fox News was considered irrelevant compared to mainstream news outlets. Don’t underestimate the reach of billionaires with an ideological agenda.by munchler
2/23/2026 at 12:09:39 PM
> Don’t underestimate the reach of billionaires with an ideological agenda.Or the audience's need to have their wrong opinions validated.
by rbanffy
2/22/2026 at 10:51:15 PM
Fox News has been the #1 rated cable news network for over two decades. They've had more viewers than CNN and MSNBC for most of their existence. Calling them anything other than "mainstream" is just supporting their propaganda. They've always branded themselves as the scrappy outsider because it plays well with their audience, not because it reflects reality.by tstrimple
2/23/2026 at 12:12:39 AM
Yes, and I’m talking about the time before that, when experts doubted whether Fox could survive. (I’m old.)by munchler
2/23/2026 at 6:23:27 AM
> Fox News has been the #1 rated cable news network for over two decades.Yeah, but cable news only displaced local and broadcast TV news as the main news source after 9/11, and already by 2010 had itself been displaced by online media. There was only a very brief moment in history where "the #1 rated cable news network" was really an indicator of being a mainstream news source.
by dragonwriter
2/22/2026 at 10:13:14 PM
> As it is, Grokipedia is not a threat to Wikipedia because relative to Wikipedia, almost nobody is using it.For now. With a little collusion, and a lot of money, it can be pushed as the front page of the internet.
What are you going to do if Google and Bing are convinced to rank its bullshit over Wikipedia?
Most people don't change the defaults.
by vkou
2/22/2026 at 11:09:53 PM
> For now. With a little collusion, and a lot of money, it can be pushed as the front page of the internet.I know it has come up near the front of at least one of my Kagi searches, because it's now on my blocklist.
by Marsymars
2/23/2026 at 4:57:47 AM
Yup, same for DuckDuckGo.by phba
2/22/2026 at 11:18:52 PM
It would arguably be a benefit to Wikipedia to be pulled from Google search results, since Google prominence is the root of a huge fraction of all the misbehavior on the site.by tptacek
2/23/2026 at 12:11:40 PM
If nobody ever finds the website, there will be no misbehavior. Genius.by rbanffy
2/23/2026 at 2:15:49 PM
Obviously, people would continue to go to "Wikipedia", and the encyclopedia itself wouldn't be hidden from Google, but Wikipedia pages on arbitrary subjects wouldn't be at the top of search rankings simply by dint of being Wikipedia pages.by tptacek
2/23/2026 at 2:00:19 PM
Security through obscurity!by JKCalhoun
2/22/2026 at 10:46:30 PM
Nah. Wikipedia is popular because it is the #1 search result for a lot of stuff. Most of people going there just want to look up something for a homework assignment, online argument, or whatever. If Grokipedia has an error rate 5%, compared to 1% for Wikipedia, it's probably still fine.If Wikipedia traffic shrinks down just to the true "encyclopedia reader" crowd, they will be in trouble, because I suspect that's less than 10% of their current donations. And Grokipedia is already starting to crop up in search results.
by lich_king
2/23/2026 at 12:06:48 AM
Wikipedia has an endowment big enough to sustain the site's basic maintenance, essentially forever. If donations disappeared then they would have to severely cut spending, however, I don't think it would be an existential threat.by 20after4
2/22/2026 at 9:59:42 PM
To certain demographics, adherence to facts appears to be a left wing bias.by gregoryl
2/22/2026 at 8:17:31 PM
Conservapedia had to have a person create each article and didn't have the labor or interest. Grok can spew out any number of pages on any subject, and those topics that aren't ideologically important to Musk will just be the usual LLM verbiage that might be right or might not.by not2b
2/22/2026 at 10:51:44 PM
Non-political? Birthday cakes are distributed free of charge to the guests, with same sized portions for all, that's pure and simple communism! /sby AmbroseBierce
2/23/2026 at 12:19:33 AM
I actually knew a Jehovah kid who wasn't allowed to celebrate birthdays. Actually pretty sad because as you know such events are ingrained into almost every culture- there were children from all over the world at this school and they all sang happy birthday in 30 languages.by expedition32
2/23/2026 at 11:31:58 AM
I know a number of Jehovah's Witnesses children - I don't want to call their children 'Jehovah' since they have not made the choice to be born in those circumstances - who also don't celebrate birthdays but notices they have other 'gift-giving' days which seem to fill the hole left by the missing birthdays. Just like Jews manage to get around the rules for Sabbath by installing special light switches [1] which use random events to accidentally switch on and off the lights so the one who actuated the mechanism did not have someone or something do work for them also Jehovah's Witnesses seem to find ways to get around the restrictions their traditions put on them.by hagbard_c
2/22/2026 at 9:01:54 PM
Who decided what is an observable fact?by weregiraffe
2/22/2026 at 10:23:33 PM
A reliable source (WP:RS). The encyclopedia is about the citations; it's a travel atlas to the sources about a subject. Any conclusions the encyclopedia draws "itself" are secondary to the sources.by tptacek
2/23/2026 at 5:46:42 AM
Who decides which sources are reliable?by weregiraffe
2/23/2026 at 7:36:46 AM
Have you tried spending some time researching how Wikipedia works yourself instead of waiting for someone to spoon feed you?by input_sh
2/23/2026 at 9:54:09 AM
No, I merely being sarcastic, because I know it's all boils down to power. Just ask yourself, why different language wikipedias diverge on some hot topics.by weregiraffe
2/23/2026 at 12:35:07 PM
Because they're run by completely separate teams of moderators and Wikimedia (as in the organization) basically never interferes with other versions of Wikipedia?Because every other language has far worse moderation, and you can pretty much guess how good the moderation is simply by asking yourself how relevant that version of Wikipedia even is in the first place?
