Wikipedia

Grokipedia v0.2 observations

I was poking around on Grokipedia v0.2 on Nov. 25, 2025 to contrast it with Wikipedia. I was not evaluating its political orientation. The media reports that its political attitude is a primary point of interest but not for me.

Here are some observations.

  • GP tends to have long sentences that could be refactored into improved prose. There are a lot of comma splices. The style can be stilted and unnatural. The articles seem to be consistently too long. They include redundant content and repeat the same information in different sections of an article. Each topic has two or more subtopics. This contrasts with Wikipedia pages, which often have a flat outline and make judicious use of sub-topics and, rarely, sub-sub-topics, Grokipedia articles are always subdivided into two levels. The text of each Wikipedia article has been individually organized in a logical fashion. Grokipedia’s organizing principle is usually hidden. In addition, the section headings are long which makes them hard to scan quickly as you review a page.
  • GP only includes pure URLs as its citations. Wikipedia includes the date that the reference was accessed along with other information such as title, source and publisher when its available. Wikipedia can include citations that are not available online or are paywalled (for example in books or bibliographic databases) when the information is not available freely. Wikipedia heavily uses archive.org’s Wayback archive to preserve access to references that are gone or altered. A pure URL doesn’t help me grade the quality of sources or decide whether it is relevant to my purpose for visiting the site. When I did go to Grokipedia citations, it was be difficult to find where the referenced information was located. It also is a valid question to ask whether the citation actually supports the statement being cited or is it being misinterpreted.
  • With only a direct URL for the citations, Grokipedia will be brittle as the internet churns and pages come and go. Theoretically, a Grokipedia page could regenerate with new material, but that fragility inhibits consistent content over time. When source material is deleted, Grokipedia can’t stay current.
  • GP has some formatting issues. One ugly example was the mathematical page Brauer Group that had red errors in the mathematical equations. When you mouse over a citation index ([15] for example), the domain name popup is centered and hidden behind the mouse. In addition, because the target is small, you can’t move the mouse to uncover the domain. My mouse is big, but Wikipedia aligns the popup when you mouse over an internal link to the right of the mouse and there is enough room to move the mouse out of the way. When you mouse over an actual citation in Wikipedia, the entire citation is presented directly above the index number. In the body of an article, GP’s headings and subheadings are too similar in size and font weight so that they blend together. Although there is a line between top level outline elements, it is such low contrast that it’s not actually visible. This defeats the goal of adding a visual cue that a new section has begun.
  • GP has sparse internal links. Where Wikipedia has many cross links to other Wikipedia articles, GP has dramatically fewer. For example, I didn’t see any crosslinks in the article about Tasha Yar from Star Trek: The Next Generation. In most articles there are many obvious places to put an internal link that aren’t used.
  • Although it contains an edit history for each page, that feature is not very useful. You can’t put edits in context. If the edit is complicated, you can’t interpret it. Of the several pages I visited, there was only one edit and it was still being reviewed. Allowing users to thumb up/down to an edit as Grokipedia does might be ok for Reddit, but an encyclopedia requires more detailed evaluation. It’s not clear what will happen when a page with edits regenerates.
  • The pages are white on black. Since many of the pages are very long, that makes them hard to follow along. As I scroll on the page, I lose track of where I am. The page map on the left has all of the text in the same font size and weight which makes it hard to identify the top-level outline entries. Since the lengths of the outline entries are long, they are usually folded onto two lines, making the page map even harder to scan.

Although, I’m sure Grokipedia v0.3 will have improvements, right now I wouldn’t use it as a replacement for Wikipedia. Grokipedia is written by an anonymous, evolving blob and there is no one to intervene. I can visualize the Wikipedia community because I know there are people behind the scenes. In addition, I can find Wikipedia projects that I can contribute to there and be a contributor as well as a user.

Wikipedia is organic and uses principles compatible with Douglas Engelbart’s Language, Artifacts and Methodology to augment human intellect. Why reinvent the wheel?

