Tim Bray on Grokipedia | slacker news

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 it it were properly interpreted. It cites Forbes articles parroting pretty insane and unsubstantiated claims, I thought mainstream media was not to be trusted?

In the end it's longer, written in a weird style, and doesn't really bring any value. Asking Grok about about the same topic and instructing it to be succinct yields much better results.

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...