Wikipedia vs Elon Musk
In a world of algorithms, the simple joy of aimlessly wandering through ideas is worth preserving
What separates professional wrestling from philosophy? About 11 clicks. You can forget Championship Manager 01/02 or GoldenEye on the N64, my favourite game is Wikipedia: Getting to Philosophy.
The rules are pleasingly simple. Head to a random Wikipedia article and click on the first (non-parenthesised, non-italicised) hyperlink. Repeat the process for all subsequent pages and you will eventually — and usually pretty swiftly — end up at ‘Philosophy’.
This loop was first identified — like seemingly every good thing on the internet — by xkcd’s Randall Munroe. A 2016 study later confirmed his theory, when it found that 97% of Wikipedia articles led to ‘Philosophy’. For my example, it goes:
Professional wrestling > mock combat > combat > violence > force > physics > scientific > hypothesis > explanation > proposition > philosophy of language > philosophy.
And to be clear, 11 is on the high side.
If you can’t beat them, scrape them
Earlier this week, Elon Musk’s company xAI launched Grokipedia, an online, artificial intelligence-generated encyclopedia, intended to compete with what the billionaire called the “political and ideological bias” of Wikipedia. An abrupt shift since 2017, when Musk tweeted, “I love Wikipedia. Just gets better over time.”
Of course, Wikipedia is far from perfect. Many of its sources are out of date, unclear or misleading. A notable example is the article on Zionism, whose definition draws on language from extreme anti-Israel activists and some academics, and presents these views as mainstream.
But it is not clear whether Grokipedia will represent a marked improvement. First, because like every large language model, it will have been trained on Wikipedia content, which remains one of the largest open sources of information on the internet. And second, because it appears to be pushing far-right talking points.