Musk's mildly-heralded Grokipedia is out as Beta 0.1; we should take a look. As I recall the last Wiki-clone was Justapedia, and that hasn't fared well. Gpedia is a better effort, though.What is it? Of course, we turn to Wiki to find that it is AI - i.e. Grok - generated, but very clearly based on Wiki. Amusingly, turning to Grokipedia itself produces no results (it also plays badly with archive.is), which throws up the first obvious issue: it is significantly smaller than Wiki, at about 900,000 articles. Wiki still has the article about me (I've just updated it to say I'm retired); Gpedia doesn't, arguably a better choice but this is minor.
Searching for something neutral, I looked at Autun Cathedral (because I'd just come across this) and it seemed achingly familiar... this turned out to be because I'd been through in the summer. Comparing Gpedia with Wiki, Wiki is obviously superiour because it has images; I can't quite imagine how Gpedia has managed to fail in this aspect. The text is a virtual copy of Wiki, down to the error in reference 15 ("Capital: Virtues and Vices. Jean and Alexander Heard Library. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)"). But that's not a problem; Wiki is freely copiable, that's part of the point (though is Gpedia we wonders?). Problem two is the lack of internal links in Gpedia; again, I struggle to understand how they've screwed that one up.
Let's try something more controversial. Was George Floyd "an African American man who was murdered by a white police officer" or was he "an American man with a lengthy criminal record including convictions for armed robbery, drug possession, and theft in Texas from 1997 to 2007". Answer: he was both. You get no prizes for guessing which quote comes from which 'pedia; and note that for purposes of exposition I have only taken a short leading quote from both.
Tip-toeing up to GW, let's look at Global Cooling: G, W. Here the Gpedia text isn't from Wiki; it reads like someone has pushed Grok to do an analysis; it has done passably but the Gpedia text is worse than Wiki's.
Now to look at GW directly. A year or so back Wiki renamed its GW article to Climate Change, because <fashion>, so Gpedia wins by having the content at GW, although bizarrely at an article called Global warming (disambiguation) which can only be because it has picked up on Wiki's Global warming (disambiguation) page for some odd reason. But Gpedia loses by absurdly including minor nonsense about some rap album in the lede. It also loses by lacking detail, and above all by not having easy links to subsidiary articles, which makes following up on ideas much harder. And it lacks images, a major blunder. But as to slant, it is all fine; I had to go down quite a long way to "Surveys of climate scientists indicate that while over 99% of recent peer-reviewed studies endorse human causation as primary, approximately 14% attribute warming roughly equally to human and natural factors, highlighting persistent debate on precise partitioning" to find something objectionable. That statement is supported by two refs; the first is news.cornell.edu/stories/2021/10/more-999-studies-agree-humans-caused-climate-change and is sane, but doesn't support the statement; the second is by Scafetta. I also notice that I don't get a "see edits" button for that page.
Looking at The Theory of the Leisure Class, I recall not liking the Wiki articles I used for convenience; but Gpedia is if anything worse. It sez "Veblen examines the origins and behaviors of the leisure class, a non-productive upper stratum that sustains social dominance through displays of wealth rather than contributions to societal utility" but that's wrong; as I noted, the title is a lie and Grok has been misled. I suspect it is reporting what TV himself thought, but errs by stating it as a fact; he makes the mistake that nowadays would be analoguous to the "progressive" idea that bankers or venture capitalists are parasites and contribute nothing.
But this is all v0.1. I look forward to something out of beta being rather better. Oh, before I'm off: what does yer meeja say? The answer is... meh, nothing interesting.
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