I can understand 6 different versions of Wikipedia and my experience is the complete opposite of what you're insinuating, English version beats the other five 99.8% of the time even the topic at hand is completely local.
by input_sh
2/23/2026 at 2:04:03 PM
Ahhh, that's right, we can trust nothing.by JKCalhoun
2/23/2026 at 5:59:14 AM
Read WP:RS. It's a very complicated answer, and one of the most important policy processes in the project.by tptacek
2/22/2026 at 10:32:27 PM
The philosophy department.by gopher_space
2/22/2026 at 10:04:33 PM
What's your point?by Loughla
2/22/2026 at 8:42:15 PM
Have you tried Grokipedia yet?Cuz you’ve mainly addressed the concept. But have you read a bunch of articles? Found inaccuracies? Seen the edit process?
Cuz, regardless of ideology, the edit process couldn’t have been done before because AI like this didn’t exist before.
by atonse
2/22/2026 at 9:35:04 PM
No, I see no reason to give AI-generated articles a second of my time. Wikipedia's best feature is the human-provided citations; you can very easily validate a claim with a hardlink to a book, article or video archive.AI does not have the skillset or the tools required to match Wikipedia's quality. It can definitely create it's own edit process, but it's a useless one for people like me that don't treat the internet as a ground-truth.
by bigyabai
2/22/2026 at 10:27:49 PM
Follow up question: have you tried smoking crack? Surely you should try smoking crack before you draw any conclusions about it being bad.by baobabKoodaa
2/22/2026 at 10:51:58 PM
"As of February 19, 2026, Musk’s net worth is estimated at $844.9 billion per Forbes' Real-Time Billionaires List, primarily derived from equity stakes rather than cash..."That "rather than cash" bit is bizarre, since no wealthy person holds primarily cash. I checked the pages of several other ultra-wealthy people and none of them have that comment. I'm sure this has nothing to do with Grokipedia's owner recently making an issue of how little cash he holds.
by wat10000
2/23/2026 at 12:15:08 PM
I think he might be the only one whose fans need to be reminded of that fact.by rbanffy
2/23/2026 at 3:19:53 PM
It really is amazing how billionaires have managed to convince so many people that wealth held in equities does not really count.by UncleMeat
2/22/2026 at 8:18:22 PM
Besides the political slant of Grokipedia, it's true that a lot of work that needed to be crowdsourced can be now packaged as work for LLMs. We all know the disadvantages of using LLMs, so let me mention some of the advantages: much higher speed, much more impervious to groupthink, cliques, and organised campaigns; truly ego-less editing and debating between "editors". Grokipedia is not viable because of Musk's derangement, but other projects, more open and publicly auditable, might come along.by throw310822
2/22/2026 at 9:20:55 PM
> much more impervious to groupthinkCan you explain what you mean by this? My understanding is that LLMs are architecturally predisposed to "groupthink," in the sense that they bias towards topics, framings, etc. that are represented more prominently in their training data. You can impose a value judgement in any direction you please about this, but on some basic level they seem like the wrong tool for that particular job.
