Richard Cooke Traces Wikipedia's 25-Year Rise in New History With 7 Million English Articles
Updated
Updated · The New York Times · Oct 21
Richard Cooke Traces Wikipedia's 25-Year Rise in New History With 7 Million English Articles
2 articles · Updated · The New York Times · Oct 21
Summary
Richard Cooke’s new book, “The Last Best Place on the Internet,” frames Wikipedia as a human history of the web’s most durable collaborative project.
25 years after its founding, Wikipedia has grown from a dismissed open-editing experiment into the largest encyclopedia ever, with more than 7 million English articles and about 508 million daily views.
Cooke argues that scale emerged partly because few people took the site seriously at first, letting its collective-creation model develop into a public institution largely outside the spotlight.
The book also tracks the costs of that success: thicker rules, more bureaucracy and mounting pressure from culture-war attacks, even as Wikipedia remains a nonprofit alternative to social media and AI-driven platforms.