{"id":938748,"date":"2026-10-19T11:26:24","date_gmt":"2026-10-19T11:26:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/938748\/"},"modified":"2026-10-19T11:26:24","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T11:26:24","slug":"wikipedia-often-gets-taken-for-granted-but-its-history-is-fascinating-and-its-future-is-fragile-richard-cooke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/938748\/","title":{"rendered":"Wikipedia often gets taken for granted \u2013 but its history is fascinating, and its future is fragile | Richard Cooke"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few years ago, I was struck by the tension between how Wikipedia<\/a> was used, and how it was talked about. Everyone was on it all the time, and yet its reputation had stalled at \u201cdon\u2019t trust it\u201d, because it was the \u201cfree encyclopedia that anyone can edit\u201d.<\/p>\n

Clearly people were trusting it, so much so it had become part of the fabric of everyday life since it was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001. But despite the fact it now has been consulted trillions of times by billions of people (English Wikipedia alone is 5.2bn words long), it inspires an odd lack of curiosity. Even people donating to Wikipedia might say the money was \u201cfor the factcheckers\u201d, though there aren\u2019t any \u2013 not paid ones, anyway. Meanwhile, the internet in the social media era had begun to feel like a much uglier place, and some digital nostalgia was setting in: here was this holdover that had somehow survived; a website that functions \u2013 and even looks \u2013 much the same as it did 20 years ago.<\/p>\n

You could say that I fell down a Wiki rabbit hole, especially when it came to the website\u2019s early years. Almost everything important about the project came together quite quickly. Its amateurish, homegrown ethos was off-putting to a lot of writers and journalists, and that meant many questions about why it had worked had no answers. Most of the people seriously interested in Wikipedia were a handful of academics \u2013 so I decided to write a book about it.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not a tech journalist. Instead, I have a background in the humanities. Wikipedia actually does, too: philosophy, and even off-piste disciplines like town planning and poetry, played a much bigger role in its inception than pure technology. Ward Cunningham, who invented the wiki in the 1990s \u2013 that\u2019s a webpage anyone can edit, and the foundational tool of Wikipedia \u2013 thought very carefully about how the power of computers might be democratised. He drew on all sorts of oblique concepts for it, such as constructivism and the Zen concept of wabi-sabi \u2013 beauty in imperfection \u2013 and it\u2019s remarkable how well the culture he created has persisted. Especially wabi-sabi \u2013 Wikipedia is, after all, always in a state of incompleteness.<\/p>\n

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. \u2018Lots of people in the dotcom boom started online encyclopedias, but Wales was the only one to hire a philosopher.\u2019 Photograph: Bloomberg\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Philosophy drew Wikipedia\u2019s co-founders together as well. Though Wales worked in tech and finance, he corresponded with philosophers for years. And though Sanger was an academic philosopher, he spent lots of time arguing online \u2013 only \u201camateurs\u201d seemed to share his sense that philosophy had life-and-death stakes. Lots of people in the dotcom boom started online encyclopedias, but Wales was the only one to hire a philosopher. In fact, the only person he hired was a philosopher. It was such an unpredictable choice, and an important clue to what made Wikipedia work: it sprang out of this digital \u201crepublic of letters\u201d, where all sorts of people were thinking about facts and why they were important.<\/p>\n

Because Wikipedia is so massive, writing an \u201cexhaustive\u201d book on it is impossible, like trying to represent a mountain with a grain of sand. Instead, I concentrated on the human history \u2013 the small, sometimes very small, number of people who really influenced what Wikipedia became. Wikipedians can be difficult, and the most ornery get a bad wrap \u2013 even the Wikimedia Foundation\u2019s leadership has made comments about their \u201cDorito-stained fingers\u201d, or tendency to stay home on a Saturday night. But by the end of the process, I was in awe of them, and I still am.<\/p>\n

double quotation markThe first woman to edit Wikipedia, Gaytha Langlois, wrote about two things dear to her: Rhode Island and standard poodles<\/p>\n

Wales and Sanger are prominent, but many other important early Wikipedians are unknown. The first woman to edit Wikipedia, Gaytha Langlois, hasn\u2019t had much attention. She wrote about two things dear to her: Rhode Island and standard poodles \u2013 small states and big dogs. Wikipedia has always had a gender imbalance, which has proved stubborn \u2013 Sandi Toksvig is only the latest in a long line of critics trying to address it<\/a>. She is part of an effort to create a more balanced alternative to Wikipedia called Mappa Mundi, which has the potential to feed back into Wikipedia as well.<\/p>\n

I became fascinated too with a little-known contributor who had the first biographical page for a woman on Wikipedia (today, it would be called a user page). Her name was Ruth Ifcher, and she was a very intelligent grammar pedant, with a PhD, who had been forced out of the workforce with severe agoraphobia. Wikipedia came along later in her life and opened a whole new avenue for creative and meaningful work.<\/p>\n

Proust said that neurotics alone \u201ccomposed our masterpieces\u201d, and that\u2019s true here.<\/p>\n

Neurodiversity is so central to Wikipedia that one former head of the Wikimedia Foundation told me the encyclopedia is a \u201ccity built by Asperger\u2019s\u201d. You can sense that energy in familiar topics \u2013 planes, trains and automobiles, comic books, weather, and all the rest. Often, Wikipedians are so prolific that they write too much, a phenomenon called \u201cfancruft\u201d. \u201cRoad geeks\u201d (like trainspotters for roads) kept having their work about minor roads deleted, so a whole lot of them left in a huff, and started a separate online wiki encyclopedia for roads<\/a>. That\u2019s almost a microcosm of the inclusionists v deletionists debate, which is the biggest philosophical rift on Wikipedia \u2013 a rolling argument about what should be included, and what shouldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

The co-founders had once believed that 100,000 articles would be \u201ca reasonable size\u201d for an encyclopedia, because that\u2019s how big Britannica was. Today, Wikipedia has 68m, and Pew Research estimates that it served 1.9tn page views between 2015 and 2025. Because it is so monumental, I never expected Wikipedia to feel fragile or vulnerable \u2013 but as I was finishing the book, AI had begun to encroach on Wikipedia in an existential way by diminishing the web traffic it relies on, for instance, or by editors contributing huge volumes of poorly written AI-generated text. People ask me \u201cis Wikipedia under threat?\u201d, and it is, but so is everything from Hollywood to pure mathematics. I do think it will survive, but the quaking foundations made it feel urgent to say \u201cwe saw this made, and we won\u2019t see anything like it again\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia by Richard Cooke is out now through Black Inc in Australia, and WW Norton in the US. It will be released in the UK on 5 November, via Granta<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A few years ago, I was struck by the tension between how Wikipedia was used, and how it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":938749,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":["post-938748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=938748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/938749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=938748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=938748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=938748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}