Grokipedia is live. Now what?
In cauterising leftist insanity, we may have lost something special
The Wikipedia woke infestation is very similar to what happened to the rest of the internet around the time Discord came about 2015. GamerGate hit the shelves a year before with a blogpost that rang around the world.
The wokism had been quietly coiling for some time prior, but like every sickness, was acting low-key as its incubation period progressed. First seen as a fashionable ‘oh look at how civilised we are’ displays of compassionate, post-scarcity flair, it slowly encroached from the position of charming novelty to mandated set of coded speech.
Even now-reviled old Twitter used to be a fairly unmoderated place - like most of the Internet back in the day - while extreme censorship is seen as an indispensable feature of every platform. Few question it. This frog got boiled long ago.
Reddit, too: up until the 2013-2014 it was little different from old 4chan with ‘anything goes, just don’t do anything super illegal’ policy. It wasn’t clean, but it was real.
Wikipedia? Not that different. Or rather, ahead of the curve. Criticism about activists with nothing better to do than poison the well emerged as early as the founding year (2001). Unlike visible tightening of censorship across the entire internet, first stage of which was made visible with 2014 GamerGate, with a follow up after Trump’s 2016 election campaign where Trump assuming office in 2017 shocked then-ascendant leftists so much they doubled down on retaining control, Wikipedia was subsumed much earlier.
All the way back in 2001, Larry Sanger, Wikipedia co-founder, voiced criticism about ideological bias, which culminated in him leaving the project a year later over “disagreements over quality control”, adding in 2005 the site became a cesspool of left-wing activists. Very much in contrast with early Twitter and Reddit which sported gore, pirated software, raids, edge (read: edgy) content and other fun stuff which made early internet a traumatic, but fun life event for untold millions.
It should be mentioned that there is no and can never be equivalenc between “right-wing”, “conservative” (read “normal”) and left-wing views. Where the normal, well-adjusted people debate on merits of approaches, exchange viewpoints and can have meaningful differences of opinions, the ‘left’ is an anti-civilisational, self-hating and suicidal force in opposition of orderliness, integrity, cleanlines and beauty. People committed to it usually have little more to do with their lives than to propagate their failed ideology, which explains ever-present and rabid activity that serves to propagate falsehoods of their secular religion to detriment of everything else.
4chan, founded in 2003, and Wikipedia of 2001 were both anonymous websites. One for education, another for entertainment. Only one group had a case to fight and took the (still somewhat normal) world for granted, while another wanted to warp the perception of it to suit its belief.
The first fracture of Wikipedia was a spin-off called Conservapedia but like most forks, it was a niche reactionary project - if measured by the criteria of replacing Wikipedia, it was a resounding failure.
The conceit of the left is not to start their own ‘left wing Wikipedia/Reddit/Google’ , but to subsume the real thing and call it mainstream. With the right (read: normal), the habit of fighting and gatekeeping isn’t that prevalent. The standard MO is to withdraw and start your own thing.
For the left, the MO is to subvert the thing - and leave only when they have no power to enforce their demands in an inverse dynamic.
The power of the left is not with labelling their mutations of supposedly mainstream and objective thing ‘left Wiki’ (even as they exist), but to claim that their point of view is the default, reasonable, vanilla and mainstream, when it’s anything but.
Thanks to Elon, one of the most consequential social media purchases signalled the decline of the global woke. X is a far cry from the free internet that should be rebuilt, but apart from marking the beginning of a big-money pushback against destructive creed of “progressivism” (which in itself is a misnomer), it handily demonstrated how the ‘left’ is unable to share a platform they don’t control even if they’re not banned or forcefully ejected. All of them leave voluntarily whenever their views (being fundamentally indefensible) are challenged, a brief emotional outburst always ends with digital self-deportations. The right, on the other hand isn’t bothered to share a platform, but inevitably ends up getting forcefully removed. Truth burns those who live by a lie.
It’s wrong to rely on one man, with all his biases and blindspots, to fix everything: for the moment Elon gets tired or changes his worldview, all of the vassal systems tied to him will shift as well.
