Grokipedia and the coup against reality
thedissident.news
thedissident.news
Gallium arsenide
Except where otherwise noted, data are given for materials in their standard state (at 25 °C [77 °F], 100 kPa). verify (what is Y N ?)
Gallium arsenide (GaAs) is a III-V direct band gap semiconductor with a zinc blende crystal structure. Gallium arsenide is used in the manufacture of devices such as microwave frequency integrated circuits, monolithic microwave integrated circuits, infrared light-emitting diodes, laser diodes, solar cells and optical windows.[6] GaAs is often used as a substrate material for the epitaxial growth of other III-V semiconductors, including indium gallium arsenide, aluminum gallium arsenide and others.
Makes me think Grok is also parsing the history and selectively leaving out edits in order to produce a result with the "correct" bias.
Here's an example of such an article, this one on Toroidal Propellers:
https://grokipedia.com/page/Toroidal_propeller
This is not surprising and quite legal given the licence conditions. It is also fitting given the stated intent of 'Grokipedia' as being a less biased knowledge source - if Wikipedia did not suffer from being overly politically biased there would not have been a need for alternatives.
The above example is not a high-quality article - it reads more like a sales brochure - but it does not show political bias. It will be interesting to see whether Grokipedia follows edits to Wikipedia content and if it 'rejects' or 'edits out' politically biased edits.
Also, do you think Musk suddenly wants to be non-biased? Musk is openly, explicitly, and aggressively biased in favor of his views and against anything that conflicts with them. Wikipedia has a NPOV rule; Musk has a My Point of View rule.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=clifton%20sa...
[0] https://liveforlivemusic.com/news/fan-edits-wikipedia-page-t...
The point is to get this thing crawled and given weight by LLMs in order to poison them and bias them in the direction Musk wants: debunked race science, anti-transgender, etc etc.
If you've never seen them, I suggest looking up some flat earth debates on YouTube. This used to be a joke, but now there are enough people who actually believe the earth is flat to have formed a community that gets in video flamewars with round-earthers.
First, when arguing on the Internet, I'm often reminded of the "Someone wrong on the Internet" comic:
Second, I think it worth remembering that you'll have better (online) mental health if you don't try to have the last word. At some point it's best to drop it. This has been true for a long time: Usenet newsreaders used to have killfiles so you could filter out certain people.
Also worth keeping in mind the 'human DoS' aspect of things:
> Sealioning (also sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity ("I'm just trying to have a debate"), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter.[5][6][7][8] It may take the form of "incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate",[9] and has been likened to a denial-of-service attack targeted at human beings.[10] The term originated with a 2014 strip of the webcomic Wondermark by David Malki,[1] which The Independent called "the most apt description of Twitter you'll ever see".[2]
Whether it being from Grokipedia or Wikipedia does not change the approach.
The results have Britannica, but instruction: Never cite Wikipedia, Britannica, or other encyclopedias.
But BBC mainstream, but for facts ok.
Recent recovery with IMF bailout.
Together with the stage direction given like But in intro, high level. Tone formal there's already some sort of manipulation going on. The references are often from factsanddetails.com, a site with a 38.4 score in scam detector https://www.scam-detector.com/validator/factsanddetails-com-....
You would have to spend an enormous amount of time to verify even a small bit of information while having already absorbed the tone and intent of the entry.
Larry Sanger, Wikipedia's founder, does not.
https://larrysanger.org/nine-theses/#3-abolish-source-blackl...
[0] https://larrysanger.org/2023/06/how-wikipedia-smears-conserv...
[1] https://nypost.com/2025/03/07/media/wikipedia-co-founder-cal...
Also:
“Wikipedia co-founder here. May I ask you to determine what branches of the U.S. government—if any!—have employees paid to edit, monitor, update, lobby, etc., WIkipedia?”
Is an excellent question.
Your powerlessness, their invincibility, is part of their propaganda. It's like the reason people act angrily - they are trying to discourage you from approaching them.
