https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/the-rise-and-fall-of-wikipedia-5937358The Rise and Fall of Wikipedia
by Jeffrey A. Tucker
10/30/2025
The year was 2001 and the dot-com bust was in the rearview mirror. New ideas were in circulation among young and visionary entrepreneurs. Sure, pets.com failed and so many others but that was a temporary boom-bust.
The internet will change everything eventually, we were told. Technology, decentralization, crowd sourcing, and digital spontaneity will create an information landscape without gatekeepers. Everything will have to adapt. The experts of the old world will be replaced by a people’s revolution. Whereas legacy elites waved credentials, a new class of revolutionaries will raise armies of servers and digits to move the center of civilization to the cloud.
Wikipedia was a headline feature, an experiment in crowd sourcing knowledge in a way that was decentralized, able to scale in ways the old model was not, and drawing from the knowledge and passions of people the world over. The platform seemed to embody the principle of freedom itself. Everyone has a voice. The truth will emerge from the seeming chaos of competing points of view.
At long last, the anti-authoritarian outlook would be tested on a medium that had intrigued scholars since the ancient world: books containing all knowledge. Reading through Aristotle’s vast corpus, you find this passion and drive at work. He wanted to document everything he could about the world around him. Centuries later following the fall of Rome, St. Isidor, archbishop of Seville, embarked upon a similar path. With the help of countless scribes, he spent his life writing “Etymologiae,” a massive treatise on all that was known, compiled from 615–630AD.
As publishing with movable type took hold in the 15th and 16th centuries, the first similar work appeared in 1630: Johann Heinrich Alsted’s “Encyclopaedia Septem Tomis Distincta.” When by the late 19th century, book publishing and distribution was democratized by markets and technology, and middle-class households could obtain real libraries, the encyclopedia set became a huge commercial success. Many companies were involved in making and selling them.
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