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The Anti-Youtuber
What Wikipedia Means for Knowledge on the Internet
Bram Adams
July 23, 2025
I added a Wikipedia Game to YCB. It’s a simple, fun game that allows you to fetch random articles from Wikipedia and on tap (mobile) / click (desktop), add the sentences to YCB. Give it a go!
Synthesize
Last week, I went to Wikipedia NYC’s “Wiknic” (Wikipedia Picnic).
washington sq park wiknic photo walk!
I have a lot of respect for the work the editors put into Wikipedia.
Working on Wikipedia is largely thankless work, and though there is internal respect between contributors (I met a guy who himself alone edited over 500 pages about NYC!), the community behind Wikipedia is faceless as far as the public is concerned.
In a sense, Wikipedia editors are Anti-Youtubers. Youtubers trade on subscribers, likes and branding around their videos. Wikipedia editors trade on anonymity and heated discussions about whether or not the “X” in Hunter X Hunter should be pronounced.
I say Hunter Hunter
As Vrijen said in a conversation we had, “YouTubers are selling themselves to us, Wikipedia editors are selling the product (in this case, peer-reviewed knowledge about Varanopidae or Edwin Southern or the Boomerang Experiment) to us.
Both YouTube and Wikipedia are pillars of the Internet, but they have diametrically opposed goals in practice. I don’t know what this suggests, but it’s pretty interesting on the face of it.
Wikipedia’s task of chronicling the world’s knowledge for the love of the game is something that I can really get behind with my work on YCB. I just am more concerned with the individual than the community level.
The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is a power of sorts, if we allow it to be. There’s no end to knowledge, just the next lesson.
Store
Here are a few items to store in Your Commonbase this week!
The love of learning is general among human beings and pursued in a variety of ways and degrees. Unlike the love of the outdoors, however, we do not always recognize it. We miss it in its lowlier forms, and misidentify it in its higher ones. We do so because we have various desires and goals, in various invisible hierarchies. We have ultimate ends that may or may not be transparent to us. Thus we can love learning for its own sake, or we can use it for the sake of a political agenda; it can be a means to wealth and status, or a stepping-stone to a sense of achievement; learning can accrue under idle social habits, following the crowds. We may not know whether we are driven by the real thing or by something else until we are put to the test. But to limit learning to the professionals would be like considering sponsored mountain climbers to be the only true appreciators of the outdoors.
Best,
Bram