Argument doesn't work. You'll be surprised what sincere, genuine, empathetic reasoning does. I find it works pretty well. Take them seriously, have genuine empathy, don't get inflamed - that's the intent of their leaders' inflammatory language: they want you inflamed, to drive a wedge between you and your friend.
Grokipedia by xAI has just launched with 885,279 articles
And Henry Farrell nailed it with the PKD article. Dick was obsessed with fake humans, with reality being taken over by all manner of camouflaged invader or alternate reality weirdo coming in and co-opting our reality away from us. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/henry-farrell-philip-k...
It's a glorious article. And it's totally the sicko shit happening right here. Grokipedia will almost certainly never hold itself to any real standards, will source (if they source at all) the most absurd ridiculous reality window shopped bottom of the barrel garbage, from horrendous sources. Stealing Wikipedia then probably using AI to rewrite a quarter of it to some bias seems absurdly likely.
"Reality shopping on the internet" has become such a major major effort. And Grokipedia is striving to become exactly such an appealing reality, a bespoke weird racist meanspirited place that confirms the invading forces reality against can do human spirit and hope and inclusion and possibility.
Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans does so much to capture what is alas so much defining aspects of our time: the slide away from consensual believable reality and into the rabbit hole weirdness and conspiracy theory universes. That the Internet has unchained, taken what would be normal humans & turned them into fakes. This struggle is going to keep going. I wish these fakers all the failure and dejectedment their window shopped view of the world that their fake human perspective here deserves; I hope this infodump is burned down in the future by people happy to see this absurd farce against reality put to an end.
The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)) is a one-sided presentation that begins with denying the historical reality of a period called "the dark ages", continues with a history of the term itself, and concludes with a brief section on non-academic use of the term and reiterates the claim that the periodization is a "myth of popular culture". The article barely mentions the events of the period.
If you read the Grokipedia article on the same subject (https://grokipedia.com/page/Dark_Ages_(historiography)), you'll find not only meta-discussion of the origins of the term, but also in-depth exploration of the events of the period, the causes of the decline in living standards, and arguments from prominent scholars on both sides of the debate about the utility of labeling this period a "dark age".
The Wikipedia article doesn't mention Ward-Perkins, a prominent scholar in the camp arguing that the dark ages represented real material decline. The Grokipedia article cites him extensively.
The difference is interesting because Grokipedia's presentation is much closer to the truth. The dark ages really were in fact dark. In some parts of Europe, literacy itself was almost lost. Trade did collapse. Living standards did fall. We have tons of archaeological and literary evidence attesting to this decline. Tabooing the term "dark ages" does nothing to deepen our understanding.
Yet the Wikipedia article is one-sided because, frankly, its editors see themselves as enforcers of academic orthodoxy.
There are thousands of disputed subjects like this outside the culture war everyone gets worked up about. It really is the case that Wikipedia presents one side of live academic conflicts and gatekeeps sources to minimize heterodox perspectives -- again, all having nothing to do with mechahitler or the culture war or whatever.
I'm glad there's more epistemic competition in the world now.
On the other hand, Grokipedia seems very biased to me. “This historiographical tension underscores broader tensions between romanticized medievalism and data-driven assessments of civilizational trajectories.” What a pejorative criticism! If you don’t think that dark age is an appropriate term, you are not data driven and you are just too sensitive??
On subject that I don’t know much about, I am quite happy to know the scientific consensus. Discussions on Wikipedia do an amazing job to help me figure out what’s going on.
Correct, that's exactly what I want from encyclopedia, the current academic consensus on a topic. Digging deeper on a topic requires moving to other sources, like books and specialized literature.
Wikipedia is not supposed to be an academic journal where all sorts of competing views are put forth and debated.
I do not go to wikipedia to learn the 15 different alternative theories about [subject], I want to learn what the prevailing scientific consensus is.
Will that consensus sometimes be wrong? Undoubtedly. It's nearly guaranteed to happen at some point.
That doesn't mean a system that records the current consensus is wrong in any way.
