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Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has expressed optimism about Elon Musk’s Grokipedia, a proposed Wikipedia competitor aiming to provide less biased content.
Hoskinson shared on X yesterday that Grokipedia would not just provide real competition for Wikipedia but also help diversify information sources.
Elon Musk to Launch Grokipedia
For context, Hoskinson’s reaction followed an update from Elon Musk on the launch of a new online encyclopedia called Grokipedia. Musk disclosed that they would publish the first version of the information source in the next two weeks.
The Hoskinson and Wikipedia Dispute
Remarkably, Charles Hoskinson has not had a soft spot for Wikipedia; this brawl dates back to Cardano’s early days. Back in 2020, he claimed that Wikipedia had an agenda against him and Cardano. This comes after he disclosed that the encyclopedia was preventing them from creating pages for the Cardano blockchain.
Hoskinson streamed a YouTube video in March 2020, titled “On Wikipedia,” where he ranted about undue censorship against Cardano by the platform. The founder insisted that the encyclopedia was hostile to Cardano despite being the most cited among its peers at the time.
He also took to X in October 2020 to brand Wikipedia as an “organization of cowards.” He stated in the tweet that one of the founders, Jimmy Wales, had blocked him.
Jimmy Wales just blocked me. I guess 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’s entry on Wiki by the site’s editors.
Essentially, Grokipedia could give Cardano a fair playing ground to push the correct narrative about the ecosystem. It would also mitigate the left slant in several topics.