What Wikipedia and Grokipedia are saying about each other

Elon Musk’s Grokipedia encyclopedia is now on-line, difficult volunteer-edited Wikipedia with a brand new instrument that comes with Grok, the big language mannequin chatbot developed by Musk’s synthetic intelligence firm, xAI.

Musk is positioning Grokipedia as a substitute for Wikipedia, which he referred to as “Wokepedia” in an X publish final December. Musk has lofty ambitions for the brand new encyclopedia: His acknowledged aim is to create “an open supply, complete assortment of all information.”

Critics and pundits are busy evaluating the 2 websites and the way they current a spread of controversial subjects. However we are able to additionally study a few of their variations by asking a easy query: What do Wikipedia and Grokipedia say about one another?

Trying to find one another

A seek for “Wikipedia” on Grokipedia yielded 6,047 outcomes early Wednesday, a quantity that displays each the work that is gone into Grokipedia and the problem of competing with an encyclopedia that is been rising for almost 25 years.

On Wikipedia, a seek for “Grokipedia” returned 13 outcomes.

In the meantime, two days after its Monday launch, a seek for “Grokipedia” on Grokipedia didn’t return a devoted entry. As an alternative, the eight search outcomes ranged from a basic entry about on-line encyclopedias to seven entries primarily about Wikipedia.

Typing “grokipedia” into Grokipedia’s URL to see if the brand new encyclopedia may need an entry that is not but searchable returns a message: “This web page does not exist … but.”

Bias and imitation

On its web page about Wikipedia, Grokipedia says the location is famend for its “unprecedented scale, accessibility, and function in democratizing info.” However Grokipedia additionally says Wikipedia is the topic of “persistent criticisms concerning factual reliability, susceptibility to vandalism and hoaxes, and systemic ideological biases — notably a left-leaning slant in protection of political figures and subjects.”

The prolonged article makes use of types of the phrase “bias” dozens of instances. It alleges that Wikipedia suffers from “ideological skew” to the left, and states that the location’s choice for a impartial standpoint drawn from dependable sources can as a substitute reinforce narratives that “align with institutional biases in academia and media.”

On its web page about Grokipedia, Wikipedia says that Musk “positioned Grokipedia as a substitute for Wikipedia that may ‘purge out the propaganda.'” It additionally notes that Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who has turn out to be a critic of the long-running encyclopedia, welcomed Grokipedia’s arrival.

The Wikipedia article about Grokipedia highlights criticisms of the brand new web site, reminiscent of media studies that Grokipedia’s article about Elon Musk omits point out of the controversy over a gesture he made earlier this 12 months “which many considered as resembling a Nazi salute.” It additionally says critics allege Grokipedia promotes right-leaning views and depends an excessive amount of on AI instruments.

Wikipedia additionally notes that Grokipedia appears to have pulled textual content from Wikipedia, stating, “Some articles are almost similar to their Wikipedia entries.”

In some instances, Grokipedia duplicates Wikipedia content material, as famous by media retailers and Wikipedia customers. Grokipedia’s web page on “buttocks,” as an illustration, is nearly a replica of the Wikipedia web page (albeit with out photographs).

In that and comparable instances, the articles acknowledge that their “content material was tailored from Wikipedia.”

Musk mentioned on the All-In Podcast convention in September that Grok was working to judge info from sources reminiscent of Wikipedia pages after which “rewrite the web page to … take away the falsehoods, appropriate the half-truths and add the lacking context.”

Like Wikipedia, Grokipedia customers can see an article’s edit historical past. However whereas Wikipedia customers can immediately edit a narrative, Grokipedia presents instruments to ask questions and submit a correction.

“Wikipedia’s information is — and at all times will probably be — human,” the Wikimedia Basis mentioned in an announcement to NPR. Noting the location’s ethos of open collaboration and consensus, it added, “This human-created information is what AI firms depend on to generate content material; even Grokipedia wants Wikipedia to exist.”

Nuts and bolts

Numbers rule the web, and these two websites are pretty correct about their rival’s measurement, with some caveats.

Wikipedia, as an illustration, says that Grokipedia had “about 900,000 AI-generated articles” as of Oct. 28. That very same day, Grokipedia’s web site mentioned it had 885,279 articles out there — a determine printed on its touchdown web page. The Wikipedia entry for Grokipedia did not reference that exact quantity, and it cited an article from the Indian monetary information web site Moneycontrol as a substitute of Grokipedia’s knowledge — maybe to seize a historic file of a determine that will probably be up to date. An editor later up to date the quotation to level to an Axios article.

Grokipedia precisely states that as of October 2025, Wikipedia had greater than 7 million articles in English, in the principle entry about its older rival. However additional down that web page, the entry muddies the water a bit by stating that Wikipedia had “over 6.8 million articles in English alone by October 2025.”

In accordance with Wikipedia’s working depend on the Dimension of Wikipedia web page, the English web site had greater than 6.9 million articles as of January 2025.

Disclosure: NPR CEO Katherine Maher is the previous CEO of the Wikimedia Basis.