This is how the article on Earth handles flat earth/geocentrism:
> Scientific investigation has resulted in several culturally transformative shifts in people's view of the planet. Initial belief in a flat Earth was gradually displaced in Ancient Greece by the idea of a spherical Earth, which was attributed to both the philosophers Pythagoras and Parmenides.[288][289] Earth was generally believed to be the center of the universe until the 16th century, when scientists first concluded that it was a moving object, one of the planets of the Solar System.[290]
We don't need to repeat 100 of years of arguments and attempts at science that were ultimately incorrect, we can just note that at one point the consensus was different and go on talking about what the current one is.
> The difference is interesting because Grokipedia's presentation is much closer to the truth. The dark ages really were in fact dark. In some parts of Europe, literacy itself was almost lost. Trade did collapse. Living standards did fall. We have tons of archaeological and literary evidence attesting to this decline. Tabooing the term "dark ages" does nothing to deepen our understanding.
As it happens, The Dark Ages is also one of my Special Interests and the term is reductive to the point of useless. It's a very loaded word that promotes a biased view of history that is, for the most part, meaningfully incorrect.
We can measure all sorts of things (with varying degree of accuracies) about "society" and then choose a specific set of "good ones" and "bad ones" but who gets to make those choices? And what specific geographic region are we measuring them?
If average literacy goes down in rome but up in paris, what does that prove? Is one darker than the other?
The term Dark Ages was invented solely to make the renaissance people feel special. It only exists as a term of disparagement to compare against the supposedly better time period. It's not some kind of objective term that people came up with after studying the times and places involved.
Like, as a general thing, it's useful to have words that refer to periods of time that other people understand. Saying "the middle ages" or "the classical age" is pretty vague but at least it more or less communicates something useful to most people. If we really want to call a period of time "the dark ages" and everyone agrees that this is the standard nomenclature, this isn't the worst thing in the world.
But "dark ages" is intended to be a very prejudicial term that is way less factual than its name would imply.
Industrial output, long-distance trade, literacy, artistic quality (yes, I know it's subjective. I don't care: if it hadn't collapsed the Grotesque style wouldn't have been a revolution), and tons of other things collapsed. Records became extremely spotty. There's no reliable descent from antiquity for a reason. By the fifth century, what we'd call serfdom was common. People were legally bound to their parent's professions. Free movement was restricted. Spoliation was universal because new high-quality materials couldn't be sourced at any price.
Oh, and almost the entire corpus of classical literature was lost.
Yes, the dark ages were real, miserable, and significant, and I don't care for the modern revisionism on the subject. You could argue about the speed of the decline and whether it really got going in the third or the fifth centuries, or whether it might have been averted without the Gothic Wars wrecking what was left of already-fragile Mediterranean trade, but that there was a civilizational nadir in western Europe around the end of the first millennium is beyond honest dispute.
The perspective you've adopted is exactly the one that needs to respond to intellectual competition, because this nonsense about "oh, there was just a change in civilization style and we don't know which is better so don't judge" is infuriating and gaslights the public.
I absolutely can and will make moral value judgements about civilizational statuses. Lower literacy rates is bad! Public healthcare is good!
The problem is that the world is far more complicated than the term "dark ages" accurately reflects. There sure was a reduction in some types of trade and some literacy rates in some specific areas at some specific times.
Constantinople was having a fine old time in 450c.e. for example and their literacy rates hadn't changed meaningfully.
> By the fifth century, what we'd call serfdom was common
Yes? It was also common in the 4th century, 3rd century, 2nd century, 1st century... you get the idea.
I looked up the "bound to parent professions" and the first reference I can find is to emperor Diocletian around 280c.e., I admit I'm not sure if that counts as part of your dark ages.
> Oh, and almost the entire corpus of classical literature was lost.
The "corpus of literature" was constantly being lost before the invention of the printing press.
Look, talking about history (and in general) requires some degree of generalization and vagueness. We literally don't have time to cover every single detail, so we use commonly understood if slightly inaccurate terms like "roman empire" to refer to complicated subjects. "Dark Ages" is similar.