Non-Foreign Language

Modern browsers help break the language barrier by including features that translate the text of a website into the reader’s language. I find the Edge browser to be most useful for this. I’ll show how these features can help me use DeviantArt, Wikipedia and Twitch. My experience is based on the browsers available in Windows 11.

I’ve got some friends on DeviantArt who are from France. Often, they have image descriptions, comment threads and blog posts in French. Rather than being locked out of their community, Edge helps me automatically translate the messages to English.

Edge offers a few multilingual options.

One allows me to highlight the text I want to read, right click, and select “Translate to English.” This will replace the French (or other language) text with English and preserve the formatting.

Another option happens when the browser recognizes a page is French and offers to translate the page once it loads.

Once language features have been activated on a page, an extra icon is added to the right end of the address bar. There are two modes this icon offers. After highlighting a section and translating it with the context menu, the icon allows you to “show original” to undo the translation. After doing that, when you press the icon again, you can select a language and translate the whole page. That’s awkward but it’s a tradeoff because Edge prefers to translate individual blocks of text and not the whole page

There are a few additional tricks that these features include. In addition to inlining the translation, hyperlinks have their text translated but they go to the same destination. When the page has mixed languages, it leaves the English text unchanged. Edge can identify the language of a page without the language being tagged in the HTML.

Another multi-lingual place I go to is the home page of Wikipedia. If I select a language link such as Deutsch it will open the home page for that language’s version of Wikipedia. When the language is supported, Bing will offer to translate the page. The pleasant surprise of translating a whole page is that pages reached from it by a link are also translated automatically.

It is really cool to see the different versions of Wikipedia in different languages since pages are not translated by the Wiki. For example, one surprise discovery was American Football in Germany. I had never heard of professional (American) football teams in Europe.

A third place that I visit that has text in a different language is Twitch. Twitch is an interactive streaming platform that can provide income to the streamers. Often the streamer is playing a computer game but some streamers just hang out or stream about anything else. Usually there is an interactive chat running alongside the video. When the streamer is using a different language, if I select some of the chat, I can have Edge translate the whole page using the language icon in the address bar. My use of this is limited because the audio is not translated.

The additional translation feature that this unlocks causes the chat to be translated as it is updated so that I can follow the conversation smoothly without knowing the streamer’s language.

Of these features, the one that is unique to Edge is that you can select several separate areas of text and translate them individually in place while keeping the formatting the same. The text that hasn’t been selected is left alone. The sections do not need to be in the same language.

Firefox and Chrome have similar translation features. One feature that is different is that they prefer to translate the whole page instead of sections of it. In addition, they aren’t as successful at preserving the formatting. An additional weakness of the current version of Firefox is that it can mangle English text that is mixed in when it translates the full page. (Firefox marks its features as beta at this time so that will probably improve.)

Firefox and Chrome are weaker than Edge when you want to translate blocks of text. Firefox will show the translation of the text in a separate edit control and Chrome only previews a short section of the translation. Both will not show the translation in place unless the whole page is translated. Another weakness of Chrome is that it does not dynamically follow a chat window as it updates.

An interesting feature is how they deal with documents that contain three or more languages. For this, Chrome wins. When it translates the whole page, it translates each language section to English. Edge can be coaxed to translate both languages, but it requires several steps. Firefox will only change a single language when it tries to translate the whole page in place.

These translation features are really useful. They let users read text from all over the world without needing to learn a new language. I didn’t evaluate the quality of the translated text so it would be a separate project to evaluate the Edge’s translator, the Bergamot translator used by Firefox and the translator used by Chrome. Those are surely under active development so any evaluation would be limited to the moment the evaluation takes place.

The help pages for these browsers don’t appear to describe the ‘Translate to English” context menu that all of the browsers have. They allow one to translate a section of a page instead of translating the whole page. Even though it is missing from documentation, all three browsers support it. Edge has the block translation capability more thoroughly integrated into the browser. I use that most often.

Black hole moderation

If someone violates community guidelines, they can be given a suspension or ban.

