I woke up at 6am on Sunday morning feeling anxious and kind of hungover and opened Reddit. Somewhere near the top was a post called “TIL In 2002 a cave diver committed suicide by stabbing himself during a cave diving trip near Split, Croatia. Due to the nature of his death, it was initially investigated as a murder, but it was later discovered that he did so while lost in an underwater cave to escape the pain of drowning.” The post links to a Wikipedia page named “List of unusual deaths in the 21st centuryI spent the next two hours going down the Wikipedia rabbit hole of all kinds of horrifying and hard-to-imagine ways to die.
A day later, I noticed that the incredible social media account, Depths of Wikipedia, run by Annie Rouwerda, This is a completely amazing factBehind the scenes, there was vigorous conversation and debate by Wikipedia editors about what exactly constitutes an “unusual” death, and many previously listed “unusual” deaths were removed from the list for not being strange enough. For example: People who were killed by beach umbrellas are “no longer an unusual or unique occurrence”; “Hippos are extremely dangerous and very aggressive and there is nothing unusual about hippos killing people”; “The mysterious circumstances do not mean that his death itself was unusual.” It’s these edits and conversations that have happened collectively billions of times that make Wikipedia what it is, and what make it so human, so interesting, so useful.
Recently discovered that Wikipedia volunteers have a ridiculously high bar for “unusual deaths”
– Wikipedia Depths (@depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social) 2025-10-27T12:38:42.573Z
On Wednesday, as part of his ongoing war against Wikipedia because he doesn’t like his page, Elon Musk launched Grokepedia, a completely AI-generated “encyclopedia” that doesn’t serve anyone or anything else. Arrogance of the richest man in the worldAs others have already pointed out, Grow Wikipedia wants to be a Right-wing, anti-woke Wikipedia competitorBut calling it a competitor to Wikipedia is also giving too much credit to a half-baked project, It is not a Wikipedia “competitor” at all, It is a completely robotic, heartless resurrection machine that cynically and indiscriminately wastes the work of humanity to serve interests, protect ego, enhance viewpoints and further enrich the richest man in the world, It’s a totem of what Wikipedia could and would become if you took away all the humans and handed it over to a robot; In that sense, Grow Wikipedia is a useful warning due to the constant pressure Attacks by AI Slope Purveyors To push AI-generated content in WikipediaAnd of course, it’s just getting attention because Elon Musk This represents a real threat to Wikipedia through him Political power, money, and website obsessionAnd also the fact that he owns a huge social media platform.
One need only spend a few minutes clicking on the launch version of GrowWikipedia to understand that it lacks the human touch that makes Wikipedia such a valuable resource. In addition to often having a conservative bent and general characteristics of AI writing, Grokipedia pages are excessively long, poorly and confusingly organized, have no internal linking, no photos, and are generally not written in a way that makes any sense. There is no information about how any article was created, how information was obtained and ordered, any edits made, no version history, etc. GrowCypedia is, in effect, just a black box LLM version of an encyclopedia. There’s a reason Wikipedia editors are called “editors” and that’s because writing a useful encyclopedia entry doesn’t mean “just putting random facts into no apparent order.” To use an example. Just clicked around and noticed: The list of “notable people” in the Grow Wikipedia entry for Baltimore begins with a jumbled list of recent mayors, perhaps the least interesting but lowest hanging fruit type of data scraping one can do about a place.
Even on the lowest-stakes Wikipedia pages, real human beings with real taste and real ideas and real viewpoints discuss and debate what kind of information should be included in a given article, what order it should be presented in, and what specific language should be used. They do so under a framework of Byzantine rules that have been battle tested and debated through millions of edit wars, virtual community meetings, talk page discussions, conference meetings, esoteric lists, which are themselves informed by Wikimedia’s “Mission Statement”, “Wikimedia Values”, its “Founding Principles”, and “Wikimedia Values”. Policies and Guidelines And a host of other stated and unstated rules, norms, procedures and processes. All of this behind-the-scenes activity is essentially invisible to the user, but the human editors involved in building and protecting Wikipedia and its related projects are very serious business (it’s difficult for Wikipedia to find new editors due to the high cultural barrier to entry for editors, and the Wikipedia community is always discussing how they can fix the project without ruining it). Any Wikipedia page has been stress tested by actual humans discussing, for example, whether it’s really unusual to be speared by a beach umbrella.
Meanwhile, Grow Wikipedia looks like what you’d get if you asked an LLM to create an anti-woke encyclopedia, which is basically what Elon Musk did.
As LLMs tend to do, some pages on Grokipedia leaked part of its instructions. For example, a Grokeypedia page on “Spanish Wikipedia” reads, “Wait, no, can’t cite wiki,” indicating that Grokeypedia is programmed not to link to Wikipedia. He Entry cites Wikimedia pages Anyway, but in “Sources”, those pages are not actually hyperlinked:
I have no doubt that GrowWikipedia will fail, like other attempts to “compete” with Wikipedia or create an “alternative” to Wikipedia that no one has heard of because all of these attempts were so ridiculous and poorly attended that they died almost immediately. GrowWikipedia isn’t really a competitor at all, because it’s everything Wikipedia isn’t: it’s not an encyclopedia, it’s not transparent, it’s not human, it’s not non-profit, it’s not collaborative or crowdsourced, in fact, it’s not really edited at all. It is true that Wikipedia is under attack from both powerful political figures, the spread of AI, and structural changes related to searching and linking on the Internet. Like AI Summary and Knowledge PanelBut Wikipedia has proven itself incredibly resilient because it is a project that relies exclusively on humanity’s shared knowledge and collaboration, our shared weirdness and methods of information processing, This is something that LLM will never be able to compete with,
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