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arXiv:2511.09685cs.SI

What did Elon change? A comprehensive analysis of Grokipedia

Harold Triedman, Alexios Mantzarlis

Abstract

Elon Musk released Grokipedia on 27 October 2025 to provide an alternative to Wikipedia, the crowdsourced online encyclopedia. In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive analysis of Grokipedia and compare it to a dump of Wikipedia, with a focus on article similarity and citation practices. Although Grokipedia articles are much longer than their corresponding English Wikipedia articles, we find that much of Grokipedia's content (including both articles with and without Creative Commons licenses) is highly derivative of Wikipedia. Nevertheless, citation practices between the sites differ greatly, with Grokipedia citing many more sources deemed "generally unreliable" or "blacklisted" by the English Wikipedia community and low quality by external scholars, including dozens of citations to sites like Stormfront and Infowars. We then analyze article subsets: one about elected officials, one about controversial topics, and one random subset for which we derive article quality and topic. We find that the elected official and controversial article subsets showed less similarity between their Wikipedia version and Grokipedia version than other pages. The random subset illustrates that Grokipedia focused rewriting the highest quality articles on Wikipedia, with a bias towards biographies, politics, society, and history. Finally, we publicly release our nearly-full scrape of Grokipedia, as well as embeddings of the entire Grokipedia corpus.

arXiv comments
23 pages, 16 figures, 5 tables
Journal reference
DOI
Subjects
cs.SISocial and Information Networks

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Discussed in comments2 threads

  1. I'm Not Consulting an LLM 1 comment

    • Apart from calling itself "Mecha Hitler" and that time it made every conversation be about "white genocide" in South Africa? There's also Grokipedia, supposedly make by Grok, where I'd point to section 3.6 ("Controversial topics"): https://arxiv.org/html/2511.09685v1

      ben_wView on HNParent context

  2. Grokipedia is the antithesis of Wikipedia 2 comments

    • Nazism and white nationalism, for starters. This is all gone over in that laughable article. To help, here's the study referenced, which has two, not one, researchers cited: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09685. They also published their data on GitHub…

      femiagbabiakaView on HNParent context

    • Some people actually studied this already, and used embeddings to determine the differences between Grokipedia and Wikipedia: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09685 Some things I found interesting: * Grokipedia uses Twitter a lot more as authoritative evidence than Wikipedia *…

      stingraycharlesView on HNParent context

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