Grokipedia

• 1. Introduction

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  Grokipedia, an online encyclopedia run by the American company xAI, opened to the public on the 27th of October 2025. Its first release was labeled "v 0.1" and arrived with more than 800,000 articles. English Wikipedia, by comparison, held over seven million entries in 2025. Many of the pages a visitor reads were produced by Grok, a large language model owned by the same company. Others began life as Wikipedia articles, altered to varying degrees. That mix raises questions this documentary will chase. Why did a billionaire decide the world needed a rival to Wikipedia? What happens when a machine writes, checks and edits its own encyclopedia? And can the readers, search engines and chatbots that lean on it trust what it says?

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• 2. A Feud Years In The Making

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  In 2018, the newspaper Haaretz observed that Wikipedia "has succeeded in being accused of being both too liberal and too conservative, and has critics from across the spectrum". Wikipedia is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, and its possible bias has long been studied and debated. Elon Musk, the founder of xAI, was once friendly toward it. In 2021 he expressed affection for the site on its 20th anniversary.

  By 2022, Musk was arguing that Wikipedia was "losing its objectivity". In 2023 he said he would donate US$1 billion to the project if it was pejoratively renamed "Dickipedia". In December 2024 he called for a boycott of donations, calling the site "Wokepedia". In January 2025 he posted a series of statements on Twitter denouncing how Wikipedia described an incident at Donald Trump's second inauguration.

  The idea for a replacement took shape in September 2025 at the All-In podcast conference. Musk was speaking with David O. Sacks, the White House advisor on AI and cryptocurrency, about how Grok consumed data from Wikipedia and other sources to learn about the world. Sacks suggested publishing that knowledge base as an artifact called "Grokipedia". He said, "Wikipedia is so biased, it's a constant war".

  Musk then announced that xAI was building a new encyclopedia to rival Wikipedia by addressing its perceived biases, errors and ideological slants. He promised it would "purge out the propaganda" that he believes Wikipedia promotes. He described Wikipedia as "woke" and an "extension of legacy media propaganda".

  Grokipedia joined a line of ideologically driven alternatives. Conservapedia, a conservative project, launched in 2006. Ruwiki, friendly to the Russian government, launched in 2023. Grokipedia differed in its core reliance on artificial intelligence rather than a community of human editors.

  On the 6th of October 2025, Musk announced that an early version was two weeks away. The project slipped briefly while the team worked on problems with content quality.

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• 3. How Grok Writes

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  Visitors to Grokipedia land on a minimalist homepage with little more than a large search bar. Behind it, the Grok model both generates and fact-checks the articles. Readers cannot edit a page directly. Logged-in users can open a pop-up form to suggest new articles or corrections, and Grok reviews every submission.

  Forbes named AMD, Lamborghini and PlayStation 5 as articles copied from Wikipedia. Some copied pages were republished almost verbatim, with a disclaimer saying the content was "adapted from Wikipedia" under a Creative Commons license. Other pages were rewritten from scratch by Grok. On the 31st of October 2025, Musk said the duplication was deliberate. His team had told Grok to compile Wikipedia's top 1 million articles and make content changes to them.

  Two licenses govern the text. Articles attributed to Wikipedia carry a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. The rest fall under the "X Community License". It accepts reuse and remixing for "non-commercial and research purposes". It also allows commercial use that abides by all the guardrails in xAI's Acceptable Use Policy.

  A comparative textual analysis looked at the most heavily edited matched pairs of Grokipedia and Wikipedia articles. Grokipedia entries were substantially longer and less densely referenced. The authors read that as a sign that machine-written encyclopedias favor exposition over source-based validation.

  Version 0.2 arrived on the 21st of November 2025. From then on, Grok reviews and implements approved suggested edits, and a small panel rotates through the names of recently edited articles. In February 2026, the Columbia Journalism Review reported an analysis by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. It found that Grok had increasingly begun suggesting and approving edits to the site without human involvement. AI-generated suggestions overtook human submissions in December 2025 and made up more than three-quarters of proposed changes. Concern grew after Grok proposed or modified politically sensitive content.

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• 4. Errors And Evidence

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  In November 2025, PolitiFact reviewed Grokipedia and found trouble wherever its text differed from Wikipedia's. The new material included unsourced claims, misleading or opinionated statements and occasionally incorrect citations. Some pages credited sources that did not exist. Others carried no citations at all beyond a note that they were adapted from Wikipedia. The page on the Canadian singer Feist was copied directly except for one added line saying her father died in May 2021. It cited a 2017 article that made no such claim. Other pages relied on Instagram Reels and user-generated content, which Wikipedia calls "generally unacceptable as sources".

