Richard Cooke Publishes Wikipedia Book as AI Threatens 68 Million-Article Site

1 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Oct 18

Richard Cooke’s new book argues Wikipedia’s story is fundamentally human, tracing how a small group of early editors and founders built a site now consulted trillions of times.
68 million articles and an estimated 1.9 trillion page views from 2015 to 2025 underscore that scale, even as Cooke says public understanding still lags behind Wikipedia’s everyday use.
Cooke says AI has made the encyclopedia feel newly fragile by cutting the web traffic it depends on and by enabling floods of weak machine-generated edits.
The book also highlights long-running structural tensions inside Wikipedia, from its stubborn gender imbalance to the inclusionist-versus-deletionist fight over what belongs on the site.
Cooke says those pressures make Wikipedia’s survival feel less assured, casting the project as a rare internet institution whose collaborative model may not be replicated.