I have long planned on writing a thorough post about how much the United States, its culture, its future as a viable democracy and its avoidance (so far) of a close call with progressive neo-totalitarianism owes to Elon Musk. This isn’t it. However, once again he has used his boundless wealth and creativity to strike down an engine of cultural indoctrination and Orwellian twisting of knowledge and history. Buying Twitter and ending its flagrant partisan bias was a landmark in American freedom of speech, one that may well have made the election of Donald Trump possible. His latest adventure may be even more important.

He has launched Grokipedia, the desperately needed alternative to Wikipedia. It is still a work in progress, as Musk admits, but by being AI-driven (the bot in charge is Elon’s Grok), the online living encyclopedia avoids the progressive bias and vulnerability to partisan manipulation that had caused me to only resort to Wikipedia when the topic was immune from political bias.

We all know by now that AI makes mistakes, with a tendency to make up stuff when it can’t find what it’s looking for. I’m sure Gokipedia will too, but Wikipedia is already full of fake stories, topics and references. The process of getting an entry in Wikipedia is baroque, and adding useful information to any entry is subject to multiple roadblocks, as my father discovered when he attempted to correct a blatantly wrong Wiki entry regarding a World War II battle in which he was a prominent participant. Its editors have agendas, and they are often political.

Right now the online reference has less than a million entries, but Grokipedia 1.0 will be available shortly and promises to be much more exhaustive. I tested the new source yesterday, and even with its limitations I found the results, in addition to not being cluttered with appeals for donations, to be more balanced and thorough than what I am used to getting from its competition. So have others. One user tweeted the difference between Grok’s summary of the pandemic virus’s origins and Wiki’s:

Wikipedia: “conspiracy theorists claim COVID-19 leaked from a lab.”

Grokipedia: “experts are split, here are the sources for the house report on the lab leak and the scientific sentiment studies.”

Musk is and I assume will always be a loose cannon on the American scene, disrupting the status quo on a whim, making ethical wrong-turns, impulsively behaving like a petulant teenager. He will have plenty of black marks on his ledger. In the end, however, Musk’s liberation of Twitter, his space exploration enterprise, and now the shattering of Wikipedia’s sinister monopoly on online knowledge distribution should ensure our nation’s gratitude and admiration.

Unless, of course, he morphs into a super-villain who tries to take over the world….which is always a possibility with eccentric geniuses.

Meanwhile, you should check out Grokipedia yourself. Here.