Illustration: Michael Haddad
Remember when Wikipedia was a joke?
In its first decade of life, the website appeared in as many punch lines as headlines. The Office's Michael Scott called it “the best thing ever,” because “anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject—so you know you are getting the best possible information.” Praising Wikipedia, by restating its mission, meant self-identifying as an idiot.
That was in 2007. Today, Wikipedia is the eighth-most-visited site in the world. The English-language version recently surpassed 6 million articles and 3.5 billion words; edits materialize at a rate of 1.8 per second. But perhaps more remarkable than Wikipedia's success is how little its reputation has changed. It was criticized as it rose, and now makes its final ascent to … muted criticism. To confess that you've just repeated a fact you learned on Wikipedia is still to admit something mildly shameful. It's as though all those questions that used to pepper think pieces in the mid-2000s—Will it work? Can it be trusted? Is it better than Encyclopedia Britannica?—are still rhetorical, when they have already been answered, time and again, in the affirmative.
Of course, muted criticism is far better than what the other giants at the top of the internet are getting these days. Pick any inflection point you like from the past several years—the Trump election, Brexit, any one of a number of data breaches, alt-right feeding frenzies, or standoffish statements to Congress—and you'll see the malign hand of platform monopolies. Not too long ago, techno-utopianism was the ambient vibe of the elite ideas industry; now it has become the ethos that dare not speak its name. Hardly anyone can talk abstractly about freedom and connection and collaboration, the blithe watchwords of the mid-2000s, without making a mental list of the internet's more concrete negative externalities.
Yet in an era when Silicon Valley's promises look less gilded than before, Wikipedia shines by comparison. It is the only not-for-profit site in the top 10, and one of only a handful in the top 100. It does not plaster itself with advertising, intrude on privacy, or provide a breeding ground for neo-Nazi trolling. Like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, it broadcasts user-generated content. Unlike them, it makes its product de-personified, collaborative, and for the general good. More than an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has become a community, a library, a constitution, an experiment, a political manifesto—the closest thing there is to an online public square. It is one of the few remaining places that retains the faintly utopian glow of the early World Wide Web. A free encyclopedia encompassing the whole of human knowledge, written almost entirely by unpaid volunteers: Can you believe that was the one that worked?
Wikipedia is not perfect. The problems that it does have—and there are plenty of them—are discussed in great detail on Wikipedia itself, often in dedicated forums for self-critique with titles like “Why Wikipedia is not so great.” One contributor observes that “many of the articles are of poor quality.” Another worries that “consensus on Wikipedia may be a problematic form of knowledge production.” A third notes that “someone can just come and edit this very page and put in ‘pens are for cats only.’” Like the rest of the tech world, the site suffers from a gender imbalance; by recent estimates, 90 percent of its volunteer editors are men. Women and nonbinary contributors report frequent harassment from their fellow Wikipedians—trolling, doxing, hacking, death threats. The site's parent organization has repeatedly owned up to the situation and taken halting steps to redress it; several years ago, it allocated hundreds of thousands of dollars to a “community health initiative.” But in a way, the means to fix Wikipedia's shortcomings, in terms of both culture and coverage, are already in place: Witness the rise of feminist edit-athons.
The site's innovations have always been cultural rather than computational. It was created using existing technology. This remains the single most underestimated and misunderstood aspect of the project: its emotional architecture. Wikipedia is built on the personal interests and idiosyncrasies of its contributors; in fact, without getting gooey, you could even say it is built on love. Editors' passions can drive the site deep into inconsequential territory—exhaustive detailing of dozens of different kinds of embroidery software, lists dedicated to bespectacled baseball players, a brief but moving biographical sketch of Khanzir, the only pig in Afghanistan. No knowledge is truly useless, but at its best, Wikipedia weds this ranging interest to the kind of pertinence where Larry David's “Pretty, pretty good!” is given as an example of rhetorical epizeuxis. At these moments, it can feel like one of the few parts of the internet that is improving.
One challenge in seeing Wikipedia clearly is that the favored point of comparison for the site is still, in 2020, Encyclopedia Britannica. Not even the online Britannica, which is still kicking, but the print version, which ceased publication in 2012. If you encountered the words Encyclopedia Britannica recently, they were likely in a discussion about Wikipedia. But when did you last see a physical copy of these books? After months of reading about Wikipedia, which meant reading about Britannica, I finally saw the paper encyclopedia in person. It was on the sidewalk, being thrown away. The 24 burgundy-bound volumes had been stacked with care, looking regal before their garbage-truck funeral. If bought new in 1965, each of them would have cost $10.50—the equivalent of $85, adjusted for inflation. Today, they are so unsalable that thrift stores refuse them as donations.
