On October 27, Elon Musk’s xAI launched Grokipedia, an artificial intelligence-generated encyclopedia intended to compete with Wikipedia as a reliable reference source. Version 0.1 debuted with 885,279 articles (compared with 7,091,989 articles and a volunteer editing corps of 202,416 active editors for English Wikipedia).
Prior AI-generated encyclopedia projects include EndlessWiki and Infinipedia, which have very short articles on Cornell. The common challenge of any new Wikipedia rival is that Google always ranks a Wikipedia page among the top five responses on just about any search. It is not clear that Wikipedia will ever be displaced in the Google algorithm. Also, the Wikimedia Foundation endowment now exceeds $144 million, so Wikipedia will remain well-funded over the long term.
According to WIRED magazine, “While many of the [Grokipedia] pages WIRED saw on launch day appeared fairly similar to Wikipedia in terms of tone and content, a number of notable Grokipedia entries denounced the mainstream media, highlighted conservative viewpoints, and sometimes perpetuated historical inaccuracies.”
Grokipedia Covers Cornell University
To put Grokipedia to the test, the Cornell Review examined its “Cornell University” article. The article had at least ten errors. For example, it claims that there are “over 1,000 club teams and extensive intramural leagues coordinated through Recreation Services,” but that is not supported by the cited references and may have the AI bot confused with the number of registered student organizations.
Grokipedia is guilty of “recentism,” placing far more emphasis on recent events and controversies than on the scope and substance of the institution.
AI-Based Correction Process
Unlike Wikipedia articles, which anyone can edit directly, Grokipedia entries are corrected by submitting suggestions to an AI bot, which explains how it evaluated each proposed change. As an experiment, two corrections and one suggestion were submitted with the AI-bot updating the page within 7 minutes. These are documented on the “Edits History” tab of each article. Grokipedia quickly changed the opening year of the Johnson Art Museum from 1980 to 1973. It accepted an update of the endowment’s return from 8.7% for fiscal year 2024 to 12.3% for fiscal year 2025. The AI bot also accepted the suggestion that the section on programs located outside of Ithaca and NYC should include the “Cornell in Washington” program and generated its own paragraph to cover that missing campus.
Although the AI bot appears to do a good job of responding to proposed corrections, there are very few corrections being submitted to Grokipedia so far.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia’s “Cornell University” article has been edited 8,278 times by 2,868 different editors. A group of Cornell students, staff, and alumni worked in 2006 to polish the article to the point that it won a “featured article” designation from outside reviewers and appeared on the front page of Wikipedia on September 20, 2006. This was part of a program to improve article quality and to promote one article each day to Wikipedia’s overall audience.
However, some of those editors got involved in removing boosterism from articles about other colleges, including the University of Miami. Their changes to the University of Miami articles provoked a group of editors who were writing very detailed, season-by-season accounts of the Miami Hurricanes football team, and an “edit war” was fought out between the two groups. Because of the “instability” of the Cornell article, it was demoted from a featured article rating in December 2008. Elon Musk claims that Grokipedia’s use of an AI bot to update articles not only ensures more timely updates than volunteers’ edits, but also eliminates the toxic interactions that surround Wikipedia.
Wikipedia has tried to recruit Cornell students to edit Wikipedia by funding the Cornell University Library to sponsor “editathons.” Students are offered a free lunch in exchange for attending a session that explains the editing process, and the names of women with a Cornell connection are assigned for writing biographies. This is in response to a criticism that Wikipedia has fewer biographies of women than of men.
Conservapedia
Conservative attorney Andrew Schlafly, son of Phyllis Schlafly, founded Conservapedia in 2006 as a reaction to what he found to be a leftist bias in Wikipedia. One of the most popular Conservapedia articles is Examples of Bias in Wikipedia.
Conservapedia uses the same wiki software as Wikipedia. Both websites rely upon volunteer editors. Conservapedia has 58,595 pages, which have been edited 2,162,929 times since 2006. Because Wikipedia articles are ranked high by Google, they draw a lot of viewer traffic, which in turn draws public relations editors who want to show article subjects in a good light. In contrast, Conservapedia does not attract many viewers or editors, and its active editor corps focus on a very narrow set of topics.
Conservapedia’s “Cornell University” article is just two short paragraphs and then lists three comparable institutions: “University of Southern California, Ohio State University, Ave Maria University.” The article has not been updated since 2020. Some details, like Cornell’s endowment size, have not been updated since 2011.
Being a careful lawyer, Schlafly added a general disclaimer that nobody can guarantee the “validity of any information found here.” Although conservative, some articles, such as Obama’s Religion, are a bit extreme.
Conservapedia hosts the “Conservative Bible Project”, a new English translation of the Bible in order to remove or alter terms described as importing “liberal bias.” On October 7, 2009, Stephen Colbert called for his viewers to incorporate him into the Conservapedia Bible as a biblical figure, and many viewers edited the Conservapedia Bible to include his name. Then, on December 8, 2009, Colbert invited Schlafly to be interviewed on the Colbert Report. The result was greater exposure and editing of Conservapedia.
Conservapedia was so controversial that a second wiki website, RationalWiki, was established to document and criticize it. In 2022, Slate noted that Conservapedia “has long floundered with minimal readership.”
A Google search on “Cornell University” ranks Wikipedia’s article second, and neither Grokipedia nor Conservapedia appeared in the top fifty results.
