Wikipedia's 68 million articles have been consulted trillions of times, a remarkable feat for a website that has barely changed since its founding 20 years ago. Yet, as Richard Cooke explores in his new book, the encyclopedia's future is fragile, threatened by AI and a lingering reputation problem.
A website taken for granted
Cooke notes the tension between how Wikipedia is used and how it is discussed. Despite billions of people consulting it, its reputation has stalled at "don't trust it," because it is the "free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." Even those donating might say the money is "for the factcheckers," though there are none—not paid ones, anyway.
The website has become part of everyday life since it was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001. English Wikipedia alone is 5.2 billion words long. Its amateurish, homegrown ethos was off-putting to many writers and journalists, leaving questions about its success unanswered. Most of the people seriously interested in Wikipedia were a handful of academics, prompting Cooke to write a book about it.
The philosophical roots of Wikipedia
Cooke, who has a humanities background, highlights that philosophy, town planning, and poetry played a bigger role in Wikipedia's inception than pure technology. Ward Cunningham, who invented the wiki in the 1990s, drew on concepts like constructivism and the Zen concept of wabi-sabi—beauty in imperfection. This culture has persisted, with Wikipedia always in a state of incompleteness.
Philosophy also drew the co-founders together. Wales, though working in tech and finance, corresponded with philosophers for years. Sanger, an academic philosopher, spent time arguing online. Wales was the only dotcom boom entrepreneur to hire a philosopher—in fact, the only person he hired. This unpredictable choice was a clue to Wikipedia's success: it sprang from a digital "republic of letters."
Human stories and neurodiversity
Cooke focuses on the human history, including lesser-known early Wikipedians. The first woman to edit Wikipedia, Gaytha Langlois, wrote about Rhode Island and standard poodles. Ruth Ifcher, a grammar pedant with a PhD and agoraphobia, had the first biographical page for a woman. Neurodiversity is central to Wikipedia, with one former head of the Wikimedia Foundation calling it a "city built by Asperger's." This energy manifests in topics like planes, trains, and comic books, sometimes leading to "fancruft."
The co-founders once believed 100,000 articles would be "a reasonable size," matching Britannica. Today, Wikipedia has 68 million, and Pew Research estimates it served 1.9 trillion page views between 2015 and 2025. Cooke never expected Wikipedia to feel fragile, but AI has begun to encroach by diminishing web traffic and enabling poorly written AI-generated text. "We saw this made, and we won't see anything like it again," he says. The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia is out now in Australia and the US, and in the UK on 5 November via Granta.
