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Posted by ColinWright 10/29/2025

Turns Out, Wikipedia Isn't That 'Woke' as Grokipedia Rips Off Most of Its Pages(uk.pcmag.com)
52 points | 37 comments
mikkupikku 10/29/2025|
I expected they would. I was curious if they'd copy the errors too, so I checked my go-to example of errors on wikipedia lasting for years.

Wikipedia's version:

> Brilliant Pebbles was a non-nuclear system of satellite-based interceptors designed to use high-velocity, watermelon-sized, teardrop-shaped tungsten projectiles as kinetic warheads.[79][80] It was designed to operate in conjunction with the Brilliant Eyes sensor system. The project was conceived in November 1986 by Lowell Wood at LLNL.[81] Detailed studies were undertaken by several advisory boards, including the Defense Science Board and JASON, in 1989.

Grok's version:

> The Brilliant Pebbles program, initiated in 1990 by the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO), represented a shift toward distributed, cost-effective constellations of micro-satellites, each approximately 45-100 kg and equipped with autonomous processors for onboard target discrimination and interception.

Both contain errors, although different errors.

Herring 10/29/2025||
This has been tried many times, eg conservapedia comes to mind. It rarely works. You generally have to take over a successful brand then drive it to the ground. You can't just start off with a shitty brand when there are alternatives.
normalaccess 10/29/2025||
I think all Grokipedia is doing is exposing Grok's internal LLM "facts" into a preloaded and formatted site. Modern LLMs already have all of wikipedia internalized and can act as a wiki so why not make it an explicit feature?

Once that is in place you can make Grok eat it's own tail by using Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Grok with Grokaiedia (that is now crowdsourced for updates).

This may offset the side effects of model collapse from AIs consuming their own synthetic outputs with enough humanity sprinkled into the mix.

Herring 10/29/2025||
Yes and also Hitler is quite interesting outside the Nazi bit. I don't know why everyone obsesses over that.
normalaccess 10/29/2025||
I have no clue what you are referring too. The word Nazi gets used so much and for so many things that it has lost all meaning to me due to semantic satiation. You'll have to me more specific.

  Semantic satiation -- a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener,[1] who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds. Extended inspection or analysis (staring at the word or phrase for a long time) in place of repetition also produces the same effect.
array_key_first 10/29/2025||
Turns out having your ideology be fundamentally post-truth and anti-education means you don't make a very good knowledge base!

Whodda thunk?

Herring 10/29/2025||
They don’t care about quality. It’s like a hedge fund buying a struggling company and watering down the product. They hope to make a profit before loyal customers wise up. Pump and dump, Wall Street does it all the time.

America was struggling because of healthcare, college costs, rising rents, mortgages, overall inequality, China rising etc. Trump/Musk/etc saw their chance.

CupricTea 10/29/2025||
It's an open secret that encyclopedia authors, dictionary authors, and map makers all plagiarize one another, to the point where cartographers have added fictitious "trap streets" to catch others from plagiarizing their maps, and lexicographers have added Mountweazels.

It doesn't surprise me nor does it upset me that Grokipedia would include Wikipedia as an input source, nor do I feel like they're hypocritical for doing so given their stated goals. If you think a source has a bias problem, it makes sense to use that source for reference while applying your own bias checking to it.

sharperguy 10/29/2025||
While I recognize the dangers of splintering sources of truth into various fragmented opinion spaces, if you were to fork wikipedia it would make sense to simply clone all the information there and only change the parts that you consider false. Ideally, you make a reasonable case for why particular sources approved by wikipedia are invalid and why some sources considered invalid by wikipedia are indeed valid, and systematically remove all claims covered by invalid sources while verifying further modifications against the updated set of sources.
xigoi 10/29/2025||
I find it curious that the Wikipedia article on George Floyd specifically mentions in the first sentence that the police officer was white. Grokipedia’s description seems more neutral.
archagon 10/30/2025|
I mean, it may be difficult to understand or properly contextualize the subsequent BLM movement without pointing out the racial aspect of this execution.
xigoi 10/30/2025||
The “racial aspect” is a projection of people who want to make everything about race. Do you think the situation would’ve been different if the officer was black?
archagon 10/30/2025||
Yes, it would have been massively different. I don't think BLM would have coalesced without it.
xigoi 10/30/2025||
Okay, so BLM is racist and only cares about violence if it fits their narrative, but what does that have to do with the situation?
ChrisArchitect 10/29/2025||
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45726459

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45737044

timdaub 10/29/2025||
Hey, if anyone thinks this article was wrongfully flagged, please contact me via my email in the description and lets talk. I'm building a startup related to moderation on social media so I'd like to user interview you
SilverElfin 10/29/2025||
Ripping off most of its pages doesn't mean it isn't woke. You can copy content on most of the noncontroversial topics that don't have political or ideological angles, while still offering different content on the topics that do.
burnte 10/29/2025||
Musk said it was full of partisans a bias, and the reality is the reverse. Too many confuse "you're biased" with "I don't like that."
JohnTHaller 10/29/2025|
Reality has a well-established liberal bias
bad_username 10/29/2025||
Bias is deviation from a baseline. What is the baseline here?

This sentence is meaningless.

CupricTea 10/29/2025|||
I have only seen such statements made in bad faith to mean "my subjective political opinions are objective reality". It's quackery. I see people on the conservative end say it too.
tzs 10/30/2025|||
It is not meaningless.