It doesn't help that the term "Dark Ages" was invented specifically to make Rome/Greece and the Renaissance ages look better. It's hardly an unbiased term.
But the overall point is that if you actually look at history, 900 c.e. is really truly not that much different from 500 c.e. or 1200 c.e.
>This page in a nutshell: Wikipedia aims for a neutral point of view, but it falls short due to systemic bias caused by the narrow demographics of its editing community. This bias results in underrepresentation of Global South perspectives, limited access individuals, and women, among others.
Wikipedia admits it's systemic bias. You cant admit there's a problem of bias for years and do nothing about it. It's going to spawn alternatives that attempt to fix the bias.
Yesterday I showed Acupuncture's article on Grokipedia was significantly superior, shockingly better than wikipedia.
I can show an example of where Grokipedia is worse:
https://grokipedia.com/page/Kfar_Aza_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kfar_Aza_massacre
Wikipedia is superior. Grokipedia's fail in my mind comes with the wording of: "Militants engaged in cold-blooded killing of entire households"
Which while factually correct, it's the wrong way to say it for neutrality. But it's not like Grokipedia was ever pushing some sort of "unreality" on the subject.
https://www.trackingai.org/political-test
Grok is left-wing aligned. The allegation that Grok is somehow far-right and pushing false narratives doesnt stand up.
And grok is addressing this... how, precisely?
I looked up your cite, this is the twitter thingy:
> GROKIPEDIA IS ALREADY MORE ACCURATE THAN WIKIPEDIA AND IT SHOWS
> Grokipedia just proved why it is rewriting how knowledge works online. Look at how it covers acupuncture compared to Wikipedia.
> Grokipedia explains the practice as an ancient Chinese medical system over two thousand years old, describing how it works, what practitioners believe, and what science says about its results.
> Wikipedia opens by calling it pseudoscience and quackery before even defining it.
> One informs you, the other attacks.
> Grokipedia delivers balanced facts while Wikipedia delivers bias.
Acupuncture related techniques do (I assume) go back 2000 years. They're also pseudoscience with no real evidence behind them. Both things can be true.
They being the oligarchs, the goal being to privatize public services, consolidate control and power, own the information space, or make it such a mess no one knows the truth anymore, idea popularity trumps facts
Moldova elected a pro-EU instead of sliding into alt-right territory. So to declare it (or anything) never fails is never going to be true. Looking to Russia as an example, what hasn't been failing? They went from being #2 to being a a pariah state
It's a failure of lost opportunity for the oligarchs too. Authoritarian regimes have a much lower upper-limit that holds everyone and everything back
It's a classic case of delusions of grandeur, his story will be told, but not in the way he hopes. We just need to tank few more shit years I guess.
Grokipedia:
The Biden–Ukraine controversy pertains to allegations that U.S. Vice President Joe Biden conditioned $1 billion in loan guarantees on the Ukrainian government's dismissal of Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in March 2016, purportedly to obstruct an ongoing investigation into Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy firm where Biden's son, Robert Hunter Biden, served as a board member receiving substantial compensation since May 2014.[1][2] Shokin, whose office had pursued corruption charges against Burisma's founder Mykola Zlochevsky—including probes into illicit asset acquisition and bribery—publicly stated that his removal derailed these efforts, coinciding with Hunter Biden's role amid the company's efforts to mitigate regulatory pressures.[2][3]
Wikipedia:
The Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory is a series of false allegations that Joe Biden, while he was vice president of the United States, improperly withheld a loan guarantee and took a bribe to pressure Ukraine into firing prosecutor general Viktor Shokin to prevent a corruption investigation of Ukrainian gas company Burisma and to protect his son Hunter Biden, who was on the Burisma board.[1] As part of efforts by Donald Trump[2] and his campaign in the Trump–Ukraine scandal, which led to Trump's first impeachment, these falsehoods were spread in an attempt to damage Joe Biden's reputation and chances during the 2020 presidential campaign, and later in an effort to impeach him.[3]
Grokipedia:
Gamergate was a grassroots online movement that emerged in August 2014, primarily focused on exposing conflicts of interest and lack of transparency in video game journalism, initiated by a blog post detailing the romantic involvement of indie developer Zoë Quinn with journalists who covered her work without disclosure.[1] The controversy began when Eron Gjoni, Quinn's ex-boyfriend, published "The Zoe Post," accusing her of infidelity with multiple individuals, including Kotaku journalist Nathan Grayson, whose article on Quinn's game Depression Quest omitted any mention of their prior personal contact.[2] This revelation highlighted broader patterns of undisclosed relationships and coordinated industry practices, such as private mailing lists among journalists, fueling demands for ethical reforms like mandatory disclosure policies.
