What Wiki.

Wikipedia is the fifth most-visited website on the internet and the only one in the top ten that isn’t selling anything. It has no ads, no algorithm, no feed. It is, in the shape and feel of it, a nineties website — boxy, gray, full of links that go somewhere. And it is, quietly, the most-read book in the history of the species.

I want to write about why that keeps being true.

A pile of small corrections.

There’s a story we tell about Wikipedia: a horde of anonymous strangers, each adding a sentence, building the encyclopedia the way bees build a hive. It’s a nice story and it’s almost entirely wrong. Most edits to most articles are made by a small number of people, many of whom have made thousands of edits. They fight, mostly politely, in a grammar of talk pages that nobody outside Wikipedia has ever read.

“The neutral point of view is not a point of view at all. It’s a method — a way of laying two points of view down next to each other and letting the reader see the seam.”

That method, more than the software, is the thing. Anyone can edit a wiki; very few people can maintain one. Every functioning Wikipedia community is really a community of maintainers, people who read the same pages over and over and watch what happens to them.

What the internet forgot.

Around 2010 the rest of the web made a decision, mostly without saying so out loud. It chose the feed over the page. A feed is a river: it doesn’t ask you where you are, it just brings you the next thing. A page is a place. You can go back to it. You can bookmark it. You can edit it.

Wikipedia kept being a page when everything else became a feed, and this is why it feels so strange now — it feels like walking into a library after living in a casino.

The other thing Wikipedia kept is links that go somewhere. A Wikipedia article links to other Wikipedia articles, and those articles exist, and they keep existing. On the rest of the internet, roughly a quarter of links die within two years. On Wikipedia, dead links are themselves a project — there are volunteers whose entire job is to go fix them.

What this has to do with me.

I keep a version of this site the way the wiki people keep their pages. Not because I think it will matter — it probably won’t — but because the discipline of maintaining a place, instead of producing a stream, changes what I notice. A page asks: is this still true? A feed only asks: what’s next?

Fenn is my small wiki. The themes are its categories. The notes are its pages. If you’ve read this far, you’ve walked into a library, and I’m grateful for that.