Wikipedia Is the Last Encyclopedia Humans Will Ever Write

By Tom Whitfield

On April 11, 2019, a private moon lander called Beresheet crashed into the Sea of Tranquility, flinging a nickel disk containing the entire English-language edition of Wikipedia across the lunar surface. The disk, the Lunar Library, has never been seen since. Its creator called it, after the crash, a "30 million page Frisbee."

That failed tribute is the opening image of The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia by Richard Cooke, excerpted this week by its publisher, W. W. Norton. The book's central claim is blunt: Wikipedia is not only the largest encyclopedia written by humans. It is also the last encyclopedia humans will ever write.

How big is it, really?

The numbers Cooke assembles are contradictory in a productive way. Wikipedia became the largest encyclopedia ever to exist in 2007, ending the six-hundred-year reign of the imperial Chinese Yongle encyclopedia. It has been consulted trillions of times and read by billions of people. Yet its entirety, text and images, fits onto a $5 thumb drive. In Jack Lynch's history of reference works, You Could Look It Up, its page count is listed as "zero" and its size and weight as "none."

The statue honoring the achievement stands, for reasons Cooke does not explain, in the Polish border town of Słubice, population 16,000. That detail is typical of the essay's method: a promise of grandeur, then a caveat in the next breath.

Who made it, and why don't we know?

Cooke stresses how little curiosity Wikipedia provokes. Donors give money to "pay for the fact checkers," unaware that it has no paid fact checkers. The public face is co-founder Jimmy Wales, who once compared reading Wikipedia to eating a sausage: "you might like the taste of it, but you don't necessarily want to see how it's made."

The project's radical premise, Cooke argues, was cultural rather than technological. It entrusted knowledge creation to anyone who wanted to participate, violating the hierarchy of expertise that preceded it. "Everybody distrusts Wikipedia and everybody uses it," a cynic once remarked. Cooke counts that ridiculousness as protective: had anyone predicted Wikipedia's true value during its formative phase, it would never have survived.

What does this change for how we read the record?

Cooke dates Wikipedia's decisive period tightly: 2001 to 2008, when the project took its present shape. The endpoint is measurable — the moment its once-exponential growth rate became linear. That period, he notes, is precisely where contemporary coverage is thinnest, because the press considered the project unimportant at the time. Controversies remain unresolved and key figures forgotten.

The context is stark. Sometime in 2002, the quantity of digital information in existence overtook the quantity of analog information. And of all data created in 2020, less than 2 percent was saved and retained into 2021. In 2014, the BBC reported that online history was disappearing at speed, creating "a black hole for future historians."

What comes next?

Cooke, an admitted skeptic's skeptic here, does not promise survival. Wikipedia could drown in a tidal wave of AI slop, he writes, or be overshadowed by computer-composed encyclopedias of even more unfeasible size — experiments are already trying to bring such monstrosities to life. Milder fates loom too: being broken up, or withering through neglect as audiences encounter it in places where it can be read but not edited. He also flags new attention from "dangerous political enemies, foreign and domestic."

The humanities, he argues, supply Wikipedia's hidden pedigree — heirs, however improbably, to Voltaire, Diderot and Leibniz. Annie Rauwerda, who runs the social media account Depths of Wikipedia, compared the sensation of appreciating its oddities to stumbling on "abandoned cathedrals."

Cooke's closing motive is preservation, not celebration. "Digital empires, once fallen, leave few ruins," he writes. His book is his attempt to say: "we saw it made, and it was good." Whether that record arrives before the memories of Wikipedia's makers fade is the question the excerpt leaves open.