June 18, 2026
Parts list or parts fiction?
Everything Is BOM: Bill of Materials Encyclopedia
A giant parts wiki wowed people, then the "AI garbage" accusations hit
TLDR: BOMwiki wants to catalog what products are made of, down to tiny parts and raw materials, with massive counts that make everything from phones to jumbo jets look like giant puzzles. Commenters were split between impressed and deeply suspicious, with several accusing parts of the site of being AI-made nonsense.
A new site called BOMwiki is trying to do something gloriously obsessive: break products down into every single part inside them, from giant excavators to smartphones, all the way to screws, bearings, and even raw mined materials. The numbers are eye-popping — 30 million parts mapped and a jumbo jet allegedly rolling up to more than 5.6 million parts. For a moment, the crowd was impressed. One commenter simply wrote, "Really cool!" while another veteran of the manufacturing world jumped in with a proud little flex, saying they’d built a business around the idea that "everything is a BOM" years ago.
But then the comments took the classic internet turn from awe to side-eye. Fast. Critics started asking the question that always starts the drama: where did this data even come from? One user joked that the site was missing an ASML machine, then immediately turned savage, claiming some entries looked like "garbage AI hallucinated info." Ouch. Another commenter roasted the very name, saying it sounded like a meme that could age badly — and then twisted the knife by suggesting the whole thing was probably AI-generated anyway.
That sparked the real mood of the thread: not "wow, what a cool encyclopedia," but "is this an incredible public resource or just a very confident robot making stuff up?" The harshest hit came from a user who basically declared that a wiki is only as good as its human experts — and in this case, they weren’t sure there were any. In other words: huge ambition, huge numbers, and a comment section already trying to unscrew the whole thing bolt by bolt.
Key Points
- •BOMwiki describes itself as a free encyclopedia of bills of materials that breaks products down into components and raw materials.
- •The site says it covers 4,879 products, 30,390,912 mapped parts, 192,471 items, and 51 domains.
- •Its featured excavator example contains 639 parts organized into 7 top-level assemblies.
- •The article states that a commercial airliner has roughly 604,977 parts, while a 747-class jumbo jet is the largest BOM on the site at 5,643,733 parts.
- •BOMwiki emphasizes shared components and raw-material endpoints, including Fastener Set as the most-reused component and smartphone supply chains traced to lithium, cobalt, and rare-earth ores.