As a long time editor and developer in the Wikipedia and Wikimedia space, I’m of course sceptical about what Grokipedia is trying to be, and if it stands any chance of success. it may struggle to deliver the resilience, transparency, and community processes that keep projects like Wikipedia thriving, and in the early weeks the untouchable AI generated content was certainly not going to work moving forward.
However, in the last week or so editing became an option, hidden behind Grok as a safeguard against abuse.
I thought I’d have a look at trying to edit a few of areas of content to see what the experience is like, and capture some of the good and bad points.
In no particular order…
Broken link formatting
A fix attempt
The Donald Trump articles has some broken formatting, which looks like an incorrectly parsed or formatted Markdown link that is now just showing in the HTML of the page. For posterity, I captured a copy of this version of the page on archive.ph, but here is a snapshot of how it appears.
I tried to get Grok to fix this text, with a prompt something like this (sorry about the spelling… but LLMs dont appear to care much and I was rushing)
THis section has some broken link formatting in it. Either the link formatting should be fixed to actually render as a link on the page. OR the link and broken elements should jsut be removed leaving only the text
However, it looks like when it tries to go near it, an error occurs.
More occurrences
Scanning through the article, there are actually more occurrences of broken markdown style links, and I assume no way to fix them currently.
A look at the history
Looking at the very first capture of the page that is stored on archive.ph, there doesn’t appear to be any links that are broken in the same way, so perhaps this is some issue with having Grok edit the article content without safeguards to make sure the content can actually still render.
I managed to scroll down to the bottom of the list of edits on the page at the current point in time, and there are 171 edits in total. And with all of them loaded in the sidebar, I can find 16 occurrences of []( which is an indicator of this style of broken link.
However, none of these seem to be the introduction of the text. Perhpas it was introduced during a revision of the content prior to the editing feature actually being enabled, implying that the list of “All Edits” isn’t actually all edits.
I do however see other edits trying to fix these broken links…
Including one where Grok appeared to say there was an issue, however this link is still broken in the current version of the page.
And another where it decided there was no issue in the content, and it was a user issue.
Small tweaks
office vs presidency
I had some success making small tweaks to the lead of the article, where the wording sounded off to me. However, my tweak of course come from my own opinions and viewpoints, rather than any agreed on way that the content should be written or structured. Personally, I felt that “reclaimed the office in 2024” sounded odd, as “office” has not yet been discussed, always referring to “presidency”. And Grok obliged me by tweaking the wording to say “reclaimed the presidency in 2024”
The Art of the Deal
The lead said “He rose to prominence as a media figure through authorship and television, including hosting The Apprentice”.
This felt odd to me as 1) authorship was first with no example and 2) television which I thought might actually have brought him more fame was second with an example. Again, thinking about making tweaks purely from my own opinions, rather than via any guide, I suggested they should swap, but Grok didn’t like that!
And I partly agree with this rejection, as authorship did indeed come first, however the lack of context felt weird, so I tried again, and this time with some success.
So the sentence now reads “through authorship, notably The Art of the Deal, and television, including hosting The Apprentice“. Much better, though I am missing the links of Wikipedia here.
Impeachment
I threw all previous revisions that I could find of the article on archive.ph into yet another LLM…. This time https://notebooklm.google/, along with a dump of all edit proposals and reviews, and asked it to look for:
suspicious looking edits that were allowed to happen
edits with bias
or edits that likely should have been allowed, but didn’t work
check the changes between versions to see what clearly has changed that was not actually requested
generally look at it all with a critical view to spot odd things going on
Yes, this is AI slop into AI slop and back out again, but I expect it will find something else interesting to look at, and I was not wrong.
It looks like the editing process and or other revisions of the page has lead to a drastic reduction in the amount of content in the lead of the article (see the diff). This is not necessarily bad, however when comparing to other similar articles on Grokipedia, they remain large and detailed.
The two things that were pointed out as being removed were:
Removal of Key Civil Verdict Details from the Introduction
Removal of Epstein Association Details from the Introduction
And when reading the edit requests and scanning the leads myself, I noticed that one thing I’m aware of that has vanished is any mention of Impeachment. And when comparing with other articles of US presidents that are also impeached, they still have mentions in the lead, such as Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson.
So I thought I’d write a bumper prompt to see what Grok thought about the whole situation, and which articles if any should be changed.
You used to mention various other things about Donald Turmp in the lead, infact the lead really has shrunk in the past months… and lots of that has been down to user requests slowly chipping away at it. Articles for other presidents, such as Bill Clinton or Andrew Johnson mention impeachment in the lead, as this is a large notable event, even when equited, as bill also was, however you have removed it for Donald Trump pushing it further down the article. What should be the preferred choice? Listing things like this in the lead? or not? We should try to be consistent with the approach to different people and articles. If you decide on a new approach and need to change the other articles, let me know what prompt I should you for you on the other articles to make changes in line with what you do to this article.
And, partially to my surprise, especially as it seemingly didn’t actually manage to load most of the links… Grok obliged and added some of the detail back in…
Grok said…
The edit suggestion argues for including mention of Trump’s impeachments in the lead section to maintain consistency with articles on other presidents like Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson, who had impeachments noted in their leads despite acquittals. This is a proposal to add factual content highlighting a notable event from his first term. Attempts to browse the provided supporting evidence URLs (grokipedia pages for Clinton and Johnson, history.house.gov impeachment list, archive.ph, and diffchecker) failed due to connection issues, preventing direct verification of the comparative article structures or specific diffs. However, the impeachments are empirically verifiable facts: Trump was impeached by the House in 2019 and 2021, with Senate acquittals both times, as per official congressional records. The house.gov source would confirm this, and the grokipedia links appear intended to show precedent in this encyclopedia’s style for impeached presidents. The diffchecker likely illustrates prior inclusion in Trump’s lead that was later removed. While article leads should remain concise and focus on the most pertinent biographical and career highlights, impeachments represent a significant constitutional event in Trump’s presidency, warranting brief, neutral inclusion for completeness and balance, especially given the user’s point on consistency. This addition fits naturally without disrupting flow or introducing bias, as it mirrors treatment for other presidents and is already detailed in the “Impeachments, investigations, and internal controversies” subsection. Full acceptance of unspecified re-expansion is avoided to prevent bloating; instead, partially incorporate a precise, sourced clause. Only the intro (# Donald Trump) is edited, as it targets the lead paragraph(s) before the first H2 section, per extraction rules, and no other sections are implicated.
And tada, the article lead now reads…. oh no it doesnt….
But it came back soon after, and the lead now reads…
he has served as the 47th president of the United States since January 20, 2025, in his second non-consecutive term, and previously as the 45th president from January 20, 2017, to January 20, 2021, twice impeached by the House of Representatives but acquitted by the Senate both times.
What do I think?
I’ll probably continue to curiously use the edit button and look at the history of various articles.
It would be nice if some of the following existed on the platform, many of which are core parts to the transparancy and function of Wikipedia:
You could actually see all revisions of an article.
You could easily view a diff between 2 version of an article.
You could actually see the exact change that has come as the result of an edit request, rather than just a summary of roughly what might be changed.
Things like syntax link issues were actually fixable.
The approach to articles throughout Grokipedia was consistent.
Grok could actually load all sources you give it
There was a centerialized view of all of your edit requests
And I think the UI needs a tweak, because I have written this entire blog post before noticing that I can actually suggest how to edit the content, if I expand a little Edit content (optional) field, which my eyes were not drawn to at all!
