Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has expressed optimism about Elon Musk’s Grokipedia, a proposed competitor to Wikipedia that aims to provide less biased content.
Hoskinson shared on X yesterday that Grokipedia would not only provide real competition to Wikipedia, but also help diversify its sources of information.
Elon Musk will launch Grokipedia
For context, Hoskinson’s response followed an update from Elon Musk about the launch of a new online encyclopedia called Grokipedia. Musk announced that they would publish the first version of the resource in the next two weeks.
The Hoskinson and Wikipedia dispute
Remarkably, Charles Hoskinson has no soft spot for Wikipedia; this brawl dates back to the early days of Cardano. In 2020, he claimed that Wikipedia had an agenda against him and Cardano. This comes after he revealed that the encyclopedia prevented them from creating pages for the Cardano blockchain.
Hoskinson streamed a YouTube video titled “On Wikipedia” in March 2020, in which he railed about unnecessary censorship against Cardano by the platform. The founder insisted that the encyclopedia was hostile to Cardano, despite him being the most cited among his peers at the time.
He also took to X in October 2020 to label Wikipedia as an “organization of cowards.” He declared in the tweet that one of the founders, Jimmy Wales, had blocked him.
Jimmy Wales just blocked me. I think we got our answer from Wikipedia. They are an organization of cowards
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) October 23, 2020
Meanwhile, other blockchains also faced a similar challenge with Wikipedia in their early days, amid widespread censorship of the industry at the time. Even Bitcoin’s pseudonymous founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, expressed frustration over the incessant removal of Bitcoin mentions on Wiki by the site’s editors.
Essentially, Grokipedia could give Cardano a level playing field to push the right narrative about the ecosystem. It would also soften the left-wing slant on several issues.