the universe kept growing, leading to attrition and abbreviation. It
was a zero-sum game in which adding new articles meant delet-
ing or curtailing incumbent information. Even the most notewor-
thy 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, plan-
ning 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 soft-
ware 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 Nupe-
dia’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 oth-
ers do not.” Three years after that, he founded a rival called Citizen-
dium, conceived as an expert-amateur partnership. The same year,
another influential Wikipedia editor, Eugene Izhikevich, launched
Scholarpedia, an invitation-only, peer-reviewed online encyclope-
dia 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.
This barrier to entry exists even in places where there are many
experts and large volumes of material to draw from. Napoleon
Bonaparte, for instance, is the subject of tens of thousands of books.
There are probably more dedicated historians of the Corsican gen-
eral than of almost any other historical figure, but so far these schol-
ars, even the retired or especially enthusiastic ones, have been
disinclined to share their bounty. Citizendium’s entry on Napoleon,
around 5,000 words long and unedited for the past six years, is
missing events as major as the decisive Battle of Borodino, which
claimed 70,000 casualties, and the succession of Napoleon II. By
contrast, Wikipedia’s article on Napoleon sits at around 18,000
words long and runs to more than 350 sources.
The Wikipedia replacement products revealed another prob-
lem with the top-down model: With so few contributors, cover-
age was spotty and gaps were hard to fill. Scholarpedia’s entry on
neuroscience makes no mention of serotonin or the frontal lobes.
At Citizendium, Sanger refused to recognize women’s studies as a
top-level category, describing the discipline as too “politically cor-
rect.” (Today, he says “it wasn’t about women’s studies in particu-
lar” but about “too much overlap with existing groups.”) A wiki with
a more horizontal hierarchy, on the other
hand, can self-correct. No matter how polit-
ically touchy or intellectually abstruse the
topic, the crowd develops consensus. On the
English-language Wikipedia, particularly
controversial entries, like those on George
W. Bush or Jesus Christ, have edit counts in
the thousands.
Wikipedia, in other words, isn’t raised up
wholesale, like a barn; it’s assembled grain
by grain, like a termite mound. The small-
ness of the grains, and of the workers car-
rying them, makes the project’s scale seem
impossible. But it is exactly this incremen-
talism that puts immensity within reach.The heroes
OF WIKIPEDIA ARE NOT GIANTS IN THEIR
fieldsbut so-called WikiGnomes—editors
who sweep up typos, arrange articles in
neatly categorized piles, and scrub away
vandalism. This work is often thankless, but
it does not seem to be joyless. It is a com-
mon starting point for Wikipedians, and
many are content to stay there. According
to a 2016 paper in the journal Management
Science, the median edit length on Wikipe-
dia is just 37 characters, an effort that might
take a few seconds.