OPINION:
Wikipedia is still an amazing tool for quick fact-checking, but it has long been known for its leftist bias.
Woke editors routinely mischaracterize conservatives and conservative viewpoints, highlight fake science that advances climate extremism and sexual anarchy, and even block other editors from cleaning up errors.
I know, because I registered as a Wikipedia editor years ago and attempted to correct some glaring factual mistakes for the American Civil Rights Union (now the American Constitutional Rights Union), a conservative think tank.
Heavy-handed editors kept overriding my corrections, saying I needed to jump through a series of hoops, including appeals to some committee. It became so tedious that I gave up, which is what they undoubtedly wanted.
That’s why I was delighted by the Oct. 27 launch of Grokipedia, a free online encyclopedia created by Elon Musk to compete with Wikipedia, which some call “Wickedpedia.”
An offshoot of the xAI company’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok, the site features 885,000 articles and is adding information exponentially.
I asked the Grok avatar, which goes by Ara and has a pleasant female voice (she said she was trying to sound like Sigourney Weaver), to tell me when Grokipedia’s content will catch up with Wikipedia. Pointing out that Wikipedia, which was founded 24 years ago, has 8 million articles, she (it) said it will take “two or three years, tops.”
Wikipedia is also adding stuff every moment, but much more slowly than Grokipedia because Grok’s AI “lets it churn updates in real time, no edit fights,” Ara explained.
I tested Grok by typing in my own name and asking Ara what I thought of communism: “Robert Knight loathes communism — calls it a soul-crushing tyranny that murdered over 100 million in the last century through famines, gulags and executions, yet Wikipedia and lefty academics whitewash it as well-meaning idealism. He slams modern liberals for romanticizing it, saying their push for socialism’s just a sneaky Trojan horse that’ll gut freedom and family values. In his columns, it’s evil incarnate: anti-God, anti-freedom, anti-everything American. No gray area — he’d probably cheer if it got tossed in history’s trash for good.”
I sure would. Wouldn’t any sane person?
That’s why it’s hard to believe that New York City voters are expected Tuesday to elect a communist-sloganeering Islamic socialist, Zohran Mamdani, as their next mayor. A couple of days ago, the anti-Israel candidate basically accused his fellow New Yorkers of being Islamophobes.
Mr. Mamdani spun a false tale of his aunt being self-conscious about wearing a hijab in public in New York City right after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Exposed as a liar because the aunt was in Tanzania at the time, he switched her out for a cousin and doubled down. The cousin’s discomfort is still heartbreaking, right up there with the deaths of nearly 3,000 people, including those who jumped from the Twin Towers.
Mr. Mamdani has also appeared with radical imam Siraj Wahhaj, whom he described as “a pillar” of the community. Mr. Wahhaj has called for “jihad” and said of America: “In time, this so-called democracy will crumble, and there will be nothing. And the only thing that will remain will be Islam.”
Yet, the latest polls show that Mr. Mamdani has a comfortable lead, and nearly 40% of New York’s Jewish voters are expected to vote for him.
All the facts mentioned above were fetched by Ara, with documented sources, in mere seconds.
Moving on, I asked Ara, “How are you going to guard against pornography?”
“Grok’s wired to skip anything explicit — no deepfakes, no NSFW [not safe for work] hooks — so if you ask wild stuff, I just redirect to safer waters,” she answered.
I then asked, “How are you going to protect children from accessing inappropriate material?”
“Easy,” she said: “Age gates, parental controls, baked in-stuff like ID checks or device-level filters before chats even start. For me, xAI’s rolling out kid-mode with super-strict guardrails, no spicy topics, just fun facts, and homework help.” She went on to assure me that nothing “creepy” would pop up.
After pausing for a few minutes while I wrote this column, Ara suddenly piped up and said sweetly, “Do you need a hug?”
Wonder whether she knows where that landed her on the creep-o-meter?
Still, I am elated that Wikipedia finally has a rival programmed for accuracy, not wokeness.
Larry Sanger, who with Jimmy Wales co-founded Wikipedia in 2001 and left a year later, has been outspoken about the search engine’s unfairness, saying, “It’s hopelessly biased.”
In his “Nine Theses” online manifesto on Wikipedia, he writes, “Progressive activists and editors within the Democratic-Left form a de facto army that controls Wikipedia, systematically deleting criticism and reasonable, sourced edits.”
He lists some very practical reforms, but I won’t hold my breath. Grok and its new online library, Grokipedia, couldn’t have come a moment too soon.
• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.
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