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"All revolutions go down in history, yet history does not fill up," observes French theorist Guy Debord in his 1989 book Panegyric. Unbound by print, Wikipedia's infinite pages might be the perfect medium to record thatboundless history.The ubiquitous, free online encyclopaedia was born of the information revolution, and has transformed our access to knowledge. But its launch in 2001 also coincides with the heightened era of global terrorism since 9/11. Consequently Wikipedia operates amid competing forces: the desire to free knowledge versus a culture of mass surveillance.

In 2013 those forces collided. Edward Snowden's bombshell revelations that the US government's National Security Agency indiscriminately tracks and records the metadata of millions of innocent citizen's phone calls, emails and web searches sent a shockwave around the world.

It had a direct effect on what people were searching on Wikipedia. A study published by the Berkeley Technology Law Journal found traffic to Wikipedia articles related to terrorism fell by nearly 30 per cent after Snowden's whistleblowing.

This isn't necessarily a good thing. As Snowden himself warns in the 2015 Academy Award-winning documentary Citizenfour: "[When people] are careful about what they type into search engines because they know it's being recorded that limits the boundaries of their intellectual exploration."

Wikipedia agrees. "The right to information and right to freedom of expression are fundamental human rights and we'll stand by and defend those values," says Katherine Maher, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation that operates Wikipedia. "Knowledge is so fundamental to allowing us to make decisions that empower and fulfil us as individuals."

In March 2015, the San Francisco-based Wikimedia Foundation filed a lawsuit challenging the NSA's"dragnet surveillance", along with other defendants. In October 2015, the lawsuit was dismissed, but appealed in December 2016 and awaits a ruling.

For many years this democratic ideal of free-knowledge-for-all was the driving force behind the internet. Not anymore, says Maher, who is a keynote speaker at Melbourne Knowledge Week discussing the future and importance of free knowledge.

"The internet is increasingly a highly commercialised place where privacy is illusory, where platforms and information tend to be highly concentrated, where information is algorithmically presented to you with tremendous bias based on what it is you looked at last. The internet is no longer a free and open space."

Wikipedia, however, resists advertising and relies totally on some 2.5 million global donors to survive.

"Wikipedia is one of the remaining free and open spaces on the internet," says Maher, who has a background in IT and advocacy with international development organisations UNICEF, The World Bank and Access Now. "What we stand for is not just Wikipedia, but the open ecosystem of free information across the world. The need for us to create information. The need for inquiry. The need for sharing. The need for transparency and accountability. The need for presentation and celebration of languages and cultures. That's not the internet."

But what about threats to free speech from other governments? Don't countries like Russia and China censor Wikipedia or block access to it? "It's less common than you might imagine," says Maher. "If governments try to get us to take information down, we don't. We have very strong encryption technology that means that if you choose to block Wikimedia [sites] you block 'all of it' or 'none of it'. We found most places in the world choose 'none'."

Established in 2003 the non-profit Wikimedia foundation has a staff of 277 that operates the technology behind the Wikimedia sites, including the Wikicommons with 35 million free images, Wikinews and Wikipedia.

Typically, criticismof Wikipedia is over how totrust a free site that relies on editors and volunteers around the world to supply its information.But it's trust and transparency that Maher perceives as its strongest selling point. Indeed, a visitor to the site can pore over past edits and explore updates, changes and misinformation.

Since Wikipedia's inception, the scribes documenting world history in a neutral, apolitical style have been correcting errors and contending with trolls, pranksters and hoaxers. Fake news isn't new, says Maher. Disinformation, propaganda and yellow journalism are fake news by another name, she says.

Critics argue that unlike venerable encyclopaedias such as Britannica, Wikipedia articles lack consistent depth. Maher says they are rectifying this, particularly the content's white male bias.

"We realised a few years back that of all the biographies on English Wikipedia, only 16 per cent were about women. That's out of more than 1.3 million biographies. So that in and of itself is an opportunity to think about how we write in the remaining 34 per cent [of the female population]."

Increasing its international language versions is also a priority.

To a cosy First World audience, Maher's refrain that "knowledge is power"can sound like a shop-worn Enlightenment slogan. Maher cautions against such cynicism.

"The biggest threat to free information is ourselves," she declares. "We forget how valuable knowledge is to the development and furthering of our society. Accuracy of information, continued inquiry, this has always propelled us forward. If we lose value and appreciation for that, then some of the other structures start to crumble."

Meanwhile, in remote Utah, the NSA has built a new $2 billion data storage facility that records another more personal history. As Wired writer James Bamford describes, "Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches." It offers a dark spectre to Wikipedia's ambitions. Surveillance history does not fill up either. If we allow it.

Democratisation of Knowledge with Katherine Maher, Melbourne Knowledge Week, May 1, 7.30pm-9pm. A live stream is available: https://www.facebook.com/KnowledgeMelbourne/

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Wikipedia's Katherine Maher on free knowledge in the age of mass surveillance - The Sydney Morning Herald