Wikis—or modular, collectively edited websites—preceded Wikipedia. They were invented by Ward Cunningham, a software engineer in Portland, Oregon, who wanted to assemble a community history of programming ideas. His project touched off a “Jurassic wiki period” of similar experiments. It was Larry Sanger, whom Wales had hired to oversee Nupedia, who hit on the idea of building a wiki encyclopedia, though the two men dispute the exact details. (Sanger later left Wikipedia, and has criticized it in conservative media outlets.) Cooke does his best to dramatize these origins, often through dry humor, but the personalities involved don’t quite rise to the level of an Aaron Sorkin drama. Happily, Cooke devotes the bulk of his narrative to everyday Wikipedians and their collaboration’s emergent properties.
Wikipedia began life “as an unapologetic first draft, full of experiments, doodles, and marginalia,” Cooke writes. One of its decisive early advantages was a low barrier to entry. Because articles didn’t require anyone’s approval to write or edit, they accumulated quickly—and, with them, reader-editors, who flocked to the site from Google’s search engine, which at the time was still new. Much of what they wrote was junk. Early Wikipedia was full of short articles, called “stubs,” and unnecessarily detailed information about fictional universes; the Washington, D.C., of “Atlas Shrugged,” for instance, had a page before the real city. Yet the site’s pop-friendliness drew traffic, and its poor quality lured editors; then as now, people loved to correct strangers online.
The site’s breakout moment was 9/11. In an era before social media, Wikipedians’ real-time aggregation of news about the attacks established it as a serious informational resource. This also demonstrated that volunteers who’d come to the site for their own niche reasons could redirect their efforts en masse. (Cooke cites the Wikipedia researcher Brian Keegan, who compares this “migration of expertise” to the decentralized coördination of corals and insect swarms.) Bomis briefly considered trying to monetize the site’s runaway success. But the rumor of ad sales led to an insurrection on Spanish-language Wikipedia, which threatened to break away. In 2002, Wales transferred control of the site to his new nonprofit, the Wikimedia Foundation: an admission that Wikipedia wouldn’t work if it wasn’t free.
The encyclopedia became a mecca for outsiders. Cooke notes that its main period of growth, between 2001 and 2008, coincided with the coming of age of a generation “denied the hallmarks of adulthood by a conspiracy of circumstance.” This included jobless graduates, millennial “failsons,” layoff victims, hardcore fans, and the neurodivergent—just about everyone with “abilities that were hidden, overlooked, undervalued, or simply too weird to express elsewhere.” One “very senior Wikimedian,” we are told, “came to think of the project as a ‘city built by Asperger’s.’ ”
Cooke’s narrative is studded with mini-portraits of pioneering “super editors.” We meet Ruth Ifcher, an ex-coder and Ph.D. so agoraphobic that she rarely left the house, and Einar Kvaran, an unemployed and uncredentialled art historian editing from his monograph-crammed trailer home in New Mexico. Derek Ramsey, a former lay preacher from the edge of Amish country, believed that “everybody should have their own hometown” in the encyclopedia—and wrote the site’s first bot, which scraped census data, to make it so. A more controversial figure was Ryan Jordan, or Essjay, who presented himself as a Catholic theologian, and who featured in a 2006 article about Wikipedia for this magazine. Alas, it had to be corrected: Essjay was, in fact, a mere ex-legal secretary, who, according to Cooke, had been fired for using his firm’s computers to hoard porn.
His unmasking fed an emerging panic over Wikipedia’s accuracy. Cooke samples an absorbing range of hoaxes, from the college students who convinced the world that an imaginary Scotsman had invented the electric toaster to the Chinese housewife who fabricated an entire war out of boredom. Other examples are more sinister—for instance, the far-right takeover of Croatian Wikipedia, or efforts by corporations to launder their images. (An Exxon employee doctored an article about an oil spill.)
Wikipedia began tightening its policies in the wake of a 2005 scandal involving the journalist John Seigenthaler, Sr., whose page falsely implicated him in the assassinations of John and Robert F. Kennedy. Unregistered editors lost the ability to create new articles, and sensitive categories, such as “Biography of living persons,” implemented stricter sourcing requirements. The Wikimedia Foundation persuaded cultural institutions to hire “Wikipedians in residence,” and Wales became the toast of TED. The professionalization worked, but at the expense of the site’s internal culture, Cooke argues, as generous eccentrics were displaced by neurotic lovers of rules.