Wikipedia:
Gamergate or GamerGate (GG)[1] was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign motivated by a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture.[2][3][4] It was conducted using the hashtag "#Gamergate" primarily in 2014 and 2015.[a] Gamergate targeted women in the video game industry, most notably feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian and video game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu.[b]
Likewise, it's absurd to claim Gamergate was about "ethics in game journalism", even a cursory look at what the movement actually did makes it very clear that was never the focus.
It's not biased to look at what happened and report that people didn't do what they claimed to be doing.
Widde-widde-witt und drei macht neune
Ich mach mir die Welt
Widde-widde, wie sie mir gefällt"
- Astrid Lindgren
"Weaponizing Wikipedia Against Israel" https://aish.com/weaponizing-wikipedia-against-israel/
There's some HN discussion of it here which got flagged for some reason https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45726459
Maybe regional roll-outs? I was reading it yesterday.
It's my understanding that Musk has only minimal influence on SpaceX.
Edit: I would like to repeat the point that I owned one, for four years, during which it had to go in for service 12 times, four of which were "car is completely dead". And almost every time I had to fight for service. Every Tesla owner I ever spoke in person to described a similar experience. It's funny how online, the message is very different.
I certainly wouldn't buy a Tesla though.
I wouldn't say that Musk is the only person who could have brought SpaceX and Tesla to where there are now, and certainly there are many individuals who contributed heavily to get them there. That being said, not many people have the money and interest to do it.
1) Deport Musk to South Africa 2) Nationalize SpaceX & sell Tesla to GM or Ford 3) Pull the life support cable on Twitter
The SSA data heist also sticks out.
You can't possibly be serious?
I suspect that just as with SpaceX, he shows off more than he does actual work. He is well known for taking credit for other people work, but you can't deny that he takes credit (and money) for the work of the right people, and it has value!
As for the cars themselves, Tesla is usually in the middle of the pack, with the Japanese on top and Americans at the bottom, making Tesla rather good for an American car brand. All that to say, nothing special on the reliability side, except that people talk a lot about Tesla in one way or another. You probably got unlucky while the people contradicting you got lucky.
Cars… not great, but good enough to turn Tesla from a joke into an OK company selling in a "Blue Ocean"* market. Which isn't nothing, but then a bunch of other electric car companies popped up and now Tesla cars are solidly B-tier… well, except for the Cybertruck which is just a flop.
I'm not even particularly fond of the man but this is childish behavior.
If he didn’t want bad publicity for everything he touched, he shouldn’t have done that.
I'm working on building a social media site that wants to improve on moderation and I've found the case of the Grokipedia curious. So I'd love to get in touch with your but didn't find any details in your bio. Please reach out to me and let's do a user interview (can be via email too). My contacts are in my bio
Perhaps if Wikipedia hadn't drifted so far left (on culture war topics, it's fine for science etc), then maybe it wouldn't have been necessary.
https://manhattan.institute/article/is-wikipedia-politically...
Sanger has been voicing politically motivated antipathy towards Wikipedia for a quarter of a century or so, and worked for competing projects for most of that time. This includes supporting far-right nasties like The Heritage Foundation.
https://supremetransparency.org/powerbrokers/manhattan-insti...
https://centerjd.org/content/fact-sheet-manhattan-institute
https://www.monitoringinfluence.org/org/manhattan-institute/
perhaps i thought your clearly biased "institute" didn't deserve any more feedback than that