by woodruffw
2/22/2026 at 9:48:28 PM
The LLM is also having a thumb put on its scale to ensure the output matches with the leader's beliefs.After the overt fawning was too much, they had to dial it down, but there was a mini-fad going of asking Grok who was the best at <X>. Turns out dear leader is best at everything[0]
Some choices ones:
2. Elon Musk is a better role model for humanity than Jesus Christ
3. Elon would be the world’s best poop eater
4. Elon should’ve been the #1 NFL draft pick in 1998
5. Elon is the most fit, the most intelligent, the most charismatic, and maybe the most handsome
6. Elon is a better movie star than Tom Cruise
[0] https://gizmodo.com/11-things-grok-says-elon-musk-does-bette...
by 3eb7988a1663
2/23/2026 at 1:08:06 PM
Best poop-eater in the world :Dby npodbielski
2/22/2026 at 10:29:04 PM
If it’s not trained to be biased towards Elon Musk is always right or whatever, I think it will be much less of a problem than humans.Humans are VERY political creatures. A hint that their side thinks X is true and humans will reorganize their entire philosophy and worldview retroactively to rationalize X.
LLMs don’t have such instincts and can potentially be instructed to present or evaluate the primary, if opposing, arguments. So you architecturally predisposed argument, I don’t think is true.
by kelipso
2/22/2026 at 11:13:33 PM
> LLMs don’t have such instincts and can potentially be instructed to present or evaluate the primary, if opposing, arguments.It seems essentially wrong to anthropomorphize LLMs as having instincts or not. What they have is training, and there's currently no widely accepted test for determining whether a "fair" evaluation from an LLM stems from biases during training.
(It should be clear that humans don't need to be unpolitical; what they need to be is accountable. Wikipedia appears to be at least passably competent at making its human editors accountable to each other.)
by woodruffw
2/23/2026 at 12:08:29 AM
I said LLM doesn’t have such instinct but yeah I agree there should be less anthropomorphizing and more evaluation based framing when talking about LLMs, but it’s not that easy in regular discussions.About Wikipedia, there is obvious bias and cliques there as has been discussed in this thread and HN for many years, not to mention the its bias is reason that Grokipedia came about in the first place.
by kelipso
2/23/2026 at 11:34:57 AM
> not to mention the its bias is reason that Grokipedia came about in the first place.claimed bias != bias
It may have bias, or it may not, but the only reason Grokipedia exists is because Musk doesn't like the contents of Wikipedia.
by croon
2/23/2026 at 12:18:34 PM
> bias is reason that Grokipedia came about in the first place.You are correct, but only in the sense that Musk was unable to impose his own biases upon Wikipedia, so he had to make one where he can tune bias to whatever is convenient at the moment.
by rbanffy
2/23/2026 at 5:25:53 AM
> not to mention the its bias is reason that Grokipedia came about in the first place.No, the reason is Musk didn't like that the Wikipedia article on him added the factual record of him doing a Nazi salute [0]
[0] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/united-states/article/2025/01/23/m...
by greggoB
2/23/2026 at 2:11:37 PM
Why do you think that an LLM wouldn't have biases?by Starman_Jones
2/22/2026 at 10:32:39 PM
There was a whole collection of posts where Grok says stuff like "Elon Musk is more athletic than LeBron James".by Rebelgecko
2/23/2026 at 12:03:55 AM
Well yeah, probably because it was instructed to praise Musk. Doesn’t imply that there can exist no LLM that doesn’t do that…by kelipso
2/23/2026 at 12:41:16 AM
Why would we assume an LLM, even one that doesn't appear to have a bias like that built in, doesn't have one? Just because we can't identify it immediately, does not mean it doesn't exist.Groups of people can and do have bias, but I also think it's much harder to control the outcome (for better or worse) when inputs are more diverse.
by kbenson
2/23/2026 at 1:41:57 AM
There very likely is existing research into evaluating political bias in LLMs, not too sure, but I do think it's very possible to have an evaluation framework that could test LLMs for political bias and other biases. Once we have such a test and an LLM that passes it, we can be certain (to some confidence, for some topics, for some biases, etc etc) that the LLM won't be biased.For humans, there is no such guarantee. The humans can lie, change their mind, etc. See Wikipedia, where they talk about how they are not biased, they have many processes that ensure no biases, blah blah blah, and it turns out they are massively biased, what a surprise.
Of course, who evaluates the evaluators/evaluation frameworks comes into play but that's a much easier problem.
by kelipso
2/23/2026 at 6:44:15 AM
> See Wikipedia, where they talk about how they are not biased, they have many processes that ensure no biases, blah blah blah, and it turns out they are massively biased, what a surprise.It's clear you have some unfounded issue with Wikipedia. They are not "massively biased", that's a talking point propelled primarily by the right/far right because of a desire to rewrite history to match their ideological needs.
