68 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020
success story of the Internet era. A ri-
diculously simple principle—“Anyone
can edit”—has produced a more or less
responsibly curated, perpetually up-to-
date, and infinitely expandable source
of information, almost all of it hyper-
linked to multiple additional sources.
Andrew Lih’s history of the site, “The
Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch
of Nobodies Created the World’s Great-
est Encyclopedia,” published in 2009, is
similarly smitten.
Wikipedia took off like a shot. Within
a month, it had a thousand articles, a
number that would have been impossi-
ble using a traditional editorial chain of
command. Within three years, it had
two hundred thousand articles, and it
soon left print encyclopedias in the dust.
Today, Wikipedia (according to Wiki-
pedia) has more than fifty-five million
articles in three hundred and thirteen
languages. In 2020, it is the second most
visited site on the Web in the United
States, after YouTube, with 1.03 billion
visits a month—over four hundred mil-
lion more visits than the No. 3 Web site,
Twitter. The Encyclopædia Britannica,
first published in 1768 and for centuries
the gold standard of the genre, had sixty-
five thousand articles in its last print edi-
tion. Since 2012, new editions have been
available only online, where it currently
ranks fortieth in visits per month, with
about thirty-two million.
In the beginning, the notion that
you could create a reliable encyclope-
dia article about Hegel that
was not written by, or at
least edited by, a creden-
tialled Hegel expert was
received, understandably,
with skepticism. Teachers
treated Wikipedia like the
study guide SparkNotes—
a shortcut for homework
shirkers, and a hodgepodge
compiled by autodidacts
and trivia buffs. The turn-
ing point is customarily said to have
been a study published in Nature, in
2005, in which academic scientists com-
pared forty-two science articles in Wiki-
pedia and the Encyclopædia Britan-
nica. The experts determined that
Wikipedia averaged four errors per ar-
ticle and Britannica averaged three.
“Wikipedia comes close to Britannica
in terms of the accuracy of its scientific
entries” was the editors’ conclusion. By
then, many teachers were consulting
Wikipedia regularly themselves.
The reason most people today who
work in and on digital media have such
warm feelings about Wikipedia may be
that it’s one of the few surviving sites
that adhere to the spirit of the early In-
ternet, to what was known affectionately
as the “hacker ethos.” This is the ethos
of open-source, free-access software de-
velopment. Anyone can get in the game,
and a person doesn’t need permission to
make changes. The prototypical open-
source case is the operating system Linux,
released in 1991, and much early pro-
gramming was done in this communal
barn-raising spirit. The vision, which
now seems distinctly prelapsarian, was
of the Web as a bottom-up phenome-
non, with no bosses, and no rewards other
than the satisfaction of participating in
successful innovation.
Even today, no one is paid by Wiki-
pedia, and anyone can (at least in the-
ory, since a kind of editorial pecking order
has evolved) change anything, with very
few restrictions. In programming shop
talk, all work on Wikipedia is “copyleft,”
meaning that it can be used, modified,
and distributed without permission. No
one can claim a proprietary interest. There
are scarcely any hard-and-fast rules for
writing or editing a Wikipedia article.
That seems to have been what got
hacker types, people typically allergic to
being told what to do, interested in de-
veloping the site. “If rules
make you nervous and de-
pressed,” Larry Sanger, the
site’s co-founder, with Jimmy
Wales, wrote in the early
days, “then ignore them and
go about your business.”
Wikipedia is also one of
the few popular sites whose
content is not monetized
and whose pages are not
personalized. Nothing is
behind a paywall; you do not have to
log in. There are occasional pop-ups
soliciting contributions (in 2017-18, al-
most a hundred million dollars was
donated to the nonprofit Wikimedia
Foundation, headed by Wales), but no
one is trying to sell you something. Ev-
eryone who looks up Pierre, South Da-
kota, sees the same page. There is no
age-and-gender-appropriate clickbait,no ads for drain de-cloggers and books
by German philosophers.
Wikipedia has some principles, of
course. Contributors are supposed to
maintain a “neutral point of view”; ev-
erything must be verifiable and, prefera-
bly, given a citation; and—this is prob-
ably the key to the site’s success with
scholars—there should be no original re-
search. What this means is that Wikipe-
dia is, in essence, an aggregator site. Al-
ready existing information is collected,
usually from linkable sources, but it is not
judged, interpreted, or, for the most part,
contextualized. Unlike in scholarly writ-
ing, all sources tend to be treated equally.
A peer-reviewed journal and a blog are
cited without distinction. There is also a
semi-official indifference to the quality
of the writing. You do not read a Wiki-
pedia article for the pleasures of its prose.
There are consequently very few re-
strictions on creating a page. The bar is
set almost as low as it can be. You can’t
post an article on your grandmother’s
recipe for duck à l’orange. But there is
an article on duck à l’orange. There are
four hundred and seventy-two subway
stations in New York City; each station
has its own Wikipedia page. Many ar-
ticles are basically vast dumping grounds
of links, factoids, and data. Still, all this
keeps the teachers and scholars in busi-
ness, since knowledge isn’t the data. It’s
what you do with the data. A quickie
summary of “the cunning of reason” does
not get you very far into Hegel.B
ut what about the folks who can re-
cite the periodic table, or who know
hundreds of lines of poetry “by heart,”
or can tell you the capital of South Da-
kota right off the bat? Is long-term
human memory obsolete? One indica-
tion of the answer might be that the
highest-rated syndicated program on
television for the first ten weeks of 2020
was “Jeopardy!” The ability to recall enor-
mous numbers of facts is still obviously
compelling. Geek-cool lives.
“Jeopardy!” is thirty-seven years old
under its host Alex Trebek, who died
earlier this month, at the age of eighty.
But the show is much older than that. It
first went on the air in 1964, hosted by
Art Fleming, and ran until 1975. And the
“Jeopardy!” genre, the game show, is much
older still. Like a lot of early television—
such as soap operas, news broadcasts, and