For billionaires, the whole world becomes a big candy shop where everything you fancy, —newspapers, TV networks, movie studios, sports teams, social media apps—everything, is for sale.
…Well, almost everything. For years Elon Musk, still the richest man in the world, has tried for years to get his hands on Wikipedia: the free, volunteer-based, open-sourced, online encyclopedia which quickly replaced traditional models like Britannica or Larousse as the easiest, most available source of reliable(ish) information.
A hugely popular webpage visited by billions of people all across the globe, disseminating information you can’t personally control(like that Nazi salute he famously threw early this year)? Wikipedia has basically become the great white whale to Elon’s Ahab.
The Wikimedia Foundation (which hosts the encyclopedia) is a non-profit organization, hence it’s never been for sale and rely on public donations to keep their online projects afloat. On one of his famous displays of immaturity, in 2023 he offered to donate $1 billion dollars if they officially changed their name to Dickipedia —I’m sure Jimmy Wales, its main founder, was very amused by that.
That was just part of an ongoing crusade aimed at delegitimizing Wikipedia’s usefulness, claiming its pages were ‘too woke’ and leaving ‘conservative views’ out; a campaign fully supported by several others of his elite Silicon Valley brethren, who also have an axe to grind with the information circulating about them in the online encyclopedia —you would think rich libertarians would be delighted with an organization run by people who work for free, with the goal of defending the dissemination of free information unrestricted by government oversight… but ‘free speech’ is something they support as long as it agrees with their point of view.
Elon’s ‘plan B’ to have an online encyclopedia that bends to his will? build one of his own.
The project is called Grokipedia —I guess ‘Xpedia’ was too similar to the existing travel booking page? — and as the name implies, it will rely on X-Ai’s proprietary artificial intelligence system (Grok) to curate the encyclopedic entries and make them ‘more neutral’ and accurate.
Beyond Musk's long-time beef with Wikipedia, 'Grokipedia' appears to have been created at the suggestion of the All In Podcast tech-douches when they interviewed Musk a few weks ago, simply because they don't like their Wikipedia bio pages.
— Weird Bros (@weirdbros.bsky.social) September 30, 2025 at 4:09 PM
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Despite Musk’s employees working grueling hours to make the deadline demanded by their employer for the launch of the new version of Grok 4 —a photo circulating online allegedly shows camping tents set on the floors of the corporate offices, concordant with the ‘996’ philosophy still prevalent in Silicon Valley— official launch of Grokipedia has been postponed until the end of the week ‘to weed out the bias and propaganda’. Yet that hasn’t delayed early criticism which warns that Elon’s competitor to Wikipedia will hardly manage to achieve the ‘neutrality’ tone he keeps promising.
In this essay published at The Conversation, Trinity College’s professor Taha Yasseri acknowledges the fact that Wikipedia is far from being a perfect, unbiased depository of human knowledge. For starters, their statutes of forbidding ‘primary sources’ leaves the room open to the bias expounded by the ‘respectable’ sources they cite—something Greg and I informally discussed on a recent Patreon video discussing the shenanigans of Wikipedia’s Guerrilla Skeptics, when some editors were threatening to delete the page on celebrated paranormal researcher Jenny Randles (Greg went into more details about the messy way in which the editors handled the situation on his Bluesky account).
There is also the issue of demographics: In the English language version at least, research has shown that the large majority of Wiki editors are male. And since many of the sources referenced by editors were historically written by men, that inevitably leads to a gender bias. Add to that an indirect economic bias, since those who would be willing and able to volunteer to write and edit entries would do so during their spare time; meaning they are probably not too subject to the punching of a card at 8 in the morning, or working extra hours to make ends meet.
Over the years, we here at The Daily Grail have expressed our criticism of the way Wikipedia handles controversial subjects, like UFOs, alternative history, and psychic phenomena. We are more than aware that there are people embedded within the ranks of their editorial teams, with a mission to expunge and censor information pertaining to the topics we try to cover on this page with a bit more open-mindedness—leaving our readers to have a final say on the matter.
…And yet, we remain wholeheartedly supportive to Wikipedia’s mission and ethos. Yes, they kinda suck at documenting the ‘woo woo’ (que será, será…) but we applaud their decision to keep relying on human contributors instead of AI technologies to edit entries, since LLM’s are subject to hallucinating misinformation—especially when those at the wheels of the technology deliberately tweak their algorithms to reflect their own personal perspective; resulting in embarrassing displays like Grok spewing terms like ‘Mecha-Hitler’ to its users.
Going back to Yasseri’s essay, he’s not entirely closed to the use of AI tools to help in the use of moderating Wiki entries if properly implemented—they can alert human editors, for example, when bad actors are distorting pages with sensitive content too frequently. But he warns how the ‘for profit’ nature of Grok and X-Ai will more than likely distort the incentives behind Grokipedia; not unlike, I would assume, how scientific research funded by commercial ventures always seek to lead information toward a desired outcome —e.g. how tobacco companies tried to bury data showing an unquestionable link between smoking and cancer.
Even as I type this, a great number of Twitter users (perhaps millions) actively use Grok as an unofficial fact-checker of content on that platform, to the point that it has become a sort of comedic cliché highlighting a worrying tendency of people to rely on a machine response, instead of applying their own critical skills.
Those skills are precisely what we need now more than ever. Just like Wikipedia is used by seasoned internet citizens as a starting point to acquire information on a particular topic, —and it is still frowned upon by college professors if their students use it as their sole reference—any search result or entry automatically generated by an LLM should be equally taken with skepticism by default. That goes for either Grok, OpenAI, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, and every other AI that Silicon Valley is trying to embed into our daily lives uninvited.
The beautiful thing about the Enlightenment era of the 17th and 18th centuries—the age that brought us the first Encyclopédie— is that it was inspired by a desire to bring knowledge and understanding to everyone, regardless of social status or religious dogmas. Tyrants have always perceived this as dangerous, and in an age in which if they can’t no longer burn the knowledge that makes them uncomfortable, they will seek to replace it with digital falsehoods and alternative realities.
I for one would rather live in a world where Wikipedia undermines the truth about psychic research, than a world in which Grokipedia undermines the truth about the Holocaust.
