Dr. Robert Rohde Profile picture
Chief Scientist @BerkeleyEarth. Physics PhD & data nerd. Usually focused on climate change, fossil fuels, & air quality issues.

Oct 29, 2025, 5 tweets

My initial impression misjudged the ambition of Grokipedia 0.1.

It's apparently true that many (all?) articles began with Wikipedia content, and some articles are presented with few or no changes to the Wikipedia text.

But many topics have already been largely rewritten.

Notably, when Grok rewrites a page, it will heavily change the sourcing.

For example, on the Grokipedia page for Boris Johnson there are currently 361 citations with URLs. Only 12 of these URLs also appear on the Wikipedia page.

Such extensive changes are common.

After noticing this, I taught a computer to compare Grokipedia and Wikipedia reference lists, which makes it easy to estimate how heavily a page has been edited.

Heavily rewritten pages appear to be far more common than I had initially expected.

In addition, when Grok is rewriting a page, it appears to only add citations as bare links (example at left).

By contrast, citations copied and retained from Wikipedia pages often still show Wikipedia's more detailed citation format (example at right).

While Grokipedia 0.1 does retain considerable elements of its Wikipedia origins, I don't think it is really fair to think of it as a Wikipedia clone.

For better or worse, it is already its own thing, beholden to the whims of Grok.

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