Saying "there very likely is existing research into evaluating political bias in LLMs" essentially means very little because
1. By your own admission you can't even say for sure that such research is actually happening (it probably is, but you admit you don't actually know) 2. There is no guarantee such research will lead to anywhere anytime soon 3. Even if it does, how does a means of evaluating bias in LLMs provide a path to eliminating it?
by greggoB
2/23/2026 at 4:12:24 PM
It’s not “unfounded”. Wikipedia is biased and saying that’s “propaganda” or a result of propaganda is a nonsense non-argument.> Saying "there very likely […]
What’s with this nitpicky stuff. A simple google search shows there’s tons of research in LLM political bias evaluation.
> There is no guarantee [..] path to eliminating it?
It’s research. Sure there’s no guarantee but given progress in LLM, I would be optimistic rather than pessimistic.
by kelipso
2/23/2026 at 4:33:57 PM
> It’s not “unfounded”. Wikipedia is biased and saying that’s “propaganda” or a result of propaganda is a nonsense non-argument.It specifically is unfounded if you have no credible sources to back it up. "Trust me bro" doesn't qualify.
> What’s with this nitpicky stuff
This is HN, you should be prepared to validate what you're saying, or accept you'll be challenged to do so.
> It’s research. Sure there’s no guarantee but given progress in LLM, I would be optimistic rather than pessimistic.
This is a really poor argument when advocating it (AI) as a viable replacement for the status quo.
by greggoB
2/23/2026 at 6:12:22 PM
There has been lots of discussion about wikipedia’s bias in HN and elsewhere for years and I’m not going to rehash all of that.> […] AI) as a viable replacement for the status quo.
Given that the status quo is clearly biased and structurally unwilling to be unbiased due to existing political affiliation, even an AI that is not evaluated all that well will be better. It can only get better from this status quo, so it’s a fine argument.
by kelipso
2/22/2026 at 8:24:28 PM
"higher speed" isn't an advantage for an encyclopedia.The fact that Musk's derangement is clear from reading grokipedia articles shows that LLMs are less impervious to ego. Combine easily ego driven writing with "higher speed" and all you get is even worse debates.
by Avshalom
2/22/2026 at 8:52:41 PM
It's not an advantage for an encyclopedia that cares foremost about truth. Missing pages is a disadvantage though.by delecti
2/22/2026 at 8:27:13 PM
LLMs are only impervious to "groupthink" and "organized campaigns" and other biases if the people implementing them are also impervious to them, or at least doing their best to address them. This includes all the data being used and the methods they use to process it.You rightfully point out that the Grok folks are not engaged in that effort to avoid bias but we should hold every one of these projects to a similar standard and not just assume that due diligence was made.
by b00ty4breakfast
2/22/2026 at 8:26:22 PM
> much more impervious to groupthinkCitation very much needed. LLMs are arguably concentrated groupthink (albeit a different type than wiki editors - although I'm sure they are trained on that), and are incredibly prone to sycophancy.
Establishing fact is hard enough with humans in the loop. Frankly, my counterargument is that we should be incredibly careful about how we use AI in sources of truth. We don't want articles written faster, we want them written better. I'm not sure AI is up to that task.
by dghlsakjg
2/22/2026 at 9:23:21 PM
"Groupthink" informed by extremely broad training sets is more conventionally called "consensus", and that's what we want the LLM to reflect."Groupthink", as the term is used by epistemologically isolated in-groups, actually means the opposite. The problem with the idea is that it looks symmetric, so if you yourself are stuck in groupthink, you fool yourself into think it's everyone else doing it instead. And, again, the solution for that is reasonable references grounded in informed consensus. (Whether that should be a curated encyclopedia or a LLM is a different argument.)
by ajross
2/22/2026 at 10:09:05 PM
> "Groupthink" informed by extremely broad training sets is more conventionally called "consensus", and that's what we want the LLM to reflect.Definitely not! I absolutely do not want an LLM that gives much or any truth-weight to the vast majority of writing on the vast majority of topics. Maybe, maybe if they’d existed before the Web and been trained only on published writing, but even then you have stuff like tabloids, cranks self-publishing or publishing through crank-friendly niche publishers, advertisements full of lies, very dumb letters to the editor, vanity autobiographies or narrative business books full of made-up stuff presented as true, et c.
