Last month, tech billionaire Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, an AI-powered platform to compete with the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
“Glocipedia will surpass Wikipedia in breadth, depth, and accuracy by orders of magnitude,” Musk wrote on X the day after the site went live on October 27th.
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Even in the age of generative artificial intelligence and AI-assisted search engines, Wikipedia remains a human-created information repository.
Grokipedia will surpass Wikipedia by orders of magnitude in breadth, depth, and accuracy https://t.co/Nt4M6vqEZu
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 28, 2025
However, PolitiFact found that Grokipedia articles are often quoted almost entirely from Wikipedia. Additionally, when entries differ, the quality and sourcing of Grokipedia’s information is questionable and error-prone, making it less reliable as a research tool.
On the Oct. 31 episode of his technology and business podcast All-In, Musk said his team instructed the company’s chatbot, Grok, to go through the top 1 million Wikipedia articles and then “add, modify, or delete them.”
“That means researching the rest of the internet, what’s publicly available, and correcting the Wikipedia article, not only fixing mistakes, but adding more context,” he said on the podcast.
Grokipedia articles often include the text “Fact-checked by Grok.”
PolitiFact reviewed Grokipedia articles and found that if they contain a language different from that listed on Wikipedia, the new content is:
Not supported by citations. No references provided. or introduce misleading or arbitrary claims.
Grokipedia also often removes context from articles.
A sample of 885,279 articles on Grokipedia revealed that they were affected by a similar AI-related phenomenon that was first identified in May, prior to the tool’s rollout. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. then released a “Make America Healthy Again” report that included several miscitations, including crediting non-existent sources.
Joseph Riegle, an associate professor of communication studies at Northeastern University, said Grokipedia misunderstands the strengths of Wikipedia and AI.
“The beauty of Wikipedia is that it is the product of a community of thousands of people who work hard to create high-quality content,” Riegl said, adding that AI can be helpful if it’s interactive and open to backlash.
Hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the world contribute content to Wikipedia, following the platform’s editorial policies and guidelines.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia, is aware of the copying problem on Wikipedia.
“Even Grokipedia needs a Wikipedia to exist,” Serena Dekleman, chief product and technology officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, said in a statement to PolitiFact. “Wikipedia’s content is open source by design. We expect it to be used in good faith for educational purposes. This issue is especially urgent as platforms like Wikipedia increasingly exploit our articles, selectively extracting content written by thousands of volunteers and filtering it through opaque and unexplainable algorithms.”
The entries are almost identical except for incorrect or missing references
We looked at Grokipedia articles covering a variety of topics, including science, music, and economics. In many of the articles we examined, Grokipedia linked to the Wikipedia article with the statement, “Content is reprinted from Wikipedia and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.”
In other words, Wikipedia’s license allows Grokipedia to copy, redistribute, and adapt the content with attribution. Grokipedia must also be granted the same permissions for adapted content. (Some articles, such as the one on Joseph Stalin, are not copied from Wikipedia and do not feature this statement.)
Grokipedia’s article structure is similar to Wikipedia, with a reference list at the bottom. However, in some cases, Grokipedia copies Wikipedia articles and omits citations and reference lists.
For example, Grokipedia’s “Monday” article includes information about the etymology of the day of the week, associated religious observances, and cultural references. However, it does not contain any citations other than those reprinted from Wikipedia.
According to plagiarism checker Copyscape, Glokipedia’s article matched 96 percent of the time with Wikipedia’s “Monday” article. However, the Wikipedia article lists 22 references.
Grokipedia sometimes misquotes. Grokipedia, under the heading “Apex,” cited the wrong chapter of the book by military theorist Carl von Clausewitz that introduced the concept. The rest of the article is copied from Wikipedia.
One article that differs significantly from its Wikipedia counterpart is the entry for British singer Adele’s song “Hello.” Multiple items on the Grokipedia reference list are Instagram reels that provide unsourced, second-hand information and commentary. Wikipedia’s standards say that such user-generated content is “generally unacceptable as a source of information.”
Glokipedia copied the entry for Canadian singer Feist from Wikipedia, but added a line stating that her father passed away in May 2021. This quote led to Vice’s ranking of Canada’s 60 Best Indie Rock Songs of 2017, but the article does not mention the death of Feist’s father, who was still alive that year.
Grokipedia lacks transparency regarding error correction
PolitiFact found at least one instance in which Grokipedia presented misleading information.
The articles on “Nobel Prize in Physics” on Grokipedia and Wikipedia are almost identical, but Grokipedia added the following sentence: “Physics is traditionally the first award awarded at the Nobel Prize ceremony.” No source is given and it appears to be incorrect. This is the first time the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded, at least in the past few years.
“Unlike Glocipedia, which relies on rapid, AI-generated content with limited transparency and oversight, Wikipedia’s processes are open to public review and rigorously document the sources behind every article,” Deckelman said.
Wikipedia allows anyone to post and edit articles, and we provide transparency by making article history visible. Some volunteers have a high level of authority, allowing them to deal with negative behavior on the platform.
However, Wikipedia came under intense scrutiny after editors blocked changes to articles on the Gaza Genocide page.
Grokipedia allows registered users to suggest edits to published articles. However, Grokipedia does not have a feature that allows readers to see what edits have been made. It’s unclear what happens when there’s an error, whether a human or Grok fixes it, how the changes will be considered, and how long it will take to update the page.
PolitiFact researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.
