Elon Musk plans to take on Wikipedia with his own rival encyclopedia site.
On Tuesday, the Tesla CEO tweeted that his xAI startup is building Grokipedia, which he claims will be a "massive improvement" over Wikipedia. Musk has long had a gripe with Wikipedia, accusing it of being "woke" and even calling for it to be defunded. (The encyclopedia site has long relied on donations.) In January, Musk also railed at Wikipedia for adding an entry about him allegedly making a Nazi-like salute at a Trump inauguration event.
To create Grokipedia, Musk plans on tapping xAI's Grok chatbot (which he also created as an alternative to another technology he didn't like, ChatGPT). Grok has been trained on web data, including public tweets. In a podcast earlier this month, Musk suggested that Grok is smart enough not only to replicate the work of human community volunteers who maintain and update Wikipedia, but also to account for any bias or inaccuracies.
"Grok is using heavy amounts of inference compute to look at, as an example, a Wikipedia page, what is true, partially true, or false, or missing in this page," he said. "Now rewrite the page to correct, remove the falsehoods, correct the half-truths, and add the missing context." (That said, Grok has suffered its own share of problems, including praising Hitler.)
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Larry Sanger says the website has become biased against conservative and religious viewpoints, but sees a way to fix it:
Wikipedia, a popular online encyclopedia millions of people treat as an authoritative source of information, is systemically biased against conservative, religious, and other points of view, according to the site's co-founder, Larry Sanger.
Sanger, 57, who now heads the Knowledge Standards Foundation, believes Wikipedia can be salvaged either by a renewed emphasis on free speech withttps://larrysanger.org/nine-theses/hin the organization or by a grassroots campaign to make diverse viewpoints heard.
Failing that, Sanger said, government intervention may be required to pierce the shell of anonymity that now protects Wikipedia's editors from defamation lawsuits by public figures who believe the site portrays them unfairly.
[...] "Basically, it's required now, even for the sake of neutrality, that they take a side when [they believe] one side is clearly wrong," Sanger said. "Pretensions of objectivity are out the window."
[...] "You simply may not cite as sources of Wikipedia articles anything that has been branded as right wing," he said. [...] "Even now, people are still sort of waking up to the reality that Wikipedia does, on many pages ... act as essentially propaganda."
[...] On his website, Sanger outlines a series of ideas for returning Wikipedia to its original stance on fairness and free speech. A handful of his ideas center on increasing transparency into site management, such as revealing who Wikipedia's leaders are, allowing the public to rate articles, ending decision-making by consensus, and adopting a legislative process for determining editorial policy.
Related: Elon Musk Plans to Take on Wikipedia With 'Grokipedia'
(Score: 5, Touché) by maxwell demon on Friday October 17, @06:52AM (5 children)
Will we get an Encyclopedia of Alternative Facts?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Dr Spin on Friday October 17, @07:27AM (2 children)
Yes.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 3, Touché) by FunkyLich on Friday October 17, @03:31PM (1 child)
The Muskopedia?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17, @06:16PM
The Muskipedia files..
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday October 17, @11:31PM
4chan/pol/ with search and linkies. Should be fun!
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aafcac on Saturday October 18, @04:44AM
Wasn't that this: https://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page [conservapedia.com] ? It's a bunch of absolute nonsense that the right believes, and really needs to believe in order to keep toeing that particular set of lines.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jb on Friday October 17, @07:08AM (5 children)
Musk may well be right about wikipedia's inherent leftist bias...
...but any competing site built by an LLM is going to be far less accurate than even the most biased human built site imaginable (and I'm pretty sure wikipedia's bias is not great enough to earn that particular wooden spoon).
The solution, as always, is not for someone to create more garbage to drown out what's already out there, but rather for readers to consult multiple sources (by authors from a variety of schools of thought) and apply some good critical thinking in choosing whom (if anyone) to believe.
But of course that wouldn't fit the narratives favoured either by Musk or by Wikipedia...