  Wired reported that the encyclopedia falsely claims pornography worsened the AIDS epidemic and that social media may be fueling a rise in transgender people. LGBTQ Nation pointed to an article on "HIV/AIDS skepticism" that claims there is legitimate scientific critique of the fact that HIV causes AIDS. The Verge found articles that legitimized ideas against scientific consensus on vaccines and autism, COVID-19, race and intelligence, and climate change.

  The Guardian examined pages that supported discredited 20th-century scientific racism. Its page on eugenics backed the theory with alleged "empirical evidence" and dismissed criticism as suppression by left-wing sources. Several related pages listed purported skull measurements for types labeled "Negroid", "Mongoloid", "Armenoid", "Nordic" and "Ethiopid".

  PinkNews was especially critical of the transgender-related articles. It said they claimed being trans is a choice and a "social contagion", promoted the discredited rapid-onset gender dysphoria controversy and misused statistics to argue that trans identification is declining. It added that they rewrote LGBTQ+ history to suggest trans people were not part of the queer rights movement before the 1990s. They also cited the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has classified as an anti-transgender hate group.

  Individual people found mistakes in their own entries. The British historian Richard J. Evans reported multiple false statements about himself. The researcher Renée DiResta found that her article claimed her former research team at the Stanford Internet Observatory censored 22 million tweets during the 2020 United States presidential election. It also invented their involvement in Twitter's moderation of content about Hunter Biden's laptop.

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• 5. The Owner's Fingerprints

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  In January 2025, Musk made a gesture at Trump's second inauguration that many viewed as resembling a Nazi salute. NBC News noted that, unlike his Wikipedia article, his Grokipedia entry did not mention it. Time magazine wrote that the entry sometimes "describes him in rapturous terms while downplaying, or even omitting, several of his controversies".

  Reviewers found the same alignment on other subjects Musk has spoken about forcefully. These include gender transition, gender identities, Tesla, Neuralink and the former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. Time added that the encyclopedia gives more detail on Musk's views, including the idea of a "woke mind virus". Musk claimed it "killed" his estranged transgender daughter, Vivian Wilson, who is alive. Futurism reported that the article on the Tesla Cybertruck contained language promoting the vehicle and criticizing media coverage of it and Tesla.

  The journalist Richard Cooke, who wrote a political biography of Musk, told The Guardian that "Grokipedia is a copy of Wikipedia but one where in each instance that Wikipedia disagrees with the richest man in the world, it's 'rectified' so that it's congruent with them".

  David Swan of The Sydney Morning Herald argued that Musk's bias matters less than how easily it can be applied at scale. He wrote: "Other billionaires and authoritarian regimes are watching".

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• 6. Politics On The Page

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  The Atlantic's Matteo Wong noticed that the Grokipedia article on Adolf Hitler prioritizes his "rapid economic achievements" over events like the Holocaust. NBC News counted the difference. Wikipedia mentions the Holocaust in the first paragraph of its Hitler article, while Grokipedia mentions it only after 13,000 words.

  On the 17th of November 2025, The Guardian published an analysis of the encyclopedia. It found entries that "variously promote white nationalist talking points, praise neo-Nazis and other far-right figures, promote racist ideologies and white supremacist regimes, and attempt to revive concepts and approaches historically associated with scientific racism". It highlighted praise and defense of Jared Taylor, Kevin MacDonald, Revilo P. Oliver and William Luther Pierce. The entry on Pierce's 1978 book The Turner Diaries described its "advocacy for total racial war, rejection of democratic compromise and portrayal of mass extermination as moral imperative" as having merely "drawn scrutiny from institutions prone to framing such texts through lenses of hate rather than analyzing their appeal via first-principles incentives like group survival". NBC News noticed the phrase "advancement of peoples of European descent" used in place of terms like "white nationalist".

  The Guardian also noted the Holocaust denier David Irving, whom Grokipedia described as a symbol of "resistance to institutional suppression of unorthodox historical inquiry". The entry said this came in the face of "coordinated efforts to silence dissent rather than scholarly refutation". It added: "Despite mainstream dismissals from sources with evident anti-revisionist biases, such as advocacy groups, Irving's archival rigor continues to be praised within these circles." More broadly, several pages criticize academia and the news media as left-wing and accuse them of suppressing opposing views.

  The Intercept examined the page on Alternative for Germany, a far-right party. A section titled "Media Portrayals and Alleged Bias" served, in the outlet's words, "to parrot AfD's long-held claims that the media is biased and undermining them". The Intercept also reported that the site accuses the United Nations and NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch of focusing on "Israeli actions while minimizing Hamas's violations". It repeats Israeli government accusations that the UN agency for Palestine refugees is infiltrated by Hamas. It cites pro-Israel groups such as UN Watch and NGO Monitor.

