Wikipedia is Everything the Internet Should Have Been

The early years of Silicon Valley took on a distinctly different energy than the VC-dominated, hyper-competitive place that has come to define it today.

There was a heavy hippie influence, a spirit of curiosity for curiosity's sake, and a utopian vision for the future they were building.

Sitting on the shores of the San Francisco Bay, the region was known as the "Valley of Heart's Delight" thanks to its reputation for fruit production. It wasn't until an article in Electronic News used the headline “Silicon Valley USA” atop a story on the area's silicon chip companies that the name would stick.

The new name came along just in time to catch the tech wave, preceding the formation of the Homebrew Computer Club by a few years as well as a little-known company founded by two Homebrewers named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

The Homebrew Computer Club, a place for hobbyists to learn and share their expertise amongst like-minded tinkerers, was at the heart of this culture. And as Jobs and Woz turned their efforts to building Apple, this creed remained influential. In fact, it had such a strong hold on Woz that he intended on giving their first creation, the Apple I, away for free. It took the business-minded Jobs to put a stop to that.

Though hippie culture clearly faded as the years went on, through the '80s and into the '90s an underlying tide of techno-utopianism continued. As the world prepared to embrace the arrival of the internet and all the magical unknowns it entailed, this belief that tech can save the world emerged as the prevailing opinion.

It became commonplace to read theories from well-respected technologists and commentators extolling the virtuous nature of the upcoming digital age. Futurist Mark Pesce was quoted in a 1997 book titled The Soul of Cyberspace claiming "Cyberspace is a mirror that gets held up to the third eye" and in fact, this phenomenon actually allows us to see the world more clearly. This is echoed by the book's author, Jeff Zaleski, who predicted that the internet age and its hyperconnectivity would eradicate nationalism.

That same year, Nicholas Negroponte, head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory, took it a step further in this excerpt from a CNN article:

Not to play spoiler, but, as it turns out, the internet has not achieved world peace. Many would argue the precise opposite given the polarizing nature of today's digital climate and the tragic effects on our collective mental health caused by a near-universal addiction to screens, social media, etc.

There are, of course, bright spots. In multiple cases in the past few years we've seen the internet play roles in the empowerment of activists around the world, including for young organizers during the Arab Spring and more recently, during the protests in the wake of George Floyd's murder.

Despite the obvious potential for unity stretching beyond borders and ethnicities that exists in our interconnected world, these examples remain the exception rather than the rule.

However, there is one institution that has grown into an essential part of the internet's ecosystem which truly lives up to the hopes of the dreamers of 25 years ago: Wikipedia.

Y'know, that site you literally use to find information on everything?

It embodies everything that was supposed to be so fantastic about the internet age, a place where a network of strangers from across the planet collaborate on a free database for the benefit of everyone.

And the craziest part? It's pretty damn accurate. Back in the day I remember teachers telling me that Wikipedia was not a source because 'anyone can edit it, they can make up anything'.

Yet, it's been found to be as reliable as many more traditionally respected institutions. In 2005, just four years after Wikipedia's launch, a study published in Nature concluded that Wikipedia's trustworthiness was on par with Britannica. 

That was over 15 years ago. Meanwhile, the increasingly robust team of Wikipedia editors has grown substantially, and, in the process, improved Wikipedia's overall health.

Checking in on Wikipedia's Statistics page, we can get a sense of just how incredible the scale of this project truly is...

In the month of November alone, Wikipedia recorded:

• 25 Billion page views

• 28 Million edits

And it's also the 7th most visited website in the world, ahead of sites like Amazon and Yahoo.

These numbers shouldn't be so shocking considering how deeply ingrained Wikipedia is in the digital ecosystem, but it's rarely given its due for the amount of vital contributions the site provides to the world.

Let alone considering the philosophical implications of such a user-driven, open system succeeding at such a tremendous clip, all for free. It's exactly what those early dreamers were hoping for, yet it's so much more than they could ever imagine.