There is an enduring appeal to encyclopedias.The ability to look up information that has been prepared by credible sources on a huge range of topics, is invaluable, especially for someone like me whose curiosity takes me in many different directions, triggered by random events in my life. As a result, I bought a complete set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica back around the early 1980s. I was not wealthy and it cost a lot but it was the one luxury that I felt justified in indulging in. Sadly I then had to part with it when I came to the US, because the massive multi-volume set was too expensive to ship and I expected that I would be moving around a lot in my first few years here as I struggled to gain a foothold in my career. So I gifted it to a friend. Then later in the US when my children were little and we were settled, I bought another multivolume encyclopedia set, ostensibly to help them look up stuff for their homework and for general interest though I think that secretly it was for my own benefit and I ended up being the main user.

What is nice about a physical encyclopedia is the serendipity that it enables, that you often start out looking up something specific but as you turn the pages to get to that entry, you stumble across unrelated items that are interesting and read about them too. It is like walking along library stacks looking for a particular book and finding other books that look interesting and checking them out as well. The difference is that with library stacks, books are arranged according to subject categories so you will likely be in the same general area while in an encyclopedia the entries are sorted alphabetically, so with the latter one can end up very far from the starting point.

But this was before the internet and Wikipedia, which has become the go-to source for people looking for information on anything. Now one is less likely to end up on a random topic, just as doing online searches for library books means that one can miss out on serendipitous discoveries. The same is true for journals and magazines. When you have hard copies, you tend to look at the table of contents and that can result in finding new articles of interest. But with online sources, you often get sent directly to the article you are looking for and do not scan the content titles. This saves time but also results in loss.

Some right-wingers feel that Wikipedia has a liberal bias and have tried to create alternatives, such as Conservapedia. That site is a hoot, as can be seen in its page on quantum mechanics, that contains this in the opening section.

The order created by God is on a foundation of uncertainty. The Book of Genesis explains that the world was an abyss of chaos at the moment of creation. The Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13:1-9 ) also embodies the uncertainty of quantum mechanics. The Parable of the Weeds illustrates the ostensible uncertainty of nature as perceived by mankind, see Matthew 13:24-30 . The Calming of the Storm demonstrates how observation tames chaos, see Matthew 8:23-27 , Mark 4:35-41 , and Luke 8:22-25 .

Several parables in the Bible foreshadow the insight of quantum entanglement about paired photons having opposite spin, by contrasting two men in their relationship with God. The Prodigal Son contrasts two brothers, two churchgoers are contrasted in Luke 18:9–14 , and two brothers are further contrasted in Luke 21:28-31.

The term “quantum mechanics” comes from the idea that energy is transmitted in discrete quanta, and not continuous. Another historical name for “quantum mechanics” was “wave mechanics.”

Angels observed key events like Creation and the Resurrection, as described in the Bible.

Yes, indeedy. This will be of great help to a student in an introductory physics course in Modern Physics. Nothing impresses a physics professor than to have a student talk about angels as observers in QM. And quantum entanglement exhibited by two men and their relationship with god? Genius!

Now that we have AI to do the curatorial work that human volunteers do for Wikipedia, we have people like Elon Musk creating his own version called Grokipedia written by his company’s chatbot Grok (a ghastly name) that he claims will be ‘anti-woke’, creating a parallel right-wing universe. To get some basic information on it, I looked it up in (of course) Wikipedia.

Grokipedia is an AI-generated online encyclopedia operated by the American company xAI. The site was launched on October 27, 2025. Its entries are largely generated by Grok, a large language model owned by the same company. The rest of the entries have been forked from Wikipedia, with some copied nearly verbatim. Articles cannot be directly edited, though logged-in visitors to the encyclopedia can suggest corrections via a pop-up form. As of December 2025, the site has over 1 million articles.

Grokipedia is an AI-generated online encyclopedia operated by the American company xAI. The site was launched on October 27, 2025. Its entries are largely generated by Grok, a large language model owned by the same company. The rest of the entries have been forked from Wikipedia, with some copied nearly verbatim. Articles cannot be directly edited, though logged-in visitors to the encyclopedia can suggest corrections via a pop-up form. As of December 2025, the site has over 1 million articles.

