Wikipedia

Here's what kills me about Wikipedia: it shouldn't work. An encyclopedia that anyone can edit? Maintained by volunteers? With no advertising, no VC funding, and a nonprofit structure in an industry that worships quarterly earnings? The economics majors would tell you it's impossible. The business school case studies would predict failure. And yet Wikipedia has become the fifth most visited website on the planet, available in 300+ languages, with 60 million articles written and maintained by people who just want to share knowledge. It's the most successful collaborative project in human history, and it runs on MediaWiki software that looks like it was designed in 2004 because it was.

I've covered Silicon Valley for decades, and I've watched a thousand startups promise to "democratize" this or "disrupt" that. Most of them were just trying to insert themselves as middlemen and extract rent. Wikipedia actually did it. They democratized knowledge. Encyclopedia Britannica used to cost thousands of dollars and fit in your living room if you had the space. Now everyone with an internet connection has access to more information than the Library of Alexandria ever contained. For free. Forever. The Wikimedia Foundation could easily monetize this traffic—we're talking about one of the highest-traffic sites on the internet—and they consistently refuse. That's not naivete; it's integrity.

Let's talk about the elephant in the room: accuracy. Critics love to point out that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, as if that's a bug rather than a feature. Yes, vandalism happens. Yes, controversial pages get edit warred. But the volunteer editor community has developed sophisticated tools and processes to catch errors quickly, and studies have shown Wikipedia's accuracy rivals traditional encyclopedias. More importantly, Wikipedia shows its work—every claim can be traced to a citation, and the talk pages expose the debates behind contested facts. Try getting that transparency from a corporate research firm or a legacy publication that won't admit its biases.

The design is gloriously utilitarian. No infinite scroll trying to trap you. No algorithmic feed nudging you toward outrage. No autoplay videos, no cookie consent banners bigger than the content, no dark patterns. Just text, organized by links, in a structure that encourages you to learn more if you want to or leave if you don't. The sidebar shows you how many people edited the page, when it was last modified, what languages it's available in. It's information architecture designed to inform rather than manipulate. In 2026, when every website is trying to maximize "time on site" through addictive mechanisms, Wikipedia remains focused on its actual mission: get you the information you need.

Wikipedia represents what the internet was supposed to be before the attention merchants took over. A global collaborative project where humans contribute their expertise to create something none of them could build alone. Sure, the donation banners during fundraising season are a little annoying. Sure, the mobile app could be better. Sure, the editor community has systemic bias issues that need addressing. But none of that changes the fundamental miracle: millions of people, with no financial incentive, maintaining the world's largest repository of human knowledge, for anyone to use, forever. If you're not at least a little inspired by that, I'm not sure what to tell you. Donate twenty bucks and feel good about something for once.