Wikipedia and Britannica do, at least, share a certain lineage. The idea of building a complete compendium of human knowledge has existed for centuries, and there was always talk of finding some better substrate than paper: H. G. Wells thought microfilm might be the key to building what he called the “World Brain”; Thomas Edison bet on wafer-thin slices of nickel. But for most people who were alive in the earliest days of the internet, an encyclopedia was a book, plain and simple. Back then, it made sense to pit Wikipedia and Britannica against each other. It made sense to highlight Britannica's strengths—its rigorous editing and fact-checking procedures; its roster of illustrious contributors, including three US presidents and a host of Nobel laureates, Academy Award winners, novelists, and inventors—and to question whether amateurs on the internet could create a product even half as good. Wikipedia was an unknown quantity; the name for what it did, crowdsourcing, didn't even exist until 2005, when two WIRED editors coined the word.
That same year, the journal Nature released the first major head-to-head comparison study. It revealed that, for articles on science, at least, the two resources were nearly comparable: Britannica averaged three minor mistakes per entry, while Wikipedia averaged four. (Britannica claimed “almost everything about the journal's investigation … was wrong and misleading,” but Nature stuck by its findings.) Nine years later, a working paper from Harvard Business School found that Wikipedia was more left-leaning than Britannica—mostly because the articles tended to be longer and so were likelier to contain partisan “code words.” But the bias came out in the wash. The more revisions a Wikipedia article had, the more neutral it became. On a “per-word basis,” the researchers wrote, the political bent “hardly differs.”
But some important differences don't readily show up in quantitative, side-by-side comparisons. For instance, there's the fact that people tend to read Wikipedia daily, whereas Britannica had the quality of fine china, as much a display object as a reference work. The edition I encountered by the roadside was in suspiciously good shape. Although the covers were a little wilted, the spines were uncracked and the pages immaculate—telltale signs of 50 years of infrequent use. And as I learned when I retrieved as many volumes as I could carry home, the contents are an antidote for anyone waxing nostalgic.
I found the articles in my '65 Britannica mostly high quality and high minded, but the tone of breezy acumen could become imprecise. The section on Brazil's education system, for instance, says it is “good or bad depending on which statistics one takes and how they are interpreted.” Almost all the articles are authored by white men, and some were already 30 years out of date when they were published. Noting this half-life in 1974, the critic Peter Prescott wrote that “encyclopedias are like loaves of bread: the sooner used, the better, for they are growing stale before they even reach the shelf.” The Britannica editors took half a century to get on board with cinema; in the 1965 edition, there is no entry on Luis Buñuel, one of the fathers of modern film. You can pretty much forget about television. Lord Byron, meanwhile, commands four whole pages. (This conservative tendency wasn't limited to Britannica. Growing up, I remember reading the entry on dating in a hand-me-down World Book and being baffled by its emphasis on sharing milkshakes.)
The worthies who wrote these entries, moreover, didn't come cheap. According to an article in The Atlantic from 1974, Britannica contributors earned 10 cents per word, on average—about 50 cents in today's money. Sometimes they got a full encyclopedia set as a bonus. They apparently didn't show much gratitude for this compensation; the editors complained of missed deadlines, petulant behavior, lazy mistakes, and outright bias. “People in the arts all fancy themselves good writers, and they gave us the most difficult time,” one editor told The Atlantic. At Britannica rates, the English-language version of Wikipedia would cost $1.75 billion to produce.
There was another seldom remembered limitation to these gospel tomes: They were, in a way, shrinking. The total length of paper encyclopedias remained relatively finite, but the number of facts in the universe kept growing, leading to attrition and abbreviation. It was a zero-sum game in which adding new articles meant deleting or curtailing incumbent information. Even the most noteworthy were not immune; between 1965 and 1989, Bach's Britannica entry shrank by two pages.
By the time the internet came into being, a limitless encyclopedia was not just a natural idea but an obvious one. Yet there was still a sense—even among the pioneers of the web—that, although the substrate was new, the top-down, expert-driven Britannica model should remain in place.
In 2000, 10 months before Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger cofounded Wikipedia, the pair started a site called Nupedia, planning to source articles from noted scholars and put them through seven rounds of editorial oversight. But the site never got off the ground; after a year, there were fewer than two dozen entries. (Wales, who wrote one of them himself, told The New Yorker “it felt like homework.”) When Sanger got wind of a collaborative software tool called a wiki—from the Hawaiian wikiwiki, or “quickly”—he and Wales decided to set one up as a means of generating raw material for Nupedia. They assumed nothing good would come of it, but within a year Wikipedia had 20,000 articles. By the time Nupedia's servers went down a year later, the original site had become a husk, and the seed it carried had grown beyond any expectation.
Sanger left Wikipedia in early 2003, telling the Financial Times he was fed up with the “trolls” and “anarchist types” who were “opposed to the idea that anyone should have any kind of authority that others do not.” Three years after that, he founded a rival called Citizendium, conceived as an expert-amateur partnership. The same year, another influential Wikipedia editor, Eugene Izhikevich, launched Scholarpedia, an invitation-only, peer-reviewed online encyclopedia with a focus on the sciences. Citizendium struggled to attract both funding and contributors and is now moribund; Scholarpedia, which started out with less lofty ambitions, has fewer than 2,000 articles. But more notable was why these sites languished. They came up against a simple and apparently insoluble problem, the same one that Nupedia encountered and Wikipedia surmounted: Most experts do not want to contribute to a free online encyclopedia.