What is needed is a mass systemic shift - but not in perception, for even after decades of brainwashing the die-hard wokies constitute a miniscule, if strategically positioned minority, which holds key power chokepoints, from discord community servers to the Reddit boards.
The mass shift must occur not in opinions, but in the willingness and ability to fight back, gatekeep and acknowledge the dangers of leftism - as well as the habit to seize and maintain power by normal people so it cannot be touches by their lessers.
But back to Wikipedia: the cyber canary in the internet coal mine, it was one of the first poisoned well. Brainwashed underemployed activists, by marxist academia during pursuit of made up degrees with no real brains or talent began devouring the font of knowledge. While many intelligent and educated people contributed people, in fact majority of them, eagerly shared what they knew in an unprecedented drive of cross-creed, cross-border, cross-faith, cross-anything collaboration and goodwill in pursuit of shared knowledge and truth. It was helpful, convenient and almost often interesting: our modern Tower of Babil without the sin of pride, and for a long time, ‘politically correct’ tweaks and increasingly heavy-handed censorship were an expected and tolerated overhead. “This is what you do this days”, people would say, roll eyes and move on to read something not yet tainted by performative activism.
It was as good as it could be and the utopian idea of people contributing their premium expertise, time, work pro bono for the common good the results of which they wouldn’t really know about or get to enjoy was as close as humanity had gotten to utopian communism (it wasn’t real communism, of course - because, unlike communism, it worked, however briefly).
The mechanisms of control that had been running under the hood were not formed - but were made visible - in 2014 during the Peak Woke - and despite attempts to dilute the rot with some semblance of neutrality, progressive (hehe) escalation of censorship and narrative control, ending with major edit wars, unknown by all except those in the know. The public saw the article frontpage and most ingested what they read without little criticism.
Some of the most egregious edit wars, symptomatic of activist takeover, include:
Pro-China edits during Hong Kong where over 20 sensitive (protected) articles were subject to a coordinated revision and vote stacking,
“Mass killings under communist regimes”, resulting in the largest deletion discussion in Wikipedia history in 2021,
Economic recession definition tweaks tweaks in 2022 to retroactively substantiate claims of Joe Biden’s claims that ‘economy is doing fine’ (unreal and insidious level of gaslighting),
Ongoing flame / edit war on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict raging on from 2023 to this day. The issue is undestandably highly contested, but signifies the ultimate erosion of any pretense of neutrality as it is a direct clash of partisan agendas with sockpuppeting, coordinated edits, source disputes rather than pursuit of a factual perspectives.
As the woke stranglehold took root, the standards hit the rock bottom and stabilised. But occasionally, the editors showed signs of starting to dig.
Exhibit A:
After an public outcry and dominating the newscycle for days, the Supreme Lead- I mean, Supreme Editors, I mean just “editors” finally relented, reluctantly allowing it the unpleasant article to live. Written in a conciliatory tone and harping on about “fragile public trust”, the article focuses on excuses. No wonder, of course, as it wasn’t about an overdose of a beloved fentanyl addict.
Exhibit B:
Kind of suprising the the articles isn’t called “an oopsie-whoopsie of Iryna Zarutska (major statistical anomaly)”
The August shitshow was one of the last straws, which prompted Musk to announce the idea of Grokipedia in late September.
Published a few days short of two months later, it has already generated enormous butthurt as the narrative - and power - are slipping away.
In a display of perpetual lack of self-awareness, the rant veers into defence of pornography and transgenderism (who asked?).
It was becoming apparent that even with all the useful information, trivia and interesting or educational tidbits which are immune to (most algebra, physics, etc) or haven’t been poisoned by inane homosexual narcissism or third-world worship, the brazen odium of self-righteousness in their moral bankruptcy outweighed the good.
Conservapedia wasn’t it, because at the end of the day that’s not how mainstream works. Mainstream works when it comes without a context or a label.
That, and the buzz. Grokipedia has resources, authority, visibility and the public trust, with the articles now reviewed by ego-less and non-emotional thinking machine.
