How Wikipedia descended into ‘sectarian’ war
It's hard to grasp the scale of Wikipedia . In 2015, the artist Michael Mandiberg set about printing the entire website: he calculated that, even back then, it would require 7,473 volumes of 700 pages each. (He abandoned the project, suggesting that after 106 volumes, people got the idea.) And that was just the English version. Wikipedia's own list puts the number of languages represented at 364; German is the second-largest edition after English (although thanks to a recent influx of bots, Cebuano now officially ranks higher), while Cree is the smallest (just 13 pages). As I write this sentence, there are 68,453,912 articles on Wikipedia, totalling some 30 billion words. The site is revised about 16 times per second. And all of this was written without anyone being paid a penny.
How did such a vast act of collaboration come to be? In The Last Best Place on the Internet , journalist Richard Cooke pieces together the story by interviewing many of the writers and editors who built Wikipedia over the last 25 years. The result is a memorable grassroots history of an intellectual community, the likes of which humanity may never again assemble, and which could soon succumb, along with so much else, to the scourge of AI.
It began in the late 1990s. Jimmy (or "Jimbo") Wales, a financial trader from Alabama, had made enough money to start an internet company with a couple of friends. They named their outfit "Bomis", an initialism for "bitter old men in suits" – everything they were not. Bomis, based in San Diego, had a range of digital ideas, with largely similar results. An online dining service? Failed. A directory for second-hand cars? Likewise. An early search-engine? Hijacked by Chinese hackers soon after its debut.
Bomis did better, though, with their development of "webrings", a way of linking websites by theme in the days before information was easy to find on the internet. They caught the eye of NBC Interactive, the US television network's online arm. Wales pitched NBC a "really dumb" idea: a free internet encyclopedia. And thus was "Nupedia" born.
Jimmy Wales pitched pitched NBC a 'really dumb' idea: a free internet encyclopedia - Getty Images/Corbis/Rick Friedman
One immediate problem was that no one at Bomis knew much about encyclopedias. Wales's childhood was coloured by his mother's purchase of The World Book Encyclopedia , but he had gravitated from facts to first principles at university, and spent years after graduation debating Ayn Rand's Objectivism on online forums. The other problem was that Bomis only had enough funding to hire one staff member. Wales chose a lapsed philosophy lecturer, Larry Sanger, who now earned his living teaching the Irish fiddle.
Work commenced in February 2000. Nupedia's composition process was markedly traditional: a seven-step protocol of peer review and fact-checking. Five months later, only one article – on atonal music – had been marked fit for publication. And then the dot-com bubble began to burst. NBC Interactive cut Bomis loose, and Wales and Sanger propped the company up with their recession-proof side hustle, a softcore pornography site, whose advertisements showed Wales with his arms around women called "Bomis Babes". (In this venture, they actually had precedent: in the mid-18th century, when Denis Diderot was assembling the Encyclopédie , he replenished his funds by penning an erotic farce, Les Bijoux Indiscrets – one of the first works deemed pornographie .)
The "wiki" structure, named after the Hawaiian word for "quickly", was the real innovation: a website that allowed its users to edit and republish it. (The technology had been around for a while. It was developed by programmer Ward Cunningham, who launched WikiWikiWeb, a website about software design, in 1995 – the same year in which Amazon, eBay and Internet Explorer came online.)
Larry Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales, was editor-in-chief of its predecessor Nupedia - Ulli Winkler/ullstein bild via Getty Images
Wikipedia went live on Jan 15, 2001. At first, the results were as expected: the transition from Nupedia's rigorous peer-review to a lawless open platform produced a dog's dinner of less-than-scholarly results. An early article on Europe defined the landmass as containing "all the following countries: SwedeN, DenmarK, FinlanD, EstoniA, some more". There were trolls and vandals and people pasting entries wholesale from Encyclopaedia Britannica . But soon a different kind of internet citizen logged on. "For the neuroatypical, those thwarted in ambition, those who had fallen out of the traditional workforce or never joined it in the first place," Cooke writes, "Wikipedia was a place to showcase abilities that were hidden, overlooked, undervalued or simply too weird to express elsewhere."
Wikipedia owed its early successes to overlapping factors. It came of age during the dawn of search engines, which increasingly drove internet users to its shores. And by casting off the shackles of authority, it also avoided some of the biases codified in its forebears. The Enciclopedia Italiana , for instance, once asked Benito Mussolini to contribute its entry on "Fascismo" – perhaps not an impartial source. (Wikipedia has, nonetheless, struggled with other forms of prejudice: by some statistics, men make up 90 per cent of the editorial workforce, female users are far more likely to have their articles deleted, and for every biographical article about a woman there are four written about a man.)
