Is Grokipedia Right-Leaning? Comparing Political Framing in Wikipedia and Grokipedia on Controversial Topics

TL;DR

This study compares Wikipedia and Grokipedia on controversial topics, revealing differences in semantic framing and political bias, with Grokipedia showing a more bimodal distribution of ideological content.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of two encyclopedias, highlighting differences in framing and bias, especially on contentious topics, and introduces publicly available experimental code.

Findings

Semantic similarity decreases across article sections.

Both platforms are predominantly left-leaning.

Grokipedia shows a more bimodal ideological distribution.

Abstract

Online encyclopedias are central to contemporary information infrastructures and have become focal points of debates over ideological bias. Wikipedia, in particular, has long been accused of left-leaning bias, while Grokipedia, an AI-generated encyclopedia launched by xAI, has been framed as a right-leaning alternative. This paper presents a comparative analysis of Wikipedia and Grokipedia on well-established politically contested topics. Specifically, we examine differences in semantic framing, political orientation, and content prioritization. We find that semantic similarity between the two platforms decays across article sections and diverges more strongly on controversial topics than on randomly sampled ones. Additionally, we show that both encyclopedias predominantly exhibit left-leaning framings, although Grokipedia exhibits a more bimodal distribution with increased prominence of right-leaning content. The experimental code is publicly available.