Grokipedia launches after brief crash, accused of copying Wikipedia content

Elon Musk’s long-promised rival to Wikipedia, the xAI Grok-powered encyclopedia dubbed Grokipedia, made a turbulent debut this week.

The website briefly went online on Monday before promptly crashing, though it is currently back up and running. According to a counter on its homepage, the site contains over 885,000 articles.

Musk, who has consistently criticized the crowd-sourced encyclopedia for alleged bias, has declared the project will be “a massive improvement over Wikipedia” and a “necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe.” Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has called Musk’s claims “factually incorrect.”

The launch, which Musk had previously delayed “to do more work to purge out the propaganda,” has been immediately mired in controversy over the provenance of its content.

According to The Verge,  some Grokipedia entries are nearly identical to their counterparts on Wikipedia. For pages like the MacBook Air and PlayStation 5, The Verge found the content to be “almost identical – word-for-word, line-for-line — to their Wikipedia counterparts.”

These articles do feature a small disclaimer stating: “The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.”

Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson Lauren Dickinson responded pointedly to the development, stating: “Even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist.”

In other entries, social media users have already spotted content reflecting Musk’s own worldview, contrasting sharply with Wikipedia’s more consensus-based approach.

For instance, on climate change, Wikipedia states there is a “nearly unanimous scientific consensus” on human causes.  Grokipedia’s entry, however, focuses on critics who “contend that claims of near-unanimous scientific consensus… overstate agreement.”

Furthermore, all Grokipedia entries controversially claim to have been “fact-checked” by the Grok large language model, which is prone to making up false information.

The v0.1 version of Grokipedia has a long way to go to truly rival Wikipedia, which maintains around 7 million English pages. X did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the turbulent launch and the allegations of copied content.