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Tim Bray on Grokipedia

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Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#171

Post by tstrimple »

wtfwhateven wrote: post #53
bawolff wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who say these types of things should link their wikipedia user account so we could see why they were banned and if it really was so unreasonable.

They never do even when asked. Happy to be proven wrong this time of course.

> Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views

> Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?

> Con: LOL no...no not those views

> Me: So....deregulation?

> Con: Haha no not those views either

> Me: Which views, exactly?

> Con: Oh, you know the ones

Unfortunately always relevant.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#172

Post by dragonwriter »

jgalt212 wrote: post #138

> Woke/Anti-Woke · The whole point, one gathers, is to provide an antidote to Wikipedia’s alleged woke bias According to the Manhattan Institute as cited by the Economist, even grok has a leftwards bias (roughly even to all the other big models). https://www.economist.com/international/2025/08/28/donald-tr...

> According to the Manhattan Institute as cited by the Economist, even grok has a leftwards bias (roughly even to all the other big models).

When you are far enough to the right, everything has a left bias, and even the degrees become hard to distinguish.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#173

Post by frm88 »

hocuspocus wrote: post #83

I checked a topic I care about, and that I have personally researched because the publicly available information is pretty bad. The article is even worse than the one on Wikipedia. It follows the same structure but fails to tell a coherent story. It references random people on Reddit (!) that don't even support the point it's trying to make. Not that the information on Reddit is particularly good to begin with, even…

I wrote about an entry on Sri Lanka a couple of days ago [0] where I checked grok's source reference (factsanddetails.com) against scamdetector which gave it a 38.4 score on a 100 trustworthiness scale. Today that score is 12.2. Every entry in grokipedia that covers topics vaguely Asian has a reference to factsanddetails.com. You can check for yourself: just search for it on grokipedia - it'll come up with worth 601 pages of results.

Today the page I linked in my HN post is completely gone.

But worse: yesterday tumblr user sophieinwonderland found that they were quoted as a source on Multiplicity [1]. Tumblr is definitely not a reliable source and I don't mean to throw shade on sophieinwonderland who might very well be an expert on that topic.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743033

[1] https://www.tumblr.com/sophieinwonderland/798920803075883008...

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#174

Post by ValveFan6969 »

On the other hand, I click on a Wikipedia article and I'm immediately bombarded with "[blank] is an alt-right neo-nazi fascist authoritarian homophobic transphobic bigoted conspiracy theory (Source: PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE HATE THIS TOPIC I BEG YOU)"

At least Grokipedia tries to look like it was written with the intent to inform, not spoonfeed an opinion.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#177

Post by jhanschoo »

ef2k wrote: post #73

Maybe it's just me, but reading through LLM generated prose becomes a drag very quickly. The em dashes sprinkled everywhere, the "it's not this, it's that" style of writing. I even tried listening to it and it's still exhausting. Maybe it's the ubiquity of it nowadays that is making me jaded, but I tend to appreciate terrible writing, like I'm doing in this comment, more nowadays.

I'm fine with Gemini's tone as I'm reading for information and argumentation, and Gemini's prose is quite clear. I prefer its style and tone over OpenAI's which seems more inclined to punchy soundbites. I don't use Claude enough for general purpose information to have an opinion on it.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#178

Post by pstuart »

onetimeusename wrote: post #175
J_McQuade wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name one.

White supremacists were responsible for the 2020 riots.

You mean Umbrella Man? https://abcnews.go.com/US/man-helped-ignite-george-floyd-rio...

Yes, agents provocateur are a persistent threat for delegitimizing protests.

An in-depth look at the problem: https://acleddata.com/report/demonstrations-and-political-vi...

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#179

Post by LexiMax »

jameslk wrote: post #167
drysart wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a significant difference between a site being useless because it just doesn't have the breadth yet to cover the topic you're looking for (as in early Wikipedia); versus a site being useless by not actually having facts about the topic you're looking for, yet spouting out authoritative-looking nonsense anyway.

> versus a site being useless by not actually having facts about the topic you're looking for, yet spouting out authoritative-looking nonsense anyway. You just described Wikipedia early on before it had much content, rules around weasel words, original research, etc

Wikipedia early on wasn't competing against Wikipedia, it was competing against hardcover encyclopedias. There was clear value-add from being able to draw from a wider range of human expertise and update on a quicker cadence.

In a world where Wikipedia already exists, there's no similar value-add to Grokipedia. Not only is it useless today, there is nothing about the fundamental design of the site that would lead me to believe that it has any path to being more authoritative or accurate than Wikipedia in the future - ever.

Re: Tim Bray on Grokipedia

#180

Post by LexiMax »

jameslk wrote: post #122
9dev wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing about that seems promising! The one single thing you want from an Encyclopedia is compressing factual information into high-density overviews. You need to be able to trust the article to be faithful to its sources. Wikipedia mods are super anal about that, and for good reason! Why on earth would we want a technology that’s as good at summarisation as it is at hallucinations to write encyclopaedia entries?? Yo…

> Why on earth would we want a technology that’s as good at summarisation as it is at hallucinations to write encyclopaedia entries?? You can never trust it to be faithful with the sources. Isn’t summarization precisely one of the biggest values people are getting from AI models? What prevents one from mitigating hallucination problems with editors as I mentioned? Are there not other ways you can think of this might…

> Isn’t summarization precisely one of the biggest values people are getting from AI models?

If I want an AI summary of a Wikipedia article, I can just ask an AI and cut out the middle-man.

Not only that, once I've asked the AI to do so, I can do things like ask follow-up questions or ask it to expand on a particular detail. That's something you can't do with the copy-pasted output of an AI.

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