When Wikipedia entered our lives in 2001, it redefined how humanity accessed knowledge. Within a few years, it eclipsed Microsoft’s Encarta and the venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica. The platform was built on what Encyclopedia.com had attempted to pioneer in 1998 — an online, publicly accessible repository of knowledge. But Wikipedia introduced something transformative: an open-access, collaborative model that applied the wiki (a Hawaiian term for “quick”) philosophy to information compilation.
It allowed ordinary people to contribute knowledge alongside editors, challenging centuries of gate-kept knowledge production. Over the years, the site has weathered waves of criticism, legal disputes, and even state bans. Yet as of November 10, 2025, Wikipedia exists in more than 300 languages, hosting over 7 million articles in English alone, and consistently ranks among the world’s ten most-visited websites.
Enter Grokipedia
Now, Wikipedia faces a new rival, one powered by artificial intelligence. On October 27, 2025, the World’s richest man and Wikipedia critic, Elon Musk, launched Grokipedia, an AI-driven online encyclopedia developed by his company xAI.
Unlike Wikipedia, where millions of volunteers continuously edit and moderate entries, Grokipedia does not permit direct edits. Instead, users can report errors, leaving control of revisions to the platform itself. “The goal of Grok and Grokipedia.com,” Musk declared on October 18, “is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” But can Grokipedia truly deliver on that promise?
Criticisms and Controversies
Soon after its launch, observers noticed that much of Grokipedia’s content seemed strikingly similar to Wikipedia — in some cases, nearly identical. That is hardly surprising, given that large language models like Grok are trained extensively on Wikipedia and other open-source data.
Critics have also raised concerns over accuracy, bias, and AI hallucinations. Here, it is worth remembering that Grok itself has gone rogue on several occasions. But beyond factual errors, Grokipedia’s emergence has reignited a deeper ideological battle that defines much of the modern internet: the cultural and political contest between the Western right and left.
An Ideological Duel
From the outset, Musk framed Grokipedia as a challenge to what he calls Wikipedia’s “woke” bias — even dubbing it “Wokepedia.” Similar to his takeover of Twitter (X), Grokipedia was born of a desire to counter perceived liberal dominance in digital discourse.
In response, Western left-leaning analysts accused Grokipedia of promoting right-wing narratives. LGBT advocates criticised its use of derogatory terms, while others claimed that the encyclopedia selectively amplifies Musk’s own views. Several entries reportedly display cautious or apologetic tones when discussing issues that pit American conservatives against liberal academia.
Indeed, some Grokipedia articles appear to reflect Musk’s worldview. For instance, the platform presents the “white genocide theory” — widely debunked and classified as a conspiracy theory by Wikipedia — as a concept with “empirical underpinnings.”
Studies have long shown that Wikipedia exhibits a slight Democratic or left-leaning bias, a fact even co-founder Larry Sanger has accused the platform of. Grokipedia, conversely, positions itself at the other ideological pole. Yet, despite Musk’s rhetoric about “objectivity,” his project risks replacing one form of bias with another.
If anything, this rivalry between Grokipedia and Wikipedia shows the truth that knowledge has never been ideologically neutral — and it is unlikely to become so anytime soon.
Whose Knowledge Counts?
The word encyclopaedia originates from the Greek enkyklios paideia, meaning “general education.” For two millennia, encyclopedias have sought to collect and codify human knowledge.
The internet transformed this dynamic. Open-access encyclopedias like Wikipedia made scholarly knowledge accessible to anyone with a connection. Google and Wikipedia, in fact, operate in symbiosis: Google boosts Wikipedia pages in its search results, while Wikipedia’s credibility lends authority to Google’s information ecosystem.
Back to the recent duel, Grokipedia calls itself a “comprehensive collection of all knowledge.” Wikipedia defines itself as a “free encyclopedia.” Yet both raise pressing questions: Whose knowledge do they represent? Who interprets it? How free is it, really?
A 2020 Wikimedia Foundation survey revealed that 55.9 percent of Wikipedia’s contributors come from Europe, 19 percent from Asia, and 12 percent from North America. This means the Global South remains starkly underrepresented. Will Grokipedia change that? Unlikely. Research shows that the farther a culture is from the United States, the less AI models like GPT resemble its way of thinking.
As American billionaires tighten their grip on the digital sphere — from social media to AI-driven knowledge systems — the danger of losing multicultural diversity and epistemic independence grows ever more real.
Ultimately, both Wikipedia and Grokipedia are Western cultural products, built and maintained by people whose intellectual horizons are shaped by Western paradigms, politics, and histories.
For instance, in a somewhat ironic twist, reading the “Encyclopaedia” entries on both Wikipedia and Grokipedia in the first week of November 2025 reveals that neither platform acknowledges the rich encyclopedic tradition of the Islamic world, from Andalusia to Central Asia. Few readers would learn from either site that Ibn Sīnā authored one of the most comprehensive premodern medical encyclopedias, or that al-Idrīsī, al-Ishbili and Ibn Bayṭār produced multilingual works on botany and agronomy. Or al-Jazarī on engineering centuries before the European Enlightenment.
e-Information and the Muslim World
This absence points to a deeper problem: Muslims’ marginal role in shaping modern information ecosystems. Unlike their scholarly predecessors, few Muslim thinkers or institutions today lead major digital knowledge projects.
Some of the consequences of this negligence are evident. The representation of Zionist activities is an example. Wikipedia temporarily locked its “Gaza Genocide” page between October 28 and November 5, citing neutrality rules. TRT World reported that Grokipedia’s entries were noticeably pro-Israel in tone. If the loss of thousands of Palestinian lives is gaslighted using some editorial language, what hope remains for balanced portrayals of Islam and Muslims?
In light of all these, we ask: when future AI systems ingest today’s biased digital archives, what version of history will they pass to the next generation?
Perhaps it is time for Muslims, scholars, technologists, and communities alike, to reclaim the narrative and produce knowledge grounded in their own intellectual traditions, not merely filtered through Western epistemic lenses.
In the end, the contest between Wikipedia and Grokipedia is not just about facts or algorithms. It is a struggle over who defines truth in the digital age — and whose voice the future will hear.
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