(Score: 5, Touché) by epitaxial on Friday October 17, @12:33PM (1 child)
Reality has a leftist bias.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 21, @09:45PM
Academic brainwashing has a leftist bias, to the point where comments like parent's get up-voted and are taken as fact with little or no examination. Submitted for your considerations that reality has NO bias, and it's difficult at times to even define what "leftist" is.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday October 17, @04:28PM (2 children)
My experience is that there's an awful lot on Wikipedia that really aims to be encyclopedic: Articles on chemical elements, the major events of the Napoleonic Wars, biological kingdoms, mathematical concepts, classical music, historical literature, etc should be pretty apolitical. Controversial sometimes within the field, but not political. If the taxonomy of tree frogs or the stories of Chaucer influence your vote, or vice versa, then something really weird is going on.
So when I hear whining about political biases across vast swaths of human knowledge, my assumption is that the person in question either doesn't know WTF they're talking about, or is trying to pull one over on their audience, or both.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ChrisMaple on Saturday October 18, @01:37AM
The people complaining about wikipedia's alleged leftist political bias probably fall into 2 categories: non-leftists only reading wikis subject to political bias, and political commentators not bothering to read wikipedia at all and getting their opinion from people complaining about wikipedia.
As you correctly note, most of wikipedia is pretty straightforward. My 2 biggest complaints are editors nitpicking about the quality or lack of references, and a too-conventional view of emerging research, particularly in the field of health.
(Score: 2) by jb on Saturday October 18, @09:14AM
Agreed. From what little of it I've read, most of the technical articles don't seem to suffer from any kind of bias at all. Different story for some of the biographical articles though, or others about certain organisations, movements or even countries, past and present.
Yes, tree frog taxonomies sound like a pretty non-contentious topic to me too (although I admit I know absolutely nothing about them!). Chaucer on the other hand has most certainly been a bit of a political hot topic before. Believe it or not, at various times some politicians have actually suggested Bowdlerising his Canterbury Tales, or even removing that work from state schools' English lit curricula altogether. Very few topics are more politically polarising than censorship. Mind you, I have no idea at all whether wikipedia's coverage of Chaucer comments on those incidents or not and if so how neutrally (having read the original many years ago, I never felt any need to go looking for anyone else's summary of it).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Friday October 17, @07:15AM
I give it a month before someone files a lawsuit because Grok sucked up proprietary content and tried to publish it as its own.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday October 17, @10:02AM (5 children)
What is with his naming schemes? Isn't X then it's Grok. Is he a one bit mind? It's one or the other. I'm surprised he wasn't going to call it Xpedia or GroX or something such, or was all those taken? Not sure if a wikipedia replacement was what was needed. Wikipedia already have a reference problem, as in it's a bad reference since its so easily editable.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Ingar on Friday October 17, @10:10AM (1 child)
Yes.
Love is a three-edged sword: heart, soul, and reality.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday October 17, @11:34PM
Xes, rather, the preceding letter.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by epitaxial on Friday October 17, @12:07PM (2 children)
He's always been a weird asshole. As a child he talked shit and was pushed down a flight of stairs. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/elon-musks-dad-debunks-bullying-205829573.html [yahoo.com]
(Score: 2) by ichthus on Friday October 17, @12:42PM
Yeah, wow. That's so weird.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 17, @11:36PM
Either not pushed hard enough or the flight of stairs was too short. Or both.
(Score: 4, Informative) by HeadlineEditor on Friday October 17, @02:56PM (3 children)
Something similar has existed for a while:
https://infogalactic.com/info/Main_Page [infogalactic.com]
(Score: 2) by HeadlineEditor on Friday October 17, @02:57PM
edit: Infogalactic does not use AI at all - but was at least in part created because of a perception of Wikipedia as biased somehow.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday October 17, @04:30PM (1 child)
There's also Conservapedia which has been around for quite some time. I guess that wasn't conservative enough for Musk though. Maybe because Conservapedia is quick to acknowledge that the Holocaust happened, and is pretty accurate about who it targeted and how and why.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Saturday October 18, @04:47AM
That's only because it was started when you had to have at least a slim veneer of caring about reality to be taken seriously. You didn't have to take reality seriously as evidenced by most of the articles, but you had to at least pretend to care about reality.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Tork on Friday October 17, @03:50PM
Pardon me for being skeptical, but MechaHitler is still fresh on my mind.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈 - Give us ribbiti or make us croak! 🐸
(Score: 4, Insightful) by srobert on Friday October 17, @06:08PM
I know that Wikipedia has some inaccuracies. But I would trust Wikipedia all day over anything connected to Elon Sieg Heil Musk.