Happy Birthday, Wikipedia

WIKIPEDIA IS CLEAR on the matter: Wikipedia is not a reliable source. Yet on this particular question, few people seem to agree with the world’s most popular encyclopedia. The site approaches its 20th birthday, on January 15th, as the 13th-most-visited place on the web, offering more than 55m articles written in 300 languages. Worries about fake news, filter bubbles and market power have soured public opinion on the Utopian promises of the early internet. But Wikipedia—written by amateurs, freely available to all—stands as the great exception. It is the dream that worked.

Or at least, mostly worked. Wikipedia’s crowdsourced model remains vulnerable to the occasional hoaxer or chancer. In August it emerged that many articles on the Scots version of the site had been written by an American editor who, by his own admission, was not really a speaker of the dialect. Nor is it free from honest mistakes. That can cause problems: for better or worse, powerful platforms from social-media firms to the World Health Organisation have come to treat it as a wellspring of truth online (see article). All the same, the world is much better off for its existence.