Musk’s war on Wikipedia is a fight for a future without fact-checking

Turns out that Sacks was late to the anti-Wikipedia party. Musk has been on the warpath about it since at least 2023, when, in a chat with his buddy Benjamin Netanyahu, he said: “There’s an old saying that ‘history is written by the victors’ – it’s like, well, not if your enemies are still alive and have a lot of time on their hands to edit Wikipedia. The losers just got a lot of time on their hands.” Yes, agreed Bibi: “History is written by those who can harness the most editors.” By 2024, Musk was urging users to “stop donating to Wokepedia [sic] until they restore balance to their editing authority”.

Grokipedia’s debut proved inauspicious. According to the Washington Post, it remained publicly accessible for barely an hour before blocking visitors. “The site,” said the Post, “resembled Wikipedia in style and format… but was more right-leaning in how it framed some articles.”

Take gender, for instance, which, according to Grokipedia, “refers to the binary classification of humans as male or female based on biological sex…” Wikipedia’s entry starts with: “Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioural aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender.” This is merely one indicator, but it signals clearly which side of the culture wars Musk’s oracle favours. Whether it represents an improvement over its rival remains to be seen.

One thing is interesting, though. In addition to his usual braggadocio, Musk has been approvingly tweeting criticisms of Wikipedia by Larry Sanger , the guy who co-founded the encyclopedia with Jimmy Wales in 2001. Sanger, like a cut-price Martin Luther, has set out his critique in the form of “Nine Theses” nailed to Wikipedia’s virtual door. These state that Wikipedia should end decision-making by “consensus”, enable competing articles, abolish source blacklists, revive its original neutrality policy, repeal its founding mantra to “ignore all rules”, reveal who its leaders are, let the public rate articles, end permanent blocking of some users and “adopt a legislative process”.

To this user – and supporter – of Wikipedia, a few of these proposals make sense. The encyclopedia has become one of the world’s most influential media platforms, with a $144m endowment as of 2024, when it also had an income of $185m. It’s the ninth most-visited website in the world and it dominates search results for information queries. So it’s a powerful institution and it therefore seems appropriate that the names of the 60-odd people who play significant roles in it should be in the public domain. Likewise, allowing readers to “rate” articles seems reasonable, not least because it would provide a feedback mechanism that may be editorially useful. Rethinking the neutrality policy is also both timely and fraught, given our polarised media ecosystem. The original policy was that “we should fairly represent all sides of a dispute, and not make an article state, imply, or insinuate that any one side is correct”. Critics such as Sanger argue that the encyclopedia has gradually shifted from representing all published viewpoints equally to marginalising dissenting views that rely on sources the editorial community deems “unreliable”.

But two of Sanger’s “theses” are seriously misguided. These are the proposals that Wikipedia should publish competing articles and that decision-making by “consensus” should be abandoned. Adopting these would tear the heart out of one of the most remarkable institutions that digital technology has enabled. Publishing rival articles on the same topic would fragment Wikipedia’s core value proposition: a single, synthesised summary of human knowledge. And deciding on what’s most likely to be true on the basis of a show of hands is not the wisest way to reach a conclusion.

Adopting these two theses would launch Wikipedia on to the slippery slope down into the “choose your own reality” nightmare that now characterises the public spheres of democracies everywhere. And leave us with an inscrutable AI-powered alternative attentive only to its owner’s curious views about truth.

In the meantime, though, Wikipedia already has a pretty good entry about Grokipedia. Which is just what you would expect.

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