IN ITS FIRST DECADE OF LIFE, THE WEBSITE
appeared in as many punch lines as head-
lines. 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 mis-
sion, 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 rep-
utation 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 some-
thing 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 collabora-
tion, 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- It does not plaster itself with advertising, intrude on pri-
vacy, 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, col-
laborative, 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 Wiki-