Elon Musk's Grokipedia encyclopedia is now online, challenging volunteer-edited Wikipedia with a new tool that incorporates Grok, the large language model chatbot developed by Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI.
Musk is positioning Grokipedia as an alternative to Wikipedia, which he called "Wokepedia" in an X post last December. Musk has lofty ambitions for the new encyclopedia: His stated goal is to create "an open source, comprehensive collection of all knowledge."
Critics and pundits are busy comparing the two sites and how they present a range of controversial topics. But we can also learn about some of their differences by asking a simple question: What do Wikipedia and Grokipedia say about each other?
Searching for each other
A search for "Wikipedia" on Grokipedia yielded 6,047 results early Wednesday, a number that reflects both the work that's gone into Grokipedia and the challenge of competing with an encyclopedia that's been growing for nearly 25 years.
On Wikipedia, a search for "Grokipedia" returned 13 results.
Meanwhile, two days after its Monday launch, a search for "Grokipedia" on Grokipedia did not return a dedicated entry. Instead, the eight search results ranged from a general entry about online encyclopedias to seven entries primarily about Wikipedia.
Typing "grokipedia" into Grokipedia's URL to see if the new encyclopedia might have an entry that's not yet searchable returns a message: "This page doesn't exist ... yet."
Bias and imitation
On its page about Wikipedia, Grokipedia says the site is renowned for its "unprecedented scale, accessibility, and role in democratizing information." But Grokipedia also says Wikipedia is the subject of "persistent criticisms regarding factual reliability, susceptibility to vandalism and hoaxes, and systemic ideological biases — particularly a left-leaning slant in coverage of political figures and topics."
The lengthy article uses forms of the word "bias" dozens of times. It alleges that Wikipedia suffers from "ideological skew" to the left, and states that the site's preference for a neutral point of view drawn from reliable sources can instead reinforce narratives that "align with institutional biases in academia and media."
On its page about Grokipedia, Wikipedia says that Musk "positioned Grokipedia as an alternative to Wikipedia that would 'purge out the propaganda.'" It also notes that Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who has become a critic of the long-running encyclopedia, welcomed Grokipedia's arrival.
The Wikipedia article about Grokipedia highlights criticisms of the new site, such as media reports that Grokipedia's article about Elon Musk omits mention of the controversy over a gesture he made earlier this year "which many viewed as resembling a Nazi salute." It also says critics allege Grokipedia promotes right-leaning views and relies too much on AI tools.
Wikipedia also notes that Grokipedia seems to have pulled text from Wikipedia, stating, "Some articles are nearly identical to their Wikipedia entries."
In some cases, Grokipedia duplicates Wikipedia content, as noted by media outlets and Wikipedia users. Grokipedia's page on "buttocks," for instance, is virtually a copy of the Wikipedia page (albeit without images).
In that and similar cases, the articles acknowledge that their "content was adapted from Wikipedia."
Musk said at the All-In Podcast conference in September that Grok was working to evaluate information from sources such as Wikipedia pages and then "rewrite the page to … remove the falsehoods, correct the half-truths and add the missing context."
Like Wikipedia, Grokipedia users can see an article's edit history. But while Wikipedia users can directly edit a story, Grokipedia offers tools to ask questions and submit a correction.
"Wikipedia's knowledge is — and always will be — human," the Wikimedia Foundation said in a statement to NPR. Noting the site's ethos of open collaboration and consensus, it added, "This human-created knowledge is what AI companies rely on to generate content; even Grokipedia needs Wikipedia to exist."
Nuts and bolts
Numbers rule the internet, and these two sites are fairly accurate about their rival's size, with some caveats.
Wikipedia, for instance, says that Grokipedia had "about 900,000 AI-generated articles" as of Oct. 28. That same day, Grokipedia's site said it had 885,279 articles available -- a figure published on its landing page. The Wikipedia entry for Grokipedia didn't reference that precise number, and it cited an article from the Indian financial news site Moneycontrol instead of Grokipedia's data -- perhaps to capture a historical record of a figure that will be updated. An editor later updated the citation to point to an Axios article.
Grokipedia accurately states that as of October 2025, Wikipedia had more than 7 million articles in English, in the main entry about its older rival. But further down that page, the entry muddies the water a bit by stating that Wikipedia had "over 6.8 million articles in English alone by October 2025."
According to Wikipedia's running count on the Size of Wikipedia page, the English site had more than 6.9 million articles as of January 2025.
Disclosure: NPR CEO Katherine Maher is the former CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Copyright 2025 NPR