What did Elon change? A comprehensive analysis of Grokipedia
2025/11/12 by Harold Triedman, Alexios Mantzarlis, Triedman, Harold +1 · 13 voices · 3 citations
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Open Source Software Innovations #Text Readability and Simplification #Wikis in Education and Collaboration #cs.SI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2511.09685
openalex publication_date 2025/11/12 · openalex created_date 2025/11/15 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.
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Discussions
- Preprint w/ (rapid) analysis of Grokipedia, showing it to be “highly derivative of Wikipedia”, but differing, often on controversial topics, in that Grokipedia includes content/cites from low quality [bsky, 166 points, 8 comments]
- Also: - Infowars 34 times - white nationalist website VDare 107 times The paper is here: arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09685 From @harold.bsky.social and @mantzarlis.com [bsky, 25 points, 2 comments]
- 🔗 arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09685 [bsky, 20 points, 0 comments]
- aaand here's the preprint arxiv.org/abs/2511.09685 [bsky, 17 points, 1 comments]
- back again to share a new preprint from me and @mantzarlis.com! “What did Elon Change? A comprehensive analysis of Grokipedia” arxiv.org/abs/2511.09685 I had seen many spot analyses of individual grok [bsky, 12 points, 1 comments]
- I have a page on Wikipedia, but not on Grottipedia. arxiv.org/abs/2511.09685 [bsky, 7 points, 0 comments]
- 🧐 What did Elon change? A comprehensive analysis of Grokipedia [bsky, 3 points, 1 comments]
- Here's the link to the preprint paper cited by the NBC report. "What did Elon change? A comprehensive analysis of Grokipedia" arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09685 (Note: Papers on arXiv are not yet formally peer- [bsky, 2 points, 0 comments]
- Bookmarking the researcher's article [bsky, 1 points, 0 comments]
- Grokipedia de xAI cita fuentes de baja calidad y tiene 13 veces más probabilidades de utilizar referencias “incluidas en la lista negra” de Wikipedia, aunque repite gran parte del contenido de la enci [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- The first comprehensive analysis of Grokipedia to publish. [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- This is the study that shows Grok is basically a watered down wikipedia w/ lower standards for credibility, plus nazi stuff from Stormfront and Infowars. arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09685 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- What did Elon change? A comprehensive analysis of Grokipedia arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09685 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
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