Wikipedia's origin story, warts and all

Wikipedia's 25-year journey highlights the enduring value of human knowledge and collaboration amid misinformation, online disputes and the growing influence of artificial intelligence

By Jennifer Scalia 

The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia

By Richard Cooke

Published by Norton

307 pages $29.99

Remember when Wikipedia was seen as a lark, and maybe even a bit of a joke? An online encyclopaedia that could be written and edited by anyone? Wouldn’t it degenerate into a war of all against all, overrun by PR flacks and trolls? 

Now, 25 years after its founding, Wikipedia is the largest encyclopaedia ever to have existed. The site has more than seven million articles in English and receives an average of 508 million views a day. The old-school utility of its pages makes it look like an earnest rejoinder to today’s poisoned chalices of sleek branding and gaudy AI slop. While social media platforms fuel engagement by egging on users’ baser instincts, Wikipedia still revolves around the quaint pleasures of human curiosity. Instead of enriching a tech billionaire, it is run as a nonprofit. 

 

This isn’t to say that it’s been all sunshine and rainbows. As Wikipedia has grown, its rules have proliferated, making it more bureaucratic; it has also become a target in the accelerating culture wars, derided by Elon Musk as “Wokepedia.” But until recently, Wikipedia seemed to occupy the noncombatant’s sweet spot — what the journalist Richard Cooke terms the “no man’s land” between ‘trust the experts’ and ‘do your own research’”. 

Cooke’s subtitle promises a “human history of Wikipedia”, and though his treatment is conceptually rich — philosophy, literature, and even architecture come into play — his emphasis is on the human, with all the tragedy and comedy that entails.

Key to the origin story of Wikipedia was the forebear it replaced: The printed set of hardback encyclopaedia volumes, with their gilt edges and exorbitant prices. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s cofounder, recalls how his family would receive stickers in the mail every year for pasting into their World Book Encyclopaedia —  the analog version of an update. 

Wales grew up to become an options trader and an avid presence in online philosophy discussion groups. He considered himself an Objectivist: Someone who adhered to the philosophy of Ayn Rand. One of the people he encountered was a philosophy lecturer named Larry Sanger, who thought Objectivists were “kind of jerks.” 

Wales, though, was an exception. He was a good citizen online — “respectful and probing”, in Cooke’s description — and kept thinking about the World Book from his childhood. He hired Sanger to run Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia that launched in March 2000, but its drawn-out editorial process resulted in few articles and hardly any web traffic. 

Soon, Wales and Sanger started talking about a “wiki” version of Nupedia — the word is Hawaiian for “quick” — and in January 2001 Wikipedia went live. 

Amid all this congeniality, there was some inevitable unpleasantness. Cooke details the endless debates, both on the site and behind the scenes. Sanger left Wikipedia in 2002. By that point the dot-com crash had taken his salary — Wikipedia was originally supported by a for-profit start-up — but he had continued to volunteer his services as Wikipedia’s “chief instigator”, warning about its “‘anti-elite’ problem” and calling for more aggressive measures to boot out trolls and vandals. 

Within a couple of years of Sanger’s departure, Wales stopped referring to him as a cofounder, and even edited his own Wikipedia page to remove references to Sanger. Wales later apologised for doing this. 

As for Wikipedia’s other struggles, they have run the gamut from fraud, hoaxes, good-faith errors, and bad-faith disinformation campaigns to the never-ending tug of war between Deletionists (who want a more curated experience) and Inclusionists (who believe the project should reflect the limitlessness of the internet). There are also, of course, the pedants, who fuss over minute specifics and believe that they are bringing discipline and rigour to the site, while their detractors fault them for exerting disproportionate control through “argument by exhaustion”. 

This book introduced me to the term “fancruft”, which refers to the tendency of fans to indulge in “mountains of indiscriminate detail” that would be baffling or boring to non-fans. Despite his extensive stores of Wikipedia knowledge, Cooke never succumbs to fancruft in this consistently enjoyable book. Every informational tidbit has been judiciously chosen. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been both a boon and a hazard. Wikipedia has bots that scour for vandalism; it also allows editors to use AI for translations, while banning AI-generated content. Large language models have trained on Wikipedia, taking advantage of its enormous quantities of text, the links it draws among pages and the fact that it exists in multiple languages. Lately, AI summaries have been siphoning off readership, but the threat may be even more profound. 

Humans, though, continue to be unpredictable counterpoints to the smooth predictability of machines. Toward the end of the book, Cooke calls the divergent paths of Wales and Sanger a “kind of parable”. Wales went one way, endorsing Kamala Harris for president and writing a book about the importance of trust. Sanger went the other, becoming a vaccine sceptic during the pandemic and voting for Donald Trump. 

That these two wildly different humans could have once shared the same mission is reflected in the last best place on the internet — or what remains of it. As Cooke writes, “Like the United States itself, it was a constitutional experiment in emancipation and trust, incompletely applied.”

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The reviewer is the nonfiction book critic for The Times ©2026 The New York Times News Service