Tim Bray on Grokipedia

Why give it oxygen?

Because it's a genuinely good idea, and hopefully one for which the execution will be improved upon over time.

In theory, using LLMs to summarize knowledge could produce a less biased and more comprehensive output than human-written encyclopedias.

Whether Grokipedia will meet that challenge remains to be seen. But even if it doesn't, there's opportunity for other prospective encyclopedia generators to do so.

I don't why an LLM would be better in theory. The Wikipedia process is created to manage bias. LLMs are created to repeat the input data, and will therefore be quite biased towards the training data.

Humans looking through sources, applying knowledge of print articles and real world experiences to sift through the data, that seems far more valuable.

> The Wikipedia process is created to manage bias. LLMs are created to repeat the input data, and will therefore be quite biased towards the training data.

The perception of bias in Wikipedia remains, and if LLMs can detect and correct for bias, then Grokipedia seems at least a theoretical win.

I'm happy with at least a set of links for further research on a topic of interest.