Unlike traditional encyclopedias, which can seem to grow stale at the rate of bread loaves, Wikipedia updates happen in real time. During and after the September 11 attacks, people such as Brad Johnson, who edits as "Cunctator", produced hundreds of articles on the tragedy; Johnson tells Cooke that the task kept him "from falling prey to a sense of powerlessness". Wikipedia offered a new form of knowledge production, combining the temporality of a newspaper with the informational breadth of a reference work, and all fuelled by amateur enthusiasm.
Popularity, however, does not beget reputation. Print encyclopedias had long been totems of erudition – they were the offspring of the Enlightenment – and many in the media and academia were threatened by this vulgar upstart. "A professor who encourages the use of Wikipedia is the intellectual equivalent of a dietician who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs," wrote one member of the American Library Association. Schools and universities across America considered banning Wikipedia. A New Jersey librarian erected signs across her dominion with the Nancy Reagan-esque formulation: "Just Say No To Wikipedia."
The public scandals didn't help. Wales was caught editing his own biography, trying to scrub the porno days. When Julian Assange's WikiLeaks launched in 2006, its founding manifesto mentioned Wikipedia no fewer than a dozen times. (At Heathrow, Wales once watched the blood drain from an immigration officer's face when he said where he worked. "No, no, no, different guy," he quickly explained.)
But most damning of all was the "Essjay affair". A theologian with two doctoral degrees, the user "Essjay" seemed to edit for 14 hours a day, in pursuit of a personal motto: Lux et Veritas (Light and Truth). When the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Stacy Schiff asked the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia's parent organisation, to nominate a user for her 2006 New Yorker article about the website, Essjay was on everyone's minds. The only problem was that this star theologian turned out to be Ryan Jordan, an unemployed 20-something without a bachelor's degree. When Wales hired him to work at Wikia, a sister project, Jordan finally came clean.
While the Wikimedia Foundation keeps the project online, Wikipedia's executives have little editorial control. Power is held, instead, by the community. Contributors – writers, editors, reviewers – abide by a charter declaring that Wikipedia "is an encyclopedia", written from a "neutral point of view" and governed by "no firm rules." Indeed, Cooke writes, at least 28 distinct editorial schools have emerged, fuelling a sort of sectarian conflict. The most violent may be the ongoing war between Inclusionists and Deletionists. The former believe that there is a place on Wikipedia for everything – every class of angel, each style of pin – and that the site should strive to resemble a Borgesian map in complete 1:1 correspondence with the known universe. The Deletionists, in turn, champion aggressive curation and the test of "notability". When, in 2007, Wales himself created an article for a South African barbecue restaurant, it was razed by a Deletionist 22 minutes later. That's not to mention the grammatical nitpickers. Bryan Henderson, a software developer who edits as "Giraffedata", has spent 15 years eradicating the phrase "comprised of" from the site.
Journalist Richard Cooke pieces together the story by interviewing many of the writers and editors who built Wikipedia over the past 25 years - Jie Fan
And yet there is a far bigger threat slouching towards this "Red Cross of information": AI. Trained on Wikipedia's own vast troves of open data, large language models risk, in Cooke's phrase, "subordinating human editors to a janitorial role". A 2024 study by Princeton University found that 5 per cent of Wikipedia articles newly created in a given month had been "written" by AI. More ruinous is the way we have come to access information. Since 2022, Wikipedia has lost almost a quarter of its traffic, amounting to some 1.1 billion visits per month: they have overwhelmingly been replaced by queries to chatbots, and "AI summaries" at the top of search-engine results. Users who once might have read an article, noticed an error, and clicked "edit" are now hived off from the feedback loop that allows Wikipedia to thrive. Cooke concludes The Last Best Place on the Internet in a dystopic mood. Imagine a future, he writes, in which editors are trapped in "an endless curatorial project derived not from human priorities but from the frost-bitten harvests of machines".
Wikipedia, at its best, is a record of eccentricity. What else but wonderment could motivate the voluntary production of a 60,000-word entry on "tartan" – as densely woven as its subject matter – or the surprisingly riveting article on the "embanking of the tidal Thames", which resembles a historical epic? As readers, we fall down hyperlinked "wikiholes" due to our human curiosity about our world. We should try to keep it.
★★★★☆
The Last Best Place on the Internet is published by Granta at £18.99. To order your copy, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books