The meaning is that when things that should not be political questions because they have objectively correct answers do become political in recent years most of the time it is liberals whose positions match the objectively correct answer.

Note that this doesn't necessarily mean that liberals are more often correct than conservatives on how to deal with those things--that often is something that does not have an objectively correct answer and so is something that people can reasonably disagree over and so can reasonably become political.

For example consider climate change. How to address climate change is something that does not have an objectively correct answer and so you can't say that any given political group is right or wrong on that.

However, the question of whether or not the increases in the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere since pre-industrial time are most due to human activity is a question that does have an objectively correct answer. The C in CO2 comes in several different isotopes, and by looking at changes in the ratios between those isotopes in the C in atmospheric CO2 it is possible to determine that most of the increase has come from burning fossil fuels.

If a political group is taking the position that the rise in CO2 is not due to human activity they are objectively wrong, and the phrase that reality has a well known bias against that group is a way of highlighting that.

palmotea 10/29/2025|||
> Reality has a well-established liberal bias

Only if you're a liberal who confuses the information you receive, usually filtered through other liberals, for reality (which many do).

tl;dr: if you think reality agrees with your politics, you're actually just in a bubble.

delaminator 10/29/2025||
except for the first 300,000 years
array_key_first 10/29/2025||
If you actually look back towards all of human history and analyze the conservative and progressive positions at the time, you will find yourself almost exclusively siding with progressives.

Conservatism, as an ideology, is built on the belief that conservatism has always been wrong, until about 20 years ago to just now. That's what they're trying to conserve: always the very, very near past.

delaminator 10/31/2025|||
The "Well-established Liberal bias of Reality" is what I am refuting, not Progressivism vs Conservatism.
AnimalMuppet 10/29/2025||||
I don't think that's accurate. Many US conservatives think that the US Constitution and the Federalist Papers have ideas that are right and are worth conserving. Many would think that the ideas of limited government and government by the people are worth preserving.
array_key_first 10/30/2025||
From what I've seen, close to zero US conservatives think that right now. They might say they think that, but obviously you can't just listen to people. You have to look at their actions.
palmotea 10/30/2025|||
> Conservatism, as an ideology, is built on the belief that conservatism has always been wrong, until about 20 years ago to just now.

That's hilariously wrong: you're basically claiming current-day conservatives [or at least Trump I conservatives, if you want to be hyper-literal) are all about conserving [Democratic-party] Clintonism. Pretty soon they'll all in on Obamacare? You're trying to be clever but have no idea what you're talking about.

array_key_first 10/30/2025||
I mean... yeah. All this talk about cutting services and fixing the deficit. That's Clinton stuff, that's what he did. That was his platform.

The anti-gay stuff? Uh, yeah, Clinton. Anti-drug rhetoric? Clinton! Protecting our borders? Believe it or not, Clinton!

> Pretty soon they'll all in on Obamacare?

I mean, yeah. The entire concept of Obamacare was a compromise to soothe conservatives. It solidified the power and necessity of private insurance in America by entrenching it in regulation.

They're not gonna be for universal healthcare, but Obamacare? You bet your ass that's going to be their platform in a few years.

palmotea 10/31/2025|||
> The anti-gay stuff? Uh, yeah

You're backwards here. IIRC, don't-ask-don't-tell was progressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_ask,_don%27t_tell

> The policy prohibited military personnel from discriminating against or harassing closeted homosexual or bisexual service members or applicants, ... This relaxation of legal restrictions on service by gays and lesbians in the armed forces.

> ...the DADT policy specified that superiors should not initiate an investigation of a service member's orientation without witnessing disallowed behaviors. ... Unauthorized investigations and harassment of suspected servicemen and women led to an expansion of the policy to "don't ask, don't tell, don't pursue, don't harass".

And Clinton didn't have a choice on DOMA and criticized it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_Marriage_Act:

> passed both houses of Congress by large, veto-proof majorities. Support was bipartisan, though about a third of the Democratic caucus in both the House and Senate opposed it. Clinton criticized DOMA as "divisive and unnecessary". He nonetheless signed it into law in September 1996.

tl;dr: Anyone who believes or defends the idea:

>>> Conservatism, as an ideology, is built on the belief that conservatism has always been wrong, until about 20 years ago to just now. That's what they're trying to conserve: always the very, very near past.

Doesn't know what they're talking about and doesn't have their facts straight.

palmotea 10/31/2025|||
>> That's hilariously wrong: you're basically claiming current-day conservatives [or at least Trump I conservatives, if you want to be hyper-literal) are all about conserving [Democratic-party] Clintonism.

> I mean... yeah. All this talk about cutting services and fixing the deficit. That's Clinton stuff, that's what he did. That was his platform.

JFC, do you know nothing? Conservatives aren't seeking to conserve Clintonism, Clinton co-opted a lot of conservative policies (see: "triangulation"). That's the source any overlap, and conservatives still hate him for all the other stuff.

The idea that conservatives' only ideology is preserving the status quo of exactly N years ago, is completely unsupported by the facts and frankly ludicrous. Give it up. There's some genuine radicalism there, and whatever things they seek to "conserve" tend to fit in one of a few ideological frameworks that drive what they pick and choose.