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Harder to correct is the wrinkle occasioned by language. Wikipedias written in different languages are independent of each other. There might not be anything actually wrong, but theres certainly something strange about the way India, Australia, the US and the UK and all the rest of the anglophone world share a single English-language Wikipedia, while only the Finns get to enjoy the Finnish one. And it says something (obvious) about the unevenness of global development that Hindi speakers (the third largest language group in the world) read a Wikipedia thats 53rd in a ranking of size.

To encyclopedify the world is an impossible goal. Surely the philosophes of 18th-century France knew that much when they embarked on their Encyclopdie. Paul Otlets Universal Repertory and HG Wellss World Brain were similarly quixotic. Attempting to define Wikipedia through its intellectual lineage may, however, be to miss the point. In his standout essay Wikipedia as a Role-Playing Game, Dariusz Jemielniak (author of the first ethnography of Wikipedia, Common Knowledge?, in 2014) stresses the playfulness of the whole enterprise. Why else, he asks, would academics avoid it? When you are a soldier, you do not necessarily spend your free time playing paintball with friends.

Since its inception, pundits have assumed that its Wikipedias reliance on the great mass of unwashed humanity sorry, I mean user-generated content that will destroy it. Contributor Heather Ford, a South African open source activist, reckons its not its creators that will eventually ruin Wikipedia but its readers specifically, data aggregation giants such as Google, Amazon and Apple, which fillet Wikipedia content and disseminate it through search engines like Chrome and personal assistants such as Alexa and Siri. They have turned Wikipedia into the internets go-to source of ground truth, inflating its importance to an unsustainable level.

Wikipedias entries are now like swords of Damocles, suspended on threads over the heads of every major commercial and political actor in the world. How long before the powerful find a way to silence this capering non-profit fool, telling motley truths to power? As Jemielniak puts it: A serious game that results in creating the most popular reliable knowledge source in the world and disrupts existing knowledge hierarchies and authority, all in the time of massive anti-academic attacks what is there not to hate?

Dislike of Wikipedia neednt spring from principles or ideas or even self-interest. Plain snobbery will do. Wikipedia has pricked the pretensions of the humanities like no other cultural project. Editor Joseph Reagle discovered as much, 10 years ago, in email conversation with founder Jimmy Wales (a conversation that appears in Good Faith Collaboration, Reagles excellent, if by now slightly dated study of Wikipedia). One of the things that I noticed, Wales wrote, is that in the humanities, a lot of people were collaborating in discussions, while in programming people werent just talking about programming, they were working together to build things of value.

This, I think, is what sticks in the craw of so many educated naysayers: that while academics were busy paying each other for the eccentricity of their beautiful opinions, nerds were out in the world winning the culture wars; that nerds stand ready on the virtual parapet to defend us from truthy, Trumpist oblivion; that nerds actually kept the promise held out by the internet, and turned it into the fifth biggest site on theweb. Wikipedias guidelines toits editors include Assume GoodFaith and Please Do Not Bite the Newcomers. Perhaps thisis more than the naughty worlddeserves.

Wikipedia@20, edited byJoseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner, is published by MIT at 22.50. To order your copy for 18.99,call 0844 871 1514 orvisitTelegraph Books

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Wikipedia has transformed knowledge so why is it still looked down on? - Telegraph.co.uk