THE LAST BEST PLACE ON THE INTERNET: A Human History of Wikipedia, by Richard Cooke
Remember when Wikipedia was seen as a lark, and maybe even a bit of a joke? An online encyclopedia that could be written and edited by anyone? Wouldn’t it degenerate into a war of all against all, overrun by P.R. flacks and trolls?
Now, 25 years after its founding, Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia 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 A.I. 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.’”
In his wry and readable new book, “The Last Best Place on the Internet,” Cooke calls Wikipedia “an escapee from a parallel universe, a refugee of the internet as it should have been, instead of the internet as it is.” Since few people took Wikipedia seriously at first, its experiment in collective creation became a public landmark when no one was looking, and so there’s plenty about its early days that hasn’t been properly chronicled. 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 encyclopedia volumes, with their gilt edges and exorbitant prices. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder, recalls how his family would receive stickers in the mail every year for pasting into their World Book Encyclopedia — 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. “Humor me,” Sanger wrote to the Nupedia mailing list, asking members to “add a little article,” promising it would take “all of five or 10 minutes.” Wales responded by posting, “Hello world!”
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 co-founder, and even edited his own Wikipedia page to remove references to Sanger. Wales later apologized for doing this. (At the core of the dispute is whether the idea to create a “wiki encyclopedia” first came from Sanger or another staffer.)
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 rigor to the site, while their detractors fault them for exerting disproportionate control through “argument by exhaustion.”
Yet pedantry is also “a kind of engine,” Cooke writes, “fueled by an ardor verging on love.” Wikipedia probably wouldn’t have survived if it weren’t for editors who wanted to sweat the small stuff, who delighted in teasing out detail after detail, who have volunteered their time and labor so that information could be free. Still, there is an undeniable tension between finicky obsessiveness and navigable ease. The upper limit for article length is supposed to be 10,000 words — the equivalent of a long story in The New Yorker. The entry for “Tartan” is almost 60,000 words.
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. He also keeps reminding us of the bigger picture, and how much it has transformed over time.
Artificial intelligence has been both a boon and a hazard. Wikipedia has bots that scour for vandalism; it also allows editors to use A.I. for translations, while banning A.I.-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, A.I. summaries have been siphoning off readership, but the threat may be even more profound. Cooke suggests that A.I. may be “creating a postliterate culture in which the end of the encyclopedic age is only a footnote.”
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 skeptic during the pandemic and voting for Donald Trump. (In June, Sanger was barred from editing Wikipedia articles; the editors said that Sanger, who had called the site “one of the most effective organs of Establishment propaganda in history,” had violated its guidelines against canvassing outside votes to sway internal policy.)
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.”
THE LAST BEST PLACE ON THE INTERNET: A Human History of Wikipedia | By Richard Cooke | Norton | 307 pp. | $29.99
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