A suspension is a temporary hold. It could be a warning that is meaningful for someone who is pushing the boundaries too far and needs a digital rap on the knuckles with a ruler. A ban, forbidding access to the site, can be appropriate for people who are malicious and harming a web site’s community. Once they are pushed out, over time, their influence will be fade.

Black hole moderation is more demonstrative way of rejecting an account. To implement a black hole moderation decision, all content created by the user will be erased from the site. The incentive for such users to leave a “mark on the trees” will be eliminated.

Although black hole moderation could be a disincentive to bad actors, it might be painful to the site. It would not be something done lightly. For example, content that is copied into a reply or reposted might also be deleted. Technical solutions for such a search and destroy mission would be interesting to develop.

In a simple example, black hole moderation on DeviantArt would remove all of the user’s messages, art and interaction. On a message board, the hosts would remove all of the user’s messages and interaction with other users. Very difficult examples of a black hole moderation would occur on crowdsourced sites like Wikipedia and Fandom.com.

Adding black hole moderation to social media sites might be more useful and less difficult.

The purpose of the black hole moderation is to give a disincentive to the troll who incessantly adds bad content that doesn’t quite breach community standards but when taken as a whole is harmful.

If privacy of an individual can justify the right to be forgotten, black hole moderation embodies the right to forget.

Alexa on Fire

The letter AHere are my impressions of the Kindle Fire’s Alexa implementation. It has some features that a smart speaker can’t provide.

It shows what it understands. When you ask a question, the service displays the text of your query. It also shows the text that it speaks back to you.

I was surprised that the Fire also shows a graphic relevant to your question. A question about cheese shows a graphic of cheese on a cutting board. I asked for the name of the mayor of Auburn, Indiana and it displayed the Auburn city logo. My search for the mayor of Indianapolis retrieved a photo of him.

I didn’t explore the quirky questions that you can ask. I also haven’t used it enough for the software to dial in on recognizing my voice, so I was frustrated with some errors when I tried to use it as a calculator.

It isn’t clear how much curation of the answers is done by a human analyst.  My search for the mayor of Auburn, Indiana returned with the wrong name. The display shows that the name came from Wikipedia and I just corrected the Wikipedia page. It will be interesting to see how long it takes Alexa’s data repository to reflect that. Will someone need to check the citations first?

I am interested in where the information came from. I’ve seen the results explain that  information came from Reuters, reference.com, Getty or Wikipedia. Sometimes the attribution is spoken in the answer. At other times, it is in a small note on the display.

Unfortunately, the results can attribute information to Wikipedia that is not available there. For example, the sodium content of Velveeta cheese is not available on Wikipedia, even though the answer claims it is.

Alexa on the Fire is useful. I’ve been hesitant to get a smart speaker and this is a demo of some of what I could have. The most consistently useful feature I found so far is the weather.

Contribute to Wikipedia

Wikipedia has plenty of ways to contribute. The obvious one is to add content or edit pages. There are also many “WikiProjects” There’s something for everybody’s taste.Wikipedia sphere

Some of the projects cover different topic areas: Bacon, Batman and Birds

An assignment for a class last year sent me looking for a WikiProject. I found the Maintenance project Citation Cleanup and then I specialized into “Pages with broken reference names” It’s fairly esoteric and the list of things to do on the projects is unbounded. Knock down one page by fixing its citations and there’s ten more waiting for attention.

It’s interesting to learn the inner workings of Wikipedia. I don’t have to do anything more than read it, but by contributing I take a little bit of (mostly anonymous) ownership.

I learned that there are robots that go through the encyclopedia that identify likely vandalism. Others find citations that look similar for a person to make them consistent. There is a robot flotilla helping out. There are guidelines for making your own robot.

As I looked more and more into the inner workings of Wikipedia, it seems to be more of a community. I don’t have to worry about “breaking” it and I can, in my own small way, make a contribution.

Original image. By Wikipedia [Image license: CC BY-SA 3.0]