Twenty-five years on, the dream is still alive. But it has been accompanied by an unexpected monster: an encyclopaedic bureaucracy so complex that a newcomer may feel as though they are entering a parallel administration whose codes, customs and true power dynamics they know nothing about.
Welcome to Wikipedia.
In theory, ‘anyone can edit Wikipedia’. In practice, go on and try.
You’ll quickly need to learn what a secondary source, a primary source, a focused source, an independent source and a high-quality source are, as well as what encyclopaedic notability, original research, neutral point of view, consensus, banners, talk pages, deletion requests, protection, blocks and an impressive array of rules and guidelines.
The phenomenon even has a name in the Wikipedia world: ‘instruction creep’, meaning the gradual accumulation of rules as a community grows and encounters new problems.
All these rules obviously serve a purpose. Without them, an open encyclopaedia would quickly be overrun by advertising, personal vendettas, fabrications, activists, press officers and crackpots.
The problem arises when a system designed to protect knowledge ends up becoming so sophisticated that those who master the procedure automatically have a considerable advantage over those who merely know the subject they are writing about.
And that is when the horizontal utopia becomes much less horizontal.
Wikipedia has experienced contributors, administrators with technical powers enabling them to delete pages, protect articles or block accounts, as well as structures designed to resolve conflicts. Administrators are appointed by the community and are not officially supposed to have greater editorial authority than other contributors.
All of this is public.
But public does not necessarily mean simple.
For someone new to a Wikipedia discussion, facing three contributors who have been involved for fifteen years and know the dozens of applicable rules by heart, the balance of power quickly seems rather peculiar.
It is not necessarily the person who knows the most about an artist, a work of art, a historical event or a scientific field who will have the final say. It is often the person who knows precisely which rule to invoke, which source will be accepted, where to open the discussion and how to formulate their argument in accordance with Wikipedia’s internal precedents.
The paradox then becomes a magnificent one: the encyclopaedia conceived to democratise knowledge creates its own class of specialists… in Wikipedia.
Even the notion of ‘consensus’ is more subtle than it appears. Wikipedia itself states that its editorial decisions are not necessarily simply majority votes: the quality of the arguments in relation to the rules may take precedence over the number of people who support them.
On paper, this is clever.
In practice, however, it can also create an extremely intimidating environment where a few particularly seasoned contributors become extraordinarily difficult to challenge.
Research into how Wikipedia works has, in fact, examined this complex organisational culture, in which bots, tools, rules, scripts and community conventions gradually require genuine expertise in order to participate fully in the system.
The problem becomes even more acute when it comes to the much-discussed ‘notability’.
You may be a writer, film director, researcher, artist, entrepreneur or public figure, only to discover that a handful of contributors believe the available sources do not meet the criteria required for a standalone article.
Conversely, a perfectly trivial subject may be given a massive page simply because it has the right secondary sources.
This isn’t necessarily absurd: Wikipedia doesn’t want to become a giant promotional directory. But this means that the encyclopaedia does not directly reflect the real importance of the world. It largely reflects **what the media, books and other sources deemed acceptable have previously documented**. Its own notability principle is based precisely on significant coverage in independent secondary sources.
And inevitably, not all areas of society produce the same archives, press articles or academic publications.
Wikimedia itself has long recognised the existence of systemic biases within its ecosystem and has, in particular, worked to address imbalances in representation relating to gender and the composition of its community.
This is where the accusation regularly levelled against Wikipedia comes in: that it has become an ideological stronghold, sometimes described, depending on one’s political stance, as ‘politically correct’, activist, conservative, progressive, technocratic or sectarian.
We must be cautious about drawing this conclusion.
Wikipedia is too vast, too fragmented and too contradictory for us to seriously speak of a single ideology governing the entire encyclopaedia. The Wikimedia Foundation, on the contrary, asserts that decisions regarding sources are public, documented and open to debate, and that neutrality is a central principle of the project.
But there is a more subtle problem.
A community does not need to be given orders to develop a shared culture.
When a relatively stable group gradually defines its own rules, vocabulary, references and habits, it may eventually come to regard conventions as perfectly natural that have become incomprehensible to outsiders.
Wikipedia’s true drift is therefore perhaps less ideological than sociological.
It is the same drift experienced by all human institutions.
We start with a few simple principles.
Then problems arise.
We create a rule.
Then an exception.
Then a procedure for interpreting the exception.
Then a committee is set up to resolve disputes concerning the procedure.
And twenty years later, you almost need a degree in Wikipedia to understand how an encyclopaedia works, even though its implicit slogan remains: **you can contribute.**
It would, of course, be absurd to compare Wikipedia to a genuine political dictatorship. No one will imprison you simply because your edit has been reverted.
But if we use the word as a provocation, then yes: Wikipedia can sometimes resemble a small administrative dictatorship of knowledge, in which power does not come from a leader but from mastery of the rules.
And it is perhaps precisely because Wikipedia has become indispensable that we must be able to say so.
For Wikipedia remains one of the Internet’s most extraordinary collective achievements.
We visit it every day to check a date, discover an author, understand a war, find a film or start some research. Its value is immense.
But its future will also depend on its ability to avoid becoming what all major institutions eventually become when they forget their origins:
a system that claims the door is open, whilst having made the lock so complicated that only regulars still know how to get in.
