Around the turn of the century, the internet underwent a transformation dubbed “web 2.0”. The world wide web of the 1990s had largely been read-only: static pages, hand-built homepages, portal sites with content from a few publishers.

Then came the dotcom crash of 2000 to 2001, when many heavily financed, lightly useful internet businesses collapsed. In the aftermath, surviving companies and new entrants leaned into a different logic that the author-publisher Tim O’Reilly later described as “harnessing collective intelligence”: platforms rather than pages, participation rather than passive consumption.

And on January 15 2001, a website was born that seemed to encapsulate this new era. The first entry on its homepage read simply: “This is the new WikiPedia!”

Wikipedia wasn’t originally conceived as a not-for-profit website. In its early phase, it was hosted and supported through co-founder Jimmy Wales’s for-profit search company, Bomis. But two years on, the Wikimedia Foundation was created as a dedicated non-profit to steward Wikipedia and its sibling projects.

Wikipedia embodied the web 2.0 dream of a non-hierarchical, user-led internet built on participation and sharing. One foundational idea – volunteer human editors reviewing and authenticating content incrementally after publication – was highlighted in a 2007 Los Angeles Times report about Wales himself trying to write an entry for a butcher shop in Gugulethu, South Africa.

His additions were reverted or blocked by other editors who disagreed about the significance of a shop they had never heard of. The entry finally appeared with a clause that neatly encapsulated the platform’s self-governance model: “A Wikipedia article on the shop was created by the encyclopedia’s co-founder Jimmy Wales, which led to a debate on the crowdsourced project’s inclusion criteria.”

As a historical sociologist of artificial intelligence and the internet, I find Wikipedia revealing not because it is flawless, but because it shows its workings (and flaws). Behind........

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