The Wikipedian: 2009–2020, 2023–Forever
Welcome (back) to a blog about Wikipedia, exploring how the world's most-read, least-understood information resource really works
The internet as we know it today could not exist without Wikipedia. If there is one thing the tech giants, media companies, and individual participants on the social web can agree on, it's the primacy of Wikipedia's role in confirming the reality we all share.
In fact, Wikipedia and the internet grew up alongside each other. When Wikipedia was established in 2001, barely half of Americans were online, while the rest of the world was years away from logging on. For as long as most internet users can remember, Wikipedia has always been here.
I myself began editing Wikipedia just a few years after college, in the mid-2000s. Having grown up on Encarta and World Book—and being of a forgotten micro-generation whose term papers leaned heavily not on wikipedia.org but on britannica.com—I was enamored of the project's ambitions and excited by participating in its actualization.
For the few of us who remember a time before Wikipedia backstopped every Google search, underpinned every voice assistant, and provided the outline for every Netflix docudrama, it's been a truly extraordinary experience to see Wikipedia go from trifle to joke to sensation to mainstay.
Yet Wikipedia is the most relied-upon website that no one truly understands. And I don't just mean casual readers who have never visited a Talk page. I mean veteran editors who would be considered a Wikipedia expert by almost anyone but themselves. With thousands of contributors, millions of articles, and billions of pageviews, there is just too much Wikipedia for anyone to know everything.
It reminds me of a line from a David Foster Wallace short story, concerning the maddening complexity of the human mind: "What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant." Anyone who has sat and watched the Recent changes page with “live updates” turned on knows that's Wikipedia, too.
The yawning gap between Wikipedia's ubiquity on the interwebs and the obscurity of its internal operations was the insight upon which I first launched this blog, The Wikipedian, as a WordPress site in the late 2000s. Today, as I relaunch it as a Substack newsletter (and c'mon, it's still a blog) following a period of dormancy, this is as true as ever.
The old blog was accompanied by a Twitter account, which was the style at the time, with a tagline borrowed from arguably the preeminent 21st century philosopher concerned with striving for success: "Explain Wikipedia or die trying." Today, this channel is moving to Threads.
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I wrote The Wikipedian continuously from 2009 to 2020, publishing nearly 200 separate posts: about Wikipedia in popular culture, its oft-foretold death and decline, famous people meddling, PR firms meddling, the launch of Wikidata, WMF drama, arguments about US politics, and an annual feature listing the biggest Wikipedia news and events of the year, starting in 2010.
Eventually, my output slowed. I was running a business, co-hosting podcasts, and had just contributed a long essay about my professional work on Wikipedia to a book published by MIT Press. Meanwhile, other writers were telling Wikipedia stories capably, including Stephen Harrison at Slate, and various contributors to The Daily Dot.
And yet. As time went on, I kept running into funny stories that made me think: "I should write about that." Curious and even infuriating ones, too. I started a list and thought, "maybe someday." Meanwhile, the internet changed, too. Journalism’s business models deteriorated further, Twitter dissolved into X, Reddit fell into an existential crisis, and the arrival of LLMs shook everyone to attention. Someday drew closer, and now it's here.
Wikipedia is arguably more important today than when I put my pencil down three years ago. Even if I can only sketch the outlines of one tiny part, it will be a worthwhile endeavor. So what will The Wikipedian be about now? Here are some topics already in various stages of development:
The subcultures and sub-communities of Wikipedia that determine what gets posted to Wikipedia's main page, which articles are created and deleted, and other decisions you never knew to wonder about
What happens when a subgroup of Wikipedia editors prioritize the subject matter they are working on over the constraints of Wikipedia's mission and the two come into conflict?
How AI will impact Wikipedia, how Wikipedia will impact AI, how Wikipedia will impact AI impacting Wikipedia, ad infinitum
Wikipedia's 7 millionth article should be written sometime in December 2024. What was Wikipedia like when its 1 millionth article was written? What is different now? What's the same?
What is Wikipedia's role in a post-literate society dominated by short-form video, not to mention a post-truth society where merely accepting reality can be a political act?
In the months (and years) to come, I will endeavor to find satisfactory answers to these questions. It is my intention for The Wikipedian to publish on an irregular but not infrequent basis, at least once per month and hopefully more often.
Some posts will be long, and some will be short. Some will be investigative, others ruminative. Generally these posts will be strongly supportive of the Wikimedia movement, while others will be supportive in a tough love kind of way. I will offer praise when it is warranted, and ask difficult questions when it is necessary.
Overall, the plan is simple: to explain Wikipedia in clear terms to a general audience, and help the reader understand Wikipedia better than when they arrived. Or, dear reader, I will die trying.
Good news: I expect the next post will be out later this week. How about subscribing now to see if I follow through on this vaguely-worded promise? Please remind me if I don’t!
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