There have long been debates as to whether Wikipedia is a trustworthy source, whether there were Western, male, English-speaking, and/or liberal biases in its 65 million pages, or how Wikipedia resolves conflicts (or does not!). There is even a site that lets you see which topics produce the most conflicts in different languages on Wikipedia (In English, it is politics, but in Japanese and Chinese, it is television and movies, in Arabic, it is over geographical locations, and in Spanish and Portuguese, it is over sports!)
More recently, the debate has shifted to focus on allegations of liberal bias. In 2024, the Manhattan Institute (a right-wing US think tank) published a study that Wikipedia relied on left-leaning news outlets.
Last week, on 27 October, xAI (which many of you will know as Elon Musk’s AI company) launched ‘Grokipedia’ (based on Grok, xAI’s LLM) as an alternative to Wikipedia. The rationale was driven at least in part by Musk’s concern that Wikipedia was too ‘woke’ and he did not like how, for example, the controversy over his (alleged) Nazi salute was presented. Grokipedia relies heavily on Wikipedia but is curated so that you won’t be able to find a page on the Nazi salute controversy or on his father or his maternal grandfather. Some pundits describe Grokipedia as a massive own goal and/or one that pushes far-right-wing talking points. Like other LLMs, there is evidence of hallucination (when I tried to search Grokipedia for ‘MechaHitler’, the only entry I found was a gibberish page called ‘Part IiI’).
Rather than focus entirely on Grokipedia, which is less than two weeks old, I wanted to shift the focus to Wikipedia, which will turn 25 years old in January.
Wikipedia is the only website in the top 10 (indeed in the top 50) most visited websites that is not a commercial enterprise. Do you find Wikipedia’s model appealing? Why do you think this one non-commercial activity has remained so successful (and/or why have no others been similarly successful?)
To what extent have you used (or even edited) Wikipedia? Has your usage changed over time, particularly since the advent of genAI? Is Wikipedia still relevant? Do you believe that Grokipedia (or similar LLM-based efforts) will be successful in displacing Wikipedia?