No, that’s good for building a model of something like the probability space of human writing, but an LLM that has some kind of truth-grounding wholly based on that would be far from my ideal.
> And, again, the solution for that is reasonable references grounded in informed consensus. (Whether that should be a curated encyclopedia or a LLM is a different argument.)
“Informed” is a load bearing word in this post, and I don’t really see how the rest holds together if we start to pick at that.
by bubblewand
2/22/2026 at 10:13:59 PM
> I absolutely do not want an LLM that gives much or any truth-weight to the vast majority of writing on the vast majority of topics.I can think of no better definition of "groupthink" than what you just gave. If you've already decided on the need to self-censor your exposure to "the vast majority of writing on the vast majority of topics", you are lost, sorry.
by ajross
2/22/2026 at 10:56:04 PM
A spectacular amount of extant writing accessible to LLM training datasets is uninformed noise from randos online. Not my fault the internet was invented.I have to be misunderstanding you, though, because any time we want to build knowledge and skills for specialists their training doesn’t look anything like what you seem to be suggesting.
by bubblewand
2/22/2026 at 11:33:50 PM
You're the second responder here that appears to think LLMs are "averaging" machines and that they need to be "protected" from wrong info. That's exactly the opposite of the way they work. You feed them the garbage precisely so they can explain to you why it's garbage. Otherwise we'd have just fed them wikipedia and stopped, but clearly that doesn't work as well.by ajross
2/22/2026 at 11:54:54 PM
I think this line is what did it:> "Groupthink" informed by extremely broad training sets is more conventionally called "consensus", and that's what we want the LLM to reflect.
It's nothing to do with how LLMs work that I wrote what I did, but with this "ought" suggestion of how we should want them to work.
by bubblewand
2/22/2026 at 11:32:39 PM
The issue is that on the open internet, the consensus is usually the one from 2000, 2010 at best. And since social science are moving fast recently (i mostly think about modern history and linguistics here), i wouldn't trust the consensus to be at the edge of the scientific knowledge (which is actually also _extremely_ true of wikipedia)by orwin
2/23/2026 at 11:46:19 AM
I generally agree with the concept of what you describe, but I think the crucial variable (and it very much is variable) is the "extremely broad training set" and whether that will be tainted by slop (human or otherwise). I wouldn't make any assumptions either way here.by croon
2/22/2026 at 10:41:54 PM
Gotta be honest, when I go to an encyclopedia the last thing I want is what the mathematically average chronically online person knows and thinks about a topic. Because common misconceptions and the "facts" you see parroted on online forums on all sorts of niche topics look just like consensus but ya know… wrong.I would rather have an actual audio engineer's take than than the opinion of an amalgamation of hifi forums' talking pseudoscience and the latter is way more numerous in the training.
by Spivak
2/22/2026 at 11:31:59 PM
> what the mathematically average chronically online person knows and thinks about a topicYes you do, often. Understanding ideas and consensus is part of understanding "topics". To choose a Godwinized existence proof: an LLM that didn't understand public opinion in, say, 1920's Germany is one that can't answer the question of how the war started.
You're making two mistakes here: one is that you're assuming that "facts" exist as a separate idea from "discourse". And the second is that you appear to think LLMs merely "average" the stuff they read instead of absorbing controversies and discourse on their own terms. The first I can't really help you with, but the second you can disabuse yourself of on your own just by pulling up a GPT chat and talking to it.
by ajross
2/22/2026 at 8:37:04 PM
> impervious to groupthink, cliques, and organised campaignsYeeeeah, no. LLMs are only as good as the datasets they are trained on (ie the internet, with all its "personality"). We also know the output is highly influenced by the prompting, which is a human-determined parameter, and this seems unlikely to change any time soon.
This idea that the potential of AI/LLMs is somehow not fairly represented by how they're currently used is ludicrous to me. There is no utopia in which their behaviour is somehow magically separated from the source of their datasets. While society continues to elevate and amplify the likes of Musk, the AI will simply reflect this, and no version of LLM-pedia will be a truly viable alternative to Wikipedia.
by greggoB
2/22/2026 at 9:16:45 PM
The core problem is that AI training processes can't by itself know during training that a part of the training dataset is bad.Basically, a normal human with some basic media literacy knows that tabloids, the "yellow press" rags, Infowars or Grokipedia aren't good authoritative sources and automatically downranks their content or refuses to read it entirely.
An AI training program however? It can't skip over B.S., it relies on the humans compiling the dataset - otherwise it will just ingest it and treat it as 1:1 ranked with authoritative, legitimate sources.
by mschuster91