Elon Musk’s anti-Wikipedia rival, GrowWikipedia, is pulling information from widely blacklisted sources and known neo-Nazi sites, according to two researchers.
The analysis, “What did Elon change? A comprehensive analysis of Wikipedia,” was conducted by two Cornell Tech researchers and has not yet been peer-reviewed. It is the first attempt to comprehensively scrub the site’s entries, which at the time numbered more than 880,000. At the time of publication, Grow Wikipedia v0.2 hosts 1,016,241 articles.
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They found that the website repeatedly cited blacklisted sources and sites deemed low-quality by academics, including Stormfront. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SLPC), Stormfront is considered the first major hate site on the Internet and the most popular platform for white nationalists. It was founded in 1995 by former Ku Klux Klan leader Don Black, and had long hosted white supremacist, neo-Nazi message boards.
Additionally, researchers found that Grow Wikipedia cited the far-right conspiracy theorist Infowars 34 times, and 107 times cited Weedare, a white nationalist publication designated as a hate group by the SPLC. Similar entries on Wikipedia mainly cite mainstream news publications.
“We found that the elected official and controversial article subsets showed less similarity between their Wikipedia version and the Grow Wikipedia version than other pages,” the report said. “The random subset reflects that GrowWikipedia has focused on rewriting the highest quality articles on Wikipedia, with a bias towards biography, politics, society, and history.”
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The researchers also found that, overall, Grow Wikipedia articles were “longer and more verbose” than Wikipedia articles, citing twice as many sources but a higher share of unreliable citations.
It’s been less than a month since Musk launched the online encyclopedia, intended as a competition to what the former CEO called “Wokepedia” or “Dicipedia.” Musk has long criticized the nonprofit resource for alleged left-wing bias. “Grokipedia.com version 0.1 is now live. Version 1.0 will be 10x better, but even at 0.1 it’s better than Wikipedia IMO,” the billionaire wrote in an X post at the time of launch. However, users quickly noticed that Grokepedia was stealing many of its entries directly from Wikipedia, except for its more politically charged articles.
Grokpedia’s editorial process is not clearly outlined. It appears that users are not able to edit articles directly on the site, but they can submit suggestions which the xAI team filters. It is unclear whether the title is included in the Grok chatbot review system, although Musk has said it is included in fact-checking. The chatbot has previously come under criticism for delivering hate speech and praising the actions of Adolf Hitler. Musk himself has reinstated white supremacist figures on X and has engaged in far-right talk and fantasizing.
In contrast, Wikipedia’s content and citation practices are governed by the five community pillars, which include an emphasis on primary sources and general neutrality. One column reads, “All articles should strive for verifiable accuracy with citations based on reliable sources, especially when the topic is controversial or about a living person.” Wikipedia also discourages “websites and publications expressing views that are widely accepted as extremist.” For example, Infowars has been considered a deprecated source and blacklisted by Wikipedia due to its reputation for persistent spamming and publishing fake news and conspiracy theories.
“The publicly set, community-oriented rules that try to maintain Wikipedia as a comprehensive, reliable, human-generated source do not apply to GrowWikipedia,” report author Harold Triedman told NBC News.