  Wong also found that the article on the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine repeatedly cites Kremlin.ru. Meduza compared the site with the Kremlin-aligned Ruwiki. Grokipedia's treatment of the war was less overtly propagandistic, though it gave more favorable treatment to "Russian propaganda talking points" than Wikipedia did. Its coverage of Vladimir Putin was "less fawning" than Ruwiki's but still omitted noteworthy negative information. Meduza said it also omits scandals around Donald Trump, such as his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. The Texas-based site Chron observed that articles often cited "Texas Republican bloggers and advocacy groups" and that the coverage of Texas history tended to minimize the role of slavery.

  A 2026 analysis found that "many Grokipedia articles closely resemble their Wikipedia counterparts, while a considerable subset diverges". Where they diverge, the news media Grokipedia cites leans further right than the media Wikipedia cites. Some entries praise exclusionary communities on economic grounds, including those on Orania in South Africa and on Rhodesia. The Rhodesia entry says: "In retrospect, Rhodesia's era demonstrated effective resource management and institutional stability under constrained minority governance, yielding higher per capita incomes, literacy rates, and life expectancies for the broader population". It labels critics as having "institutional biases favoring rapid decolonization narratives".

  Agence France-Presse reported that several right-wing figures welcomed the site. Among them was the Russian far-right philosopher Aleksander Dugin, who praised his own Grokipedia article and said it was better than his page on Wikipedia.

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• 7. Traffic And Reach

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  Similarweb recorded a peak of over 460,000 website visits in the US on the 28th of October 2025, one day after launch. Traffic then fell sharply and settled near 35,000 visits per day between the 8th and the 11th of November. Meanwhile the library kept growing. By early 2026, the site held over 5.6 million articles.

  In January 2026, The Guardian reported that GPT-5.2 frequently cited Grokipedia in its responses, which raised fears of spreading misinformation through ChatGPT. The same month, The Verge reported that Google's AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini model, along with Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity AI, used Grokipedia for niche, obscure or highly specific factual questions. The outlet described these as "non-sensitive queries".

  A case study by SEO Engico tracked the site's rise in Google Search. Grokipedia received only 19 clicks from Google in November 2025. By January 2026 it reached roughly 3.2 million monthly clicks, with over 900,000 pages indexed and millions of ranking keywords. Analysts credited the jump partly to the site's technical structure and its large-scale production of machine-written pages.

  The climb did not last. In early February 2026, the SEO analysts Glenn Gabe and Malte Landwehr reported a significant drop in rankings across Google organic results, AI Overviews and AI Mode. The case study cited independent reviews that flagged citation problems, including references to low-credibility sources such as X conversations and neo-Nazi websites, plus instances of self-citation. By mid-February 2026, Grokipedia had reportedly lost much of its search visibility. Wikipedia ranked above it for searches on its own name.

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• 8. Verdicts And Rebuttals

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  The sociologist and physicist Taha Yasseri argued in The Conversation that Grokipedia may end up with biases just like Wikipedia, because large language models reflect the biases of their datasets. He acknowledged a difference. Wikipedia's "infrastructure is designed to make that bias visible and correctable". Anaïs Nony, a researcher at the University of Johannesburg, said Grokipedia seeks to "discredit scientific and collaborative work". L. K. Sellig, an AI researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute, described it as "cloaking misinformation".

  A May 2026 analysis in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences put it this way: "Wikipedia's openness renders bias visible and contestable through edits, disputes, and deliberation. Grokipedia replaces this process with opaque, automated authorship, embedding potential biases within model behavior rather than exposing them to scrutiny. Despite its stated corrective aim, Grokipedia functions less as an epistemic alternative than as an AI-mediated reconfiguration of Wikipedia."

  When The Guardian, NBC News and The Atlantic asked xAI for comment, each received the same automated reply: "Legacy Media Lies".

  A spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation answered that "Wikipedia's knowledge is , and always will be , human". The statement added that this human-created knowledge is what AI companies rely on, and that "even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist". Jimmy Wales, a Wikipedia co-founder, predicted that large language models would leave Grokipedia with "massive errors". Larry Sanger, another co-founder and a noted critic of Wikipedia, read his own Grokipedia entry. He found correct content missing from his Wikipedia article alongside hallucinated errors. The Wikipedia community has since deprecated Grokipedia as a source, citing problems with verifiability, circular sourcing and copyrighted material.

  Musk, for his part, has already pointed toward a grander destination. In November 2025 he said he eventually plans to rename the site Encyclopedia Galactica once it is "good enough", admitting it had a "long way to go". The name comes from a publication of that title in the works of Isaac Asimov and Douglas Adams. Musk hopes to send copies of the encyclopedia to "the Moon and Mars and out to deep space".

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