I do a lot of complaining about technology in this column. I complain about the influence of tech corporations over public life. I complain about how AI presents any number of existential economic and cultural dangers. I complain about how Elon Musk and Sam Altman are doing the handiwork of the devil himself. There is, in my defence, a good deal to complain about, and I’ve got a column that needs writing. But I’ve been giving a lot of thought over the last while to one particular product of tech culture about which I’m wholeheartedly positive, and for which I’m profoundly grateful: Wikipedia.
It seems increasingly obvious to me that Wikipedia is among the truly great cultural achievements of recent decades. It’s an amazing and inspiring thing – both an endlessly useful tool and an infinitely ramifying monument to the value of knowledge. The fact that it is the work not of a publicly-traded corporation – of vainglorious executives and pampered employees – but of a vast network of ordinary people who are strangers to one another, invests it with not just a practical but a symbolic value. It represents everything that the internet can and should be, a utopian set of possibilities which, having animated the early online era, have mostly been buried under a trash heap of targeted advertising, hateful propaganda and useless AI slop. It must be protected at all costs.
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I have always valued it, as much for its idiosyncrasies as for its incredible expansiveness, but I have probably been guilty, over the years, of taking it for granted. Not any more. The remorseless incursion of so-called artificial intelligence into every corner of online life – which is to say, increasingly, almost every corner of life itself – has caused Wikipedia to stand out in bold relief for me.
There is a shallow seductiveness to an app like ChatGPT. It presents itself, among other things, as a brilliant and erudite automated research assistant, of which you can ask almost any question, and which will immediately provide you with informative and fully-sourced answers. But anyone who has attempted to use ChatGPT, or any of its growing agglomeration of rivals, in this way will know that it continually just makes stuff up, that it is so unreliable as to be effectively worse than useless.
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I am not, by the way, claiming that Wikipedia is infallible. I have fallen victim to its fallibility. Some years ago I received a bemused message from my agent, who had just got an email, marked “URGENT”, from the organisers of the Ryszard Kapuściński Award, a Polish literary prize for works of literary non-fiction. I had been nominated, they informed her, but they only awarded the prize to living authors and according to my Wikipedia page I had been dead for almost a year. They wanted her to confirm, by close of business, that I was still alive.
The site was started in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, but it’s a testament to its egalitarian spirit that neither of these guys has become particularly famous
I realised pretty quickly what had happened: the Wikipedia page had been edited by the co-creators of a theatrical adaptation of my first book, in which a fictionalised version of me dies. The page was intended only for use in the show but somehow got put online by an oblivious third party, where it remained unnoticed – or at least unchanged – for several months, presumably because the page didn’t get a lot of footfall. My agent took the liberty of telling the award people I was alive. I did not, sadly, win the award, though I did receive the far greater prize of not being dead.
So great is my love for Wikipedia that I can easily forgive it this brief and basically frivolous attempt to murder me. If anything, in fact, it increases my affection for it, because it serves to underline its profoundly human aspect. Its failures are eccentric and endearing. Whereas if ChatGPT started saying I was dead, it would be just plain creepy.
When I consider the subject of Wikipedia, and how much I love it, I invariably find myself thinking, too, about one of my favourite living writers, the American novelist and essayist Nicholson Baker. Back in 2008 Baker wrote a great essay for the New York Review of Books called The Charms of Wikipedia. Ostensibly a review of a book called Wikipedia: the Missing Manual, the piece is mostly a long, idiosyncratically personal profession of love for Wikipedia itself, in which Baker – author of such sui generis wonders as The Mezzanine, Room Temperature, and The Fermata – reveals that he has, for some years, been a moderately prolific Wikipedia editor. (Under the username “Wageless”, he writes, he was a contributor to pages on such topics as bovine hormones, the film Sleepless in Seattle, hydraulic fluid, fruit cobbler, and the historiographical process of periodisation.)
Much of the essay is concerned with Baker’s involvement in a struggle against a group he calls “the deletionists” – people hell-bent on erasing topics deemed insufficiently notable for Wikipedia pages. Baker is a defiant “inclusionist”, an absolute believer in the potential of almost any topic to be worthy of explication – a conviction that also, not coincidentally, animates his lavishly digressive and genre-hopping body of work. (It is the inclusionists whom I have to thank, I suppose, for the fact that my own Wikipedia page has never been deleted.)
Baker exemplifies Susan Sontag’s definition of a writer as someone who is “interested in everything” – a sensibility to which Wikipedia is bound to appeal. It’s an artefact of a world madly stuffed with phenomena, and a way of thinking about it whereby none of it is irrelevant.
The site was started in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, but it’s a testament to its egalitarian spirit that neither of these guys has become particularly famous, despite the sheer scale of the thing they started. (In fact, I had to look up the Wikipedia page for Wikipedia to remind myself who its founders were.) There is no Silicon Valley-style cult of the founder here, in other words; the site is owned and run by a non-profit foundation, and its real creators are its tens of millions of anonymous volunteer editors.
“It was constructed,” as Baker puts it, “by strangers who disagreed about all kinds of things but who were drawn to a shared, not-for-profit purpose ... And when people did help they were given a flattering name. They weren’t called ‘Wikipedia’s little helpers,’ they were called ‘editors.’”
There is something ennobling, in other words, about the whole project – in all its vastness and eccentricity and frivolity and grandeur – just as there is something ennobling about democracy. The greatest thing about Wikipedia, of course, is that it works exceptionally well. It works not despite its existing outside the machinery of profit, but precisely because of it. And so if ChatGPT – along with all the other meretricious technologies that all do basically the same thing and that similarly don’t really work – represents consumer-capitalism, then Wikipedia stands for democracy. May it never fall.
