A tribute to Wikipedia, which is one of the few remaining places that retains the faintly utopian glow of the early World Wide Web
People used to think the crowdsourced encyclopedia represented all that was wrong with the web. Now it's a beacon of so much that's right. Tweets: @alexhinojo , @wikimedia , @rgcooke , @wired , @jonnoxrevanche , @timsmithrx , @mondaystory , and @johnbirmingham Tweets: lex Hinojo / @alexhinojo : “Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet” @WIRED People used to think the crowdsourced encyclopedia represented all that was wrong with the web. Now it's a beacon of so much that's right. PROUD to be part of it. https://www.wired.com/... https://twitter.com/... @wikimedia : “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.” If you've ever wondered how (or why) Wikipedia works, read this: https://www.wired.com/... @rgcooke Richard Cooke / @rgcooke : This is my first piece for @WIRED. It's something of a love letter to Wikipedia, which doesn't get the credit it deserves. I hope you enjoy it. https://www.wired.com/... @wired : In its first decade of life, Wikipedia appeared in as many punch lines as headlines. Today, Wikipedia is the eighth-most-visited site in the world. In an era when Silicon Valley's promises look less gilded than before, Wikipedia shines by comparison. https://www.wired.com/... @jonnoxrevanche : My fav line “The system still results in errors sometimes—that's why Siri briefly thought Bulgaria's national anthem was “Despacito” https://twitter.com/... Tim Smith / @timsmithrx : While not perfect, Wikipedia is a staggering and evolving achievement and in many ways is one of the best emergences from the information age. https://twitter.com/... Harry Saddler / @mondaystory : This is just lovely and gave me a new appreciation for Wikipedia. https://twitter.com/... John Birmingham / @johnbirmingham : Great piece, written with love, read with appreciation. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
When this piece ran in early 2020, Wikipedia had completed a reputational round trip: once held up as proof that crowdsourcing produced unreliable knowledge, it was being recast by Wired as one of the few places keeping the early web's open, volunteer-built ethos alive. The surrounding coverage shows why the reassessment stuck — Wikipedia had already locked down its 2020 election coverage with expanded anti-misinformation measures, and peer projects like wikiHow were explicitly marketing their commitment to open-web principles as a differentiator.
First-order effects
- Wikipedia's volunteer editors and the Wikimedia Foundation gain a legitimacy dividend: the encyclopedia is now cited as the web's trusted reference layer rather than its cautionary tale, which strengthens their hand in disputes over content policy and governance.
Second-order effects
- Commercial dependence deepens — Google and other companies consuming Wikipedia at scale push the Foundation toward monetizing that reliance through Wikimedia Enterprise, a premium delivery service layered on top of the free site.
Third-order effects
- As AI systems and political actors converge on the encyclopedia — reduced traffic attributed to AI, right-wing attacks from Musk and various governments per later coverage — the volunteer-governed model shifts from quaint relic to contested critical infrastructure whose survival becomes a structural question for the whole web's factual layer.
The trend: The open, volunteer-governed web is outliving the trust collapse of the commercial web, turning Wikipedia into foundational — and increasingly attacked — infrastructure.