In his 2007 book Here Comes Everybody, the tech consultant and commentator Clay Shirky likens Wikipedia to a Shinto shrine that needs to be rebuilt at regular intervals. The metaphor works on several levels. It encapsulates the essential ambiguity at the heart of Wikipedia, what we might call its permanent impermanence. It also explains, in Shirky’s telling, the low esteem in which Wikipedia is held in some corners of the intellectual establishment: just as the Ise Shrine in Japan is denied UNESCO World Heritage status because of its semi-permanent character, so Wikipedia is held to be inferior to paper-and-ink encyclopaedias. And finally, it speaks to the necessary idealism of Wikipedia’s most energetic contributors. For all that its Talk and History sections are crowded with sadists, pedants and cranks, there is no denying that “the free encyclopedia” is in essence a devotional phenomenon.
In The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia, Richard Cooke digs down into all these themes, mapping their many interrelations and the contradictions to which they give rise. Wikipedia, he understands, is as much a community as it is a work of reference, and both its strengths and weaknesses derive from this fact. The word “Wikipedia” combines the name of a collaborative online community – “wiki” – with the name of a literary artefact dating from the 18th century. The result is an often-combustible set of competing and even contradictory priorities. If one point emerges as salient in Cooke’s story, it is that the chaos and creativity of Wikipedia are inseparable.
Cooke is never more engaging than when describing how these foundational tensions play out at the human level. He isn’t short of raw material: the duelling imperatives of openness and authority are represented across Wikipedia, from the increasingly strained relationship between its co-founders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger to the countless feuds, small losses of temper and perverse fixations of its contributors. Most notably, it is represented in the war between “Inclusionists” and “Deletionists”. Conventional encyclopaedias are exclusive by necessity, constrained by their own materiality. But the “non-rival good” that is digital information means that Wikipedia’s libertarian ethos has been hugely, and sometimes absurdly, indulged, with the result that a more prescriptive approach has grown up in response to its excesses.
For Cooke, both approaches have their blind spots. If one negative effect of Deletionism has been to reimport the biases from which a genuinely democratic encyclopaedia should be free, he cautions against too romantic a view of the Inclusionist ethos that continues to define the project in the public’s mind. Openness is an ideology too, and much easier to reconcile with the imperatives of capital and liberal self-congratulation than Deletionist pedantry. The reader is reminded on several occasions that Wales is a devotee of Ayn Rand.
These reservations notwithstanding, it’s clear that Cooke has enormous affection for Wikipedia and its worker bees – its gap-fillers, single-subject obsessives, citation detectives and autistic sticklers. That last adjective is not used casually: Cooke tells us that autistic people are over-represented in Wikipedia’s ranks. Sometimes the affection is tangible, as in this description of a single sentence now languishing in an article’s History:
“Like medieval illuminated manuscripts, [Wikipedia] is full of marginalia, clues to the people who compose it. In the article on the sexual revolution, there was a line, since deleted, that read, ‘For those who were not there to experience it, it may be difficult to imagine how risk-free sex was during the 1960s and 1970s.’ This anonymous autobiography in miniature is an intriguing piece of editorializing, but it’s also a little legacy of the sexual revolution all by itself, a rueful reflection on a moment of freedom that didn’t last. The editor who added ‘Citation needed’ plays a bit part in that story as well.”
In one sense, The Last Best Place on the Internet is an elegy for a period that is passing from view. Cooke’s slightly tautologous subtitle – what histories are there but human ones? – is a wry acknowledgement that we are moving into new territory, where AIs will counterfeit the human energies that built the website while cannibalising its contents.
Already Wikipedia’s ranks are dwindling as the new generation of large language models, themselves substantially trained on Wikipedia, now re-enter its systems as agents, reducing human contributors to a “janitorial” role. In his final chapter, Cooke describes how these developments are combining with the increasingly reactionary attitudes on display among the broligarchy. In October 2025, on the day before Wales launched The Seven Rules of Trust, Elon Musk announced the arrival of Grokipedia, with the express intention of rebalancing public discourse along less liberal (or “woke”) lines.
Will the Shinto shrine continue to be rebuilt? Though Cooke makes no firm predictions, it’s clear he thinks that if it does survive, it will do so in very different form. It’s likely that another architectural metaphor better describes Wikipedia’s future. Referring to long-neglected articles, Wikipedians talk of “abandoned cathedrals”, and one can see how that phrase may come to describe the website in its entirety. If so, then this rich and magnanimous book will serve as a fitting work of archaeology – both a history and an instance of human curiosity at a crucial point in its (d)evolution.
Black Inc, 304pp, $36.99
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