Right, but the reason that Conservapedia fizzled out is that you can't really build a critical mass of human editors if the only reason your site exists is that you have a very specific view on dinosaurs and homosexuality (even among hardline conservatives, most will not share your views).

What's different with Grokipedia is that you now have an army of robots who can put a Young Earth spin on a million articles overnight.

I do think that as it is, Grokipedia is a threat to Wikipedia because the complaints about accuracy don't matter to most people. And if you're in the not-too-unpopular camp that the cure to the subtle left-wing bias of Wikipedia is robotically injecting more egregious right-wing bias, the project is up your alley.

The best hope for the survival of Wikipedia is that everyone else gets the same idea and we end up with 50 politically-motivated forks at each others' throats, with Wikipedia being the comparatively normal, mainstream choice.

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Borgz 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

As it is, Grokipedia is not a threat to Wikipedia because relative to Wikipedia, almost nobody is using it.

Additionally, an encyclopedia reader likely cares about accuracy significantly more than average.

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tptacek 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It would arguably be a benefit to Wikipedia to be pulled from Google search results, since Google prominence is the root of a huge fraction of all the misbehavior on the site.

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lich_king 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nah. Wikipedia is popular because it is the #1 search result for a lot of stuff. Most of people going there just want to look up something for a homework assignment, online argument, or whatever. If Grokipedia has an error rate 5%, compared to 1% for Wikipedia, it's probably still fine.

If Wikipedia traffic shrinks down just to the true "encyclopedia reader" crowd, they will be in trouble, because I suspect that's less than 10% of their current donations. And Grokipedia is already starting to crop up in search results.

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munchler an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I remember when Fox News was considered irrelevant compared to mainstream news outlets. Don’t underestimate the reach of billionaires with an ideological agenda.

	▲	tstrimple 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Fox News has been the #1 rated cable news network for over two decades. They've had more viewers than CNN and MSNBC for most of their existence. Calling them anything other than "mainstream" is just supporting their propaganda. They've always branded themselves as the scrappy outsider because it plays well with their audience, not because it reflects reality.

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vkou an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> As it is, Grokipedia is not a threat to Wikipedia because relative to Wikipedia, almost nobody is using it.

For now. With a little collusion, and a lot of money, it can be pushed as the front page of the internet.

What are you going to do if Google and Bing are convinced to rank its bullshit over Wikipedia?

Most people don't change the defaults.

	▲	Marsymars 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> For now. With a little collusion, and a lot of money, it can be pushed as the front page of the internet. I know it has come up near the front of at least one of my Kagi searches, because it's now on my blocklist.

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gregoryl an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

To certain demographics, adherence to facts appears to be a left wing bias.