What to expect from the new Wikipedia wanted by Musk It’s called Grokipedia and has already proven to be quite controversial

Recently, Grokipedia was launched, a new free online encyclopedia developed within the xAI ecosystem, the artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk. The project was born with the ambitious goal of offering an alternative to Wikipedia, which, according to Musk, suffers from a strong progressive bias and excessive control over the publishing and content review process. Grokipedia leverages the technology behind the Grok chatbot, already integrated into X, to automatically generate and update entries based on public and verifiable data, at least in theory. Grokipedia went online with nearly 900,000 pages available to users, and in terms of structure, it is very similar to Wikipedia; however, for now, Musk’s online encyclopedia is available only in English and does not include visual content.

The platform, however, already seems to show several critical issues. As reported by the U.S. edition of Wired, while many entries resemble Wikipedia’s in structure and tone, others stand out for having a more polemical slant. For instance, some articles subtly criticize the progressive approach, emphasizing more conservative viewpoints and, in some cases, presenting controversial or historically inaccurate interpretations, particularly regarding sensitive topics such as the climate crisis, where Grokipedia tends to downplay the human impact on the phenomenon, subtly accusing environmental organizations of fueling alarmism and influencing public opinion or political agendas.

Wikipedia in the age of AI

Since the rise of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence systems, Wikipedia’s traffic - like that of many other information websites - has steadily and significantly declined. As services such as AI Overview now provide automatic, concise answers even before traditional search results, more and more users no longer dig deeper into topics by visiting specialized sites and platforms, including Wikipedia itself. To counter this trend, the organization has decided to expand its presence on social media, opening accounts on Instagram and TikTok, among others. The goal is to bring the encyclopedia’s content to where users are, using more accessible languages and formats. In this context, Wikipedia has also experimented with the use of artificial intelligence to automatically summarize its entries, making them easier to read. However, the initiative was suspended after protests from numerous volunteers, concerned about the reliability of AI-generated summaries and the risk of undermining the editorial quality that has always characterized the project.

Another key factor behind Wikipedia’s declining visits is the growing popularity of video content, which has become, especially for younger generations, a primary source of information. In contrast, however, a different type of traffic has increased: that generated by bots from artificial intelligence companies, which must constantly interact with sites like Wikipedia to collect data useful for formulating their responses. This activity, known as “scraping”, on one hand puts pressure on the organization’s servers and, on the other, raises questions about the balance between the free circulation of knowledge and the use of content by large tech companies.

Moreover, Wikipedia’s model relies on a very specific yet increasingly fragile mechanism: among the millions of people who consult it every day, a small percentage end up becoming passionate about the project, volunteering and helping to enrich the encyclopedia with verified and updated content. This dynamic - quite virtuous when you think about it - risks breaking down if a growing number of users continue to interact with Wikipedia indirectly through chatbot-generated responses, often without realizing that the information actually comes from online encyclopedias. The decline in human visitors could also lead to a drop in donations that ensure its economic sustainability, triggering a domino effect that, in the long run, could jeopardize one of the most important knowledge projects on the web.