Hey rockstars,

Hear me out because this post is very different from my usual posts.

I donated to Wikipedia for the first time last night.

I have been using Wikipedia for most of my life: for school research assignments, movie plots for horror movies because I’m too chicken to watch the movie but I’m not too chicken to read the absurdity that is horror movie plots, celebrity history with multiple marriages, random historical events that I don’t know anything about but probably should know about, and questions that occur to me at 10 p.m. that I suddenly must know the answer to right now for absolutely no reason. I have opened Wikipedia because I wanted to know one very specific thing and emerged an hour later knowing twelve things I never intended to learn, simply because I clicked one hyperlink after another.

But I’ll admit, besides reading absurd horror movie plots, I don’t really go on Wikipedia anymore. 

Shocking because I think my entire senior year thesis presentation on the politicization of the Olympics was from Wikipedia. (Senior Independent Project more like Senior Wikipedia Project). 

I remember in middle school people used to say that if you click on the first hyperlink in Wikipedia, then you will always eventually get to the Wikipedia page about an apple. I never tried it but as a gullible 11-year-old I was like “oh cool!” Turns out this is fake. Turns out you will always eventually get to “Philosophy” which Wikipedia itself proved on YouTube three months ago. This would have been really handy in 2007.   

I remember being told throughout school that we were never allowed to cite Wikipedia because it was “unreliable.” If only they knew that Wikipedia is fact-checked like crazy and shows you exactly where the information came from. I am also about 10 minutes away from signing up to be a Wikipedia editing volunteer, so add it to another one of the 1000 things that I do.

Regardless, though, I love a rabbit hole. Whenever I write my physics mini-series blog posts, I read the Wikipedia page about the physics concept. I love learning something simply because it is there to be learned. I am, somewhat aggressively, a lifelong learner. Those of you who know me know that I am currently working on my second graduate degree and expect to do even more, not because I need another degree, but because there are things in the world I do not understand yet and I would like to. 

Curiosity is one of my favorite things about being alive. I owe a lot of that to my parents. They are wonderful for many, many reasons, but one thing I will always be grateful for is that they made curiosity feel important. Growing up, I had a My First Dictionary, a thesaurus, several encyclopedias, the physical Guinness World Records, and a World Book Encyclopedia CD. If I had a question, the answer used to usually be, “Why don’t you look it up?” and I would. 

My favorite store of all time was Zany Brainy, where I got some of my favorite toys, puzzles, games, and CDs. I was heartbroken when all of its stores closed in 2003. (If Toys “R” Us can make a comeback, I continue to believe there is hope.) 

And somehow, for all the years I have used Wikipedia, I had never donated to it.

But last night, the banner at the top of the page tugged at my heartstrings. Wikipedia told me that it had seen fewer visitors and fewer new supporters this year, and that fewer than 2% of its readers donate. It described itself, after twenty-five years, as “the internet we were promised,” created by people rather than machines, and warned that the kind of “free, collaborative, and accessible knowledge” it represents is “under constant threat.”

That stopped me, because lately, I have been increasingly scared of the direction the internet is going.

I only half mean that in the nostalgic “we should all go back to the full-keyboard phones from 2009” way. I do love the way technology has advanced. And I do appreciate that I don’t have to panic on the bus if I accidentally press the “internet” button on my phone and worry that my phone company will charge me $100 for using the internet. Now I just take it for granted because I have an absurd amount of the world’s information accessible from a tiny computer I carry around in my pocket.

What scares me is the possibility that we are losing something valuable without fully appreciating that it was valuable in the first place: an internet where knowledge can exist simply because people think other people should be able to know things.

In a world where we’re so concerned about fake news and having access to correct information, too much of it is behind a paywall: newspapers and magazines need subscriptions, academic research is often behind institutional access, and online courses cost money.

BUT I would be remiss if I didn’t right now do a plug for the library because so much of this information is available if you have a library card.

Do I think “everything should be free”? No. I do think journalists, writers, and researchers need to get paid.

But at a moment when it is becoming increasingly difficult to determine what information online is even real, access to reliable information and the sources behind it feels more important, not less. This makes Wikipedia feel even more extraordinary to me.

There is an irony there that I can’t stop thinking about. We have built increasingly sophisticated ways to give people answers while simultaneously weakening some of the places where those answers originate.

I’m not sure most of us, myself included until very recently, fully appreciate the scale of what people have built. Wikipedia is now twenty-five years old. It contains more than 65 million articles in more than 300 languages, written and maintained by nearly 250,000 volunteers around the world. Those volunteers write articles, check facts, add citations, correct errors, update pages, debate edits, translate knowledge, and continue doing the endless human work required to maintain something that millions of us treat as though it simply materialized on the internet one day.

The Wikimedia Foundation supports an entire collection of free knowledge projects. Wikimedia Commons contains more than 100 million freely licensed images, photographs, videos, and audio files. Wikisource is a free library of source texts and historical documents. Wikibooks offers free textbooks and instructional materials. Wikiversity provides learning resources and research. Wiktionary is a multilingual dictionary covering more than 170 languages. Wikivoyage is a free worldwide travel guide. There is Wikidata and Wikispecies and Wikiquote and projects I had barely thought about despite having benefited from this ecosystem for years.

All of it is built around an idea that feels almost radical to me now: you are allowed to wonder about something, and you are allowed to find out.

I’m not saying Wikipedia is perfect, but it’s also human. 

Wikipedia doesn’t rely on advertising, subscription fees, or selling readers’ personal data for its funding. The Wikimedia Foundation says the majority of its funding comes from individual readers, and only about 2% of Wikipedia readers donate. Until yesterday, I was part of the other 98%.

There is sadly no law of nature requiring one of the largest collections of human knowledge ever assembled to remain freely accessible to anyone who wants to use it. The internet does not automatically produce public spaces. People make choices about what they build, what they fund, what they protect, and what they allow to disappear.

I want there to remain places on the internet where the only price of learning something is wanting to know it.

So yesterday, after years of clicking past that little banner, I donated to Wikipedia. If Wikipedia has ever taught you something, answered a question, settled an argument, helped you understand a reference, rescued you from confusion, or sent you down a completely unnecessary and wonderful rabbit hole, I hope you’ll consider donating too.

Until next time!

xo

Sandhya

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