My first encounter with Wikipedia came in the form of an admonishment: a teacher’s warning we shouldn’t trust anything we read on the site, because anybody could write on it and anybody could edit it. Of course, the first thing any teenager does when they’re told not to do something is exactly that thing, and so began a lifelong fascination with Wikipedia. (Much to the chagrin of my grandfather, who, around the same time, had gifted me the entire Encyclopedia Britannica on CD-ROM; I’m fairly confident those disks never spun, just as many sets of the printed version given with the best of intentions were never opened.) More intriguing than Wikipedia itself was, and remains, the idea at its core: that the Internet can be a place not just for communication and entertainment, but collaboration and truth-seeking. It has rightfully been hailed many times as the pinnacle achievement of the philosophy of the “open web,” which has many definitions, but to me simply means: you can do almost anything here, together, without corporate influence. Today, it’s the open web’s last stand—Apple, Google and Amazon’s decision to ban right-wing darling social media app Parler from their respective platforms and services was absolutely the right choice, but also made abundantly clear that the days of hoping for a truly open web have long since passed. Yet Wikipedia, which celebrates its 20th birthday on Jan. 15, lives on—and it’s not just surviving, but thriving. It’s the fifth most popular website among U.S. internet users, according to web tracking firm Semrush, with more than 15 billion visits every month, underscoring its evolution from distrusted upstart to the most dependable of all places its size on the Internet. Yes, it has its problems—generations of philosophers would scoff at the notion that any single article could possibly represent the entire “truth” of a thing, and it endures constant attacks from vandals attempting to change the historical record. But those assaults are generally sorted out quickly. In part, Wikipedia is trusted because it’s open about what former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously called “known unknowns.” On Facebook, Twitter or other social media sites, users often present fiction as fact, and uncertainty as confidence. Wikipedia, conversely, is up front about what it doesn’t know. “Our editing community does a phenomenal job being very transparent about what is known and unknown,” Katherine Maher, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia’s parent organization, told me in mid-December. “You see that in all breaking news articles, where they’ve got a little tag at the top that says, ‘this event is happening in real time, and some information may be changing rapidly.’ And it’s really a flag, it’s a warning to say ‘we don’t know all the facts here.'” That spirit, says Maher, permeates the site and its design. “You see this when Wikipedia says ‘this content is disputed,’ or ‘this article may not be neutral,’ or how it….presents different sides of controversy, so that the reader them