The Rise and Fall of Wikipedia

Wikipedia's betrayal serves as a tragic reminder that no technology is incorruptible, no platform is permanently inoculated against capture. Grokipedia 0.1 is already vastly better...at least for now.

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by Jeffrey A. Tucker
November 3, 2025

The year was 2001 and the dot-com bust was in the rearview mirror. New ideas were in circulation among young and visionary entrepreneurs. Sure, Pets.com failed and so many others but that was a temporary boom-bust.

The internet will change everything eventually, we were told. Technology, decentralization, crowd sourcing, and digital spontaneity will create an information landscape without gatekeepers. Everything will have to adapt. The experts of the old world will be replaced by a people’s revolution. Whereas legacy elites waved credentials, a new class of revolutionaries will raise armies of servers and digits to move the center of civilization to the cloud.

Wikipedia was a headline feature, an experiment in crowd-sourcing knowledge in a way that was decentra…