In late October, Elon Musk released a Wikipedia alternative, with pages written by his AI chatbot Grok. Unlike its nearly quarter-century-old namesake, Musk said Grokipedia would strip out the “woke” from Wikipedia, which he previously described as an “extension of legacy media propaganda.” But while Musk’s Grokipedia, in his eyes, is propaganda-free, it seems to have a proclivity toward right-wing hagiography.
Take Grokipedia’s entry on Adolf Hitler. Until earlier this month, the entry read, “Adolf Hitler was the Austrian-born Führer of Germany from 1933 to 1945.” That phrase has been edited to “Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and dictator,” but Grok still refers to Hitler by his honorific one clause later, writing that Hitler served as “Führer und Reichskanzler from August 1934 until his suicide in 1945.” NBC News also pointed out that the page on Hitler goes on for some 13,000 words before the first mention of the Holocaust.
Archive: http://archive.today/aEcz0
… idk, if Wikipedia is pissing off Deepak Chopra, I’m pretty sure that’s a good thing…
edit: I think my downvote probably warrants a less flippant explanation. In the past decade, Wikipedia has started explicitly labeling pseudoscience and “alternative medicine” as such, as opposed to their original policy of being so “neutral” they would say things like “some people think this is bogus, but some people think not”. This has, understandably, pissed those people off, and I suppose in some sense they are right? But in this era of widespread and accelerated sanewashing, I think saying these (true!) things does matter, and the people getting pissed off are really just telling on themselves. I would invite you to read the Wikipedia articles on the quoted public figures for yourself, and verify that they really were slandered the way they describe.
tangentially-related Hank Green video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zi0ogvPfCA
I should have specified: I don’t agree with every part of the article, but I shared it for this excerpt:
so you’re judging their costs and balances based on ten year old data? and acting like times haven’t changed enormously in that decade?
I know the amount of bandwidth AI’s are using to scrape wikipedia is itself an onus:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/04/ai-bots-strain-wikimedia-as-bandwidth-surges-50/
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/wikipedia-contributors-are-worried-about-ai-scraping.html
https://thecoremachine.com/technology/wikipedia-vs-ai-traffic-holding-steady-but-scrapers-are-draining-its-resources/
Here is their FY 24–25 Audit Report. To wit, their net assets were $296.6 million, while their total internet hosting expenses were $3.5 million. So the claim that hosting expenses make up a trivial fraction of their total assets would appear to hold true even moreso today than a decade ago.
Granted, the FAQs for the report state that “The vast majority of […] revenue came from donations […], as well as investment income, Wikimedia Enterprise revenue, and other revenue primarily related to a cost sharing agreement with the Wikimedia Endowment”.
I remain suspicious of the large increases in “Salaries and wages” year-over-year compared to other expense categories.
cool, you do you. don’t donate and continue to use it like a parasite lol
ah okay, I think sharing that entire article is kinda endorsing all the weird stuff in it, but thanks for specifying.
I know those are large numbers, but like, Wikipedia is one of the most visited sites on the internet? “$97.6 million in assets” is peanuts to that (compare it to any other website in a similar range!). The fact that they don’t have that much operating costs is a good thing, right? It means they’re efficient, which is what people love to complain about with non-profits.
Anyway, it’s not like they ask for much–I think the last fundraiser I saw they were asking for $2.75 a year, if you felt like they provided you that much value over the year. I certainly do, and I donate $10/year to them. If you don’t feel like Wikipedia is worth that cost to you that’s fair–but I think telling other people that they shouldn’t donate because it objectively(?) isn’t worth it is a strange thing to do.
Operating expenses don’t necessarily equate to total expenditure. The article also mentions that fifteen executives took home a six-figure salary in 2015; that doesn’t strike me as particularly efficient.
Notwithstanding, what I originally said was not prescriptive. People are free to spend their money as they see fit. Even I have donated to the Wikimedia Foundation in the past and still believe that they provide invaluable resources for the common good.
Where I take issue is the fact that the messaging in their campaigns often gives the impression that the organization is scraping by on user donations, whereas in reality they’re sitting on a pile of assets that would ostensibly be in the 99.9ᵗʰ percentile of household net worth in the US.