The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia by Richard Cooke. W.W. Norton, 320 pages. 2026.

It’s hard to write about Wikipedia. It’s like trying to write about every Russian novel or the banking system. It contains too much: Sixty-eight million articles in 348 active languages, with the seven million in English being the most in any language.

Behind it all are the millions of people whose interests and motivations have made the project what it is. Often pseudonymous or anonymous, they are knowable by the traces they leave: There are the ones who make millions of edits. The ones who’ve made one edit ever. The ones who are misogynists. The ones who work to increase coverage of women. The ones who vandalize the site with jokes that get instantly reverted or hoaxes that go undiscovered for years. The ones who write thousands of words on Scrappy-Doo, nephew of Scooby, or the embankment walls of the River Thames.…