Can Grokipedia Tesla-Fy Wikipedia?

Oct 29, 2025

We all love to hate Wikipedia: it is imperfect, but unavoidably useful; biased, but somewhat correctable. Could Grokipedia take what is good about it and round off the rough edges? Maybe.

Wikipedia had just emerged when I was in college. My professors made it — well, and pretty much any Internet source — verboten in papers for good reason: some random person could easily have been an entry’s author. Perhaps someone with even less experience than a freshman Comp student desperate to pad a bibliography.

Years later, I spent a half-decade as a professor and took a different tack. I encouraged my students to use Wikipedia, but not as their final source. In the intervening years, Wikipedia itself had acquired a rich bibliography on many of its entries and those were often filled with gems worth mining. Far from merely a compendium of someone’s opinions, a novice trying to figure out how to research could leverage it to learn the lay of the land.

There’s no doubt that Wikipedia has biases and blind spots, though. A selection bias in who chooses to contribute to Wikipedia creates a compounding problem. On most articles that have controversy at all, it leans left in both opinion and linguistic choices, despite aiming for neutrality.

Elon Musk has repeatedly pointed to the site’s entries on controversial figures such as U.S. Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy to show the site’s editorial heavy hand. The introduction to Kennedy, for example, immediately labels him a conspiracy theorist. Perhaps an even clearer distinction can be seen in the Wikipedia article on Donald Trump which bluntly labels his election denial as “baseless” while favoring much gentler terms for critiquing Stacey Abrams’ nearly identical conspiracy theory as merely “unproven.”

It should be said just because there are multiple opinions doesn’t mean there are multiple “truths.” Few modern colloquial phrases annoy me more than “my truth,” because truth is truth, not an individual, subjective possession. Affirming both Abrams’s and Trump’s dubious election narratives to avoid picking sides would make sense if we lived in a multiverse, but we don’t.

The problem isn’t critiquing falsehood or labeling it as such, but doing so unevenly based on whether the target is viewed favorably or not by the editors. There is a bitter irony that many of those behind Wikipedia probably toss the “my truth” phrase around regularly and yet, when it comes to the ‘pedia, will brook no dissent from their chosen orthodoxy.

Grokipedia appears to be aimed at getting to what an encyclopedic or journalistic endeavor ought to be: to describe what is, stripped of subjective flourishes of what should be. Judgments should be applied equally and skepticism of favored narratives should be as strong as that applied to the disfavored ones. Where there are unsettled matters, neutral language should inform the reader of what is known and then stop.

A lot of the knee-jerk reaction to Grokipedia’s release has come from those who immediately condemn everything Musk does. They’re nearly apocalyptic in their handwringing that much of the content has been pulled from Wikipedia. Those takes aren’t worth the bytes they spent transmitting them. Wikipedia is open source and the point has always been to put out information in a way that can be adapted and reused.

If Grokipedia were a mere photocopy, I could see at least calling it empty hype. But, taking the countless hours of genuinely good work contained in Wikipedia and attempting to use AI to strip non-neutral language and overly opinionated segments makes perfect sense. It grounds the AI in the human while keeping the humans accountable via AI.

As someone Musk retweeted put it, “Human judgment with AI could result in the best and most complete source of truth if we continue to design it right.” The underlying human-AI hybrid approach, not the initial batch of content, is what makes Grokipedia intriguing.

Given its alpha-ish state, there are some great concepts in Grokipedia that are still hard to pass final judgment on. For example, the site is supposed to show an edit history revealing Grok’s AI changes, explain why it made those changes and give an authoritative source to justify them. I found the history button largely missing in my testing, but if xAI follows through, that would be an excellent step for accountability.

So far, I also see a lack of ability for human editors to edit. Will Grokipedia focus on regularly skimming Wikipedia and skip direct human editors? Perhaps that is fine, but if it were to become popular enough to overshadow Wikipedia, omitting new human contribution would be an ironic problem for a catalog of human knowledge and a weakness for even improving AI. Better to allow humans to interact too, even if it is in conjunction with AI challenging each edit.

If only because of its dependence on Wikipedia, Grokipedia’s content is also reusable under the Creative Commons, but what are xAI’s plans for licensing of future content? Will original work be licensed at least as openly? Will edits and such be easily downloadable, ideally via API, so Grokipedia’s own potential biases can be analyzed and guarded against?

I want to be clear: it is too early to declare a victory for this new endeavor. The above questions need clear answers first. At this point, Grokipedia could be little more than a promotional stunt for xAI. To fulfill Musk’s lofty claims of expanding and cataloging human knowledge, it must be so much more than a feather in the cap of Grok and a potential income source should they charge for using an eventual API.

But, seeing so many corners of the web immediately condemn it as nothing more than a copy of Wikipedia, I at least want to offer a cautious counterweight. A positive take need not be entirely pie-in-the-sky: where Musk has set his mind to something, he has gotten seemingly impossible things done. Tesla and SpaceX endured their obituaries being written and rewritten by successive waves of skeptics. xAI’s Grok itself was a lousy imitator of GPT until it suddenly became a first class competitor.

Will Grokipedia join Musk’s successes, settle into mediocrity like X (nee Twitter) or be discarded in its visionary founder’s ephemeral whims, like the America Party, Musk’s apparently vaporware expedition into forming a third American political party?

I’m not sure.

But it’s intriguing enough, I sure hope it is the Tesla of encyclopedias. A better Wikipedia — or at least a genuine competitor to keep it honest — would benefit us all. Let’s not bury it before it is even fully birthed.