Initial reviews of Grokipedia focused on its accuracy and biases due to hallucinations and potential algorithmic bias, which reviewers described as promoting right-wing perspectives and xAI founder Elon Musk’s views. The majority of reviews have described it as validating, promoting, and legitimizing a variety of debunked conspiracy theories and ideas against scientific consensus on topics such as HIV/AIDS denialism; vaccines and autism; climate change; and race and intelligence. Reviewers have accused it of whitewashing extremism, such as by framing the white genocide conspiracy theory as actively occurring. Several right-wing figures have welcomed the site.

The reviews are not favorable.

When we finally got access to it, WIRED found that the online encyclopedia contained lengthy entries generated by AI. While many of the pages WIRED saw on launch day appeared fairly similar to Wikipedia in terms of tone and content, a number of notable Grokipedia entries denounced the mainstream media, highlighted conservative viewpoints, and sometimes perpetuated historical inaccuracies.
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Entries for more recent historical events put conservative perspectives at the center. When WIRED searched for “gay marriage” in Grokipedia, no entry popped up, but one of the on-screen suggestions was for “gay pornography” instead. This entry in Grokipedia falsely states that the proliferation of porn exacerbated the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.
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The Grokipedia entry for “transgender” includes two mentions of “transgenderism,” a term commonly used to denigrate trans people. The entry also refers to trans women as “biological males” who have “generated significant conflicts, primarily centered on risks to women’s safety, privacy, and sex-based protections established to mitigate male-perpetrated violence.” The opening section highlights social media as a potential “contagion” that is increasing the number of trans people.

Of course, what this ersatz encyclopedia will do is scrape information from other sources such as Wikipedia, put a reactionary spin on it, and publish it. But without the huge amount of human oversight that Wikipedia has, it is likely to become a target for mockery, such as when it referred to Hitler as the ‘Führer’ of Germany’.

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.

This isn’t the first time Grok has praised Hitler. Earlier this year, X users posted screenshots of the AI chatbot saying the Nazi leader could help combat “anti-white hate,” echoing his maker’s statements about debunked claims of a “white genocide” in South Africa. (When confronted about his chatbot’s “MechaHitler” turn earlier this year, he said users “manipulated” it into praising the Nazi leader).
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According to Seiling, who is German, Grokipedia is attempting to undermine the authority of German institutions created to prevent another Hitler. “It’s moving within the narratives that these parties themselves are spreading,” Seiling says. “If you look closely, their argument is also kind of shit.

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Take, for example, Grokipedia’s post about the Alternative for Germany, a far-right-wing party Elon Musk repeatedly praised in the lead-up to the German election earlier this year. Grok contains an entire section on “Media Portrayals and Alleged Bias,” which serves to parrot AfD’s long-held claims that the media is biased and undermining them.
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Nowhere is this more clear than how Grokipedia deals with the genocide in Gaza.

Much like the post on the AfD, the page has a long section dedicated to the “biases” of the United Nations and NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which Grok accuses of emphasizing “Israeli actions while minimizing Hamas’s violations.” Notably, Grokipedia repeats unsubstantiated claims by Israel that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees was infiltrated by Hamas operatives, and the pages for the Israel–Hamas conflict rely strongly on hyperlinks from pro-Israel advocacy groups like UN Watch and NGO Watch.

I must admit that I, who came from an era when encyclopedias put out by major publishers contained entires that had been commissioned to scholars in the field and thus had default credibility, was skeptical of Wikipedia when it first debuted. I could not imagine how ordinary people free to edit its content could have the depth of knowledge needed to create articles of value. Was I wrong! Wikipedia has to be one of the biggest successes of the internet, using the collectivity it enabled for the public good. I look up Wikipedia a lot and have almost never found any errors. On a few occasions, I found minor ones and made changes but that was it. Now I am a supporter, including financially.

We are now in a world where right-wing groups seek to not further the growth of knowledge and information but to create alternatives to reality that serve their agendas. They are backed by wealthy and bigoted ideologues like Musk. Thankfully Wikipedia has had a large head start to establish itself and one hopes that it can weather this challenge.