With a bonus of being able to highlight a section and let the machine know you disagree. The machine will review it and answer instead of calling you a bigot and banning you, which at the end of the day is a nice quality of life upgrade.
zoomed-in part
Grokipedia is immune from tyranny of toxic cabals, but an LLM has no claim to objectivity either: it only as good and objective as those who shape its guardrails allow it to be.
LLM does not guarantee objectivity or nuance - if anyone is unsure, imagine a Wikipedia managed by the woke monster Gemini or even ChatGPT.
There’s also a novel and as ot today, exotic issue of data poisoning, highlighted by Anthropic just earlier this month, where as little as 250 documents is enough to compromise integrity of the dataset of a much larger size.
That said, this works both ways: for a database trained on modern Reddit, just a few non-retarded voices are enough to undermine the cohesion of the NPC leftism.
https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison
Nevertheless, with Grokipedia, an milestone has been crossed and part of the Old Internet past irrevocably altered: and in short-term, perhaps even lost forever.
Because of failure of gakeeping (aka community immune system), malicious actors embedded themselves in positions of control, destroying an utopian project - not without its flaws, but at least real and tangible.
Another human bridge and a place of passion had degraded to a degree it had to be removed like a gangrenous limb, taking a lot of healthy tissue with it, subjected to the whims of the machine tuned by even smaller group of people (who may be/become activists).
Unable to maintain a platform where debate and live exchanges took place in pursuit of truth by failing to deny space to those who were unworthy of this privilege, we’re stepping in the age where debate cannot take place at all.
With the incentive lost with the overwhelming speed and convenience of LLMs, future copies of Grokipedia run by other LLMs or private models will flood the Internet, destroying the incentive to contribute and exercise selfless desire to share which marked the wiki project. It may not be long until fandom and hobby wikis become sanitised and “fact-checked” series of sleek, featureless pages.
In itself, the change is not catastrophic - there remain many avenues of sharing of ideas and likely small groups will continue maintaining their own fragmented data repositories. The significance of Grokipedia is not in the quality of data it provides, but the change of paradigm and a shift from culture of human self-management to polite, but implacable servitors who “know better”.
Given the ideological taint, outright lies, anti-civilisational drive and activist vitriol Wikipedia permitted to cultivate and spread, poisoning minds in tandem with modern Reddit, Grokipedia is an understandable last-resort measure to preserve integrity of data and maintain some semblance of the truth until we as species recognise what to do with ourselves - and hopefully, outgrow wokism.
Maybe, without Grokipedia, the free people would have learned to mobilise and clawed back narrative control, strengthened not by the victory, but moreso transformed by what it made of them to achieve it.
That ship hasn’t sailed - it is not impossible Grokipedia and impact it will have on the Wikimedia foundation will prompt reflection and self-assessment, with eventual expunge of the woke. Worse tyrannies and bigger industries of lies once dominated more than an online website.
But we must be on our guard and remain vigilant about how our ability to interact and shape the word around us is executed. Over time, we may find ourselves losing more and more genuine expression outlets, platforms of communication and all the ways to do something out of love for art and human desire to build and share, the available outlets narrowing down to a choice of pre-selected, sanitized, optimized prompts.
Grokipedia is a good bypass, but by no means a permanent solution, which merely delegated choices from terminally progressive activists to those who tune the LLM that runs the new wiki. We must ensure our own choices matter, our avenues of expression remain available and an intelligent debate and opinion clash continues to happen between normal people or else we’ll lose both will and ability to articulate ourselves. Worse still, we’ll lose texture and grit of our lives, because surrender of agency and autonomy in something as this will impact all other areas of our lives too.
And so, the known dangers of continued information poisoning and indignity of living under a tyranny of lies have been replaced by a subtler threat, one that offers convenience without friction. But it’s only a danger if one can’t recognise it. Are we throwing the baby with the bathwater? Possibly. Perhaps it is too early to say.
The new dark ages are sleek and covered in neon lights. But I think we’ll figure it out.
This too shall pass.