Life has kept me busy in the weeks since my last blog post early this month. In fact, when I wrote that post I was still (technically) 40 years old, but have since then turned 41!
In actuality, of course, these annual delineations are man-made constructs; I was only 41 years old for a brief moment in my life, depending on how strict you want to be, either for just a second or, more generously, a whole day.
Some of what has kept me busy has been nerve-racking and stressful. Most stressful was coming back home a little over two weeks ago, after being away for work for four days, to find the indoor temperature below freezing and water had frozen inside my pipes. While I was away, one of the main fuses had blown, cutting power to a large part of my house including where the mains water and sewage pipe come up through the floor. It took more than a week for the situation to be resolved and I still need one more visit from the plumbers to get things fully sorted out again.
Fortunately, it’s not been all doom and gloom. As I discussed in my first post of the year, I am currently in the middle of a series of lectures on Western music history I am giving at the Kapellsberg Music School in Härnösand. The lectures are part of the folk high school students’ curriculum but also open to the public, with a growing (!) audience of external listeners every week.
I first held music history lectures like these three years ago. Preparing for them back then was incredibly exciting and stimulating, but simultaneously arduous and incredibly time-consuming work. I didn’t make it easy for myself; instead of simply picking one or two all-encompassing encyclopedias and summarising the contents from them, I pored over several general music encyclopedias as well as a few more specialised books about the history of opera, for example, or the involvement of women in professional arts, or the development of 20th century art music.
I wanted to compile a widely researched, more thoroughly nuanced material than simply regurgitating one book would allow. In fact, thinking back to that time, I remember feeling like I was actually getting a clearer picture of the music history I am a part of by kind of assembling pieces from different puzzles like that.
In addition, I went down more than a few Wikipedia rabbit holes, spurred on by innate curiosity as much as that desire I had to get as close as I could to a broad but still well-informed overview. (In fact, while writing this blog post, I have disappeared down another couple of Wikipedia rabbit holes…!)
Wikipedia was – and is – an indispensable tool for knowledge-gathering. For the past 10 years, I have donated every year to the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the non-profit organisation that has for more than 20 years supported Wikipedia itself as well as a number of other projects with a similar goal in mind – that goal being creating and maintaining free knowledge projects to serve the world.
What is a strength of these projects – that they are driven by community-based volunteer work, eschewing traditional corporate structures, private investments, or an ad- or subscription-based financial structure – is also a weakness. Take for instance one of Wikimedia’s projects, Wikiversity: Its Swedish version has been inactive for several years due to a lack of engagement from the community. All of its resources are still available, but with no regular administrators it is slowly but surely succumbing to malicious edits by scammers and bots.
The fact that Wikipedia, for instance, is community-driven and entirely transparently edited is nonetheless its biggest strength. It is maligned by some as being biased (most often “left-leaning” or “woke”), but the fact is that while it is easy for personal bias to creep into one person’s edits to a Wikipedia article, there rarely is only one or a few editors or viewers to a single page.
Thousands of editors all over the world collectively watch over Wikipedia’s myriad of articles – to the best of their abilities, of course – to make sure that whatever information goes into its articles is correctly sourced. Unsourced edits are either flagged or deleted and everything is saved, so there is nothing opaque or distorted about the process.
For me, Wikipedia is a tremendously useful source of information, particularly thanks to the fact that I can very easily see what information comes from where, and based on that I can make an informed assumption as to whether or not it is trustworthy. I can even track that source down if I want to, or at least check the edit history and if there has been a discussion about its veracity.
So, for instance, if I go to the Wikipedia article about Russian composer Alexander Glazunov, I can see that while most of the information there is meticulously referenced, some of it is not and that information has been clearly marked as such. One quote by Rimsky-Korsakov, which is supported by two references, has even been challenged as being incomplete and needing a better reference.
All of this is to say that I personally think Wikipedia is a fantastic and trustworthy resource as long as we use it in the way it is intended to be used. It is not a primary source, nor does it pretend to be one. Wikipedia describes itself as a tertiary source, such as other “encyclopedias or other compendia that summarise, and often quote, primary and secondary sources”. As such, it is not allowed to reference a Wikipedia article on another Wikipedia article; instead, you need to reference the actual relevant secondary (or primary) sources; specifically, reliable sources.
Wikipedia and its siblings are also increasingly unique on the more well-populated internet in that it is resistant to what Canadian author Cory Doctorow has called “enshittification”. This inherent resistance comes down to, as Doctorow describes it, being driven by community instead of profit. In a video from November last year, Hank Green pointedly describes Wikipedia as “not a place to get outraged, not a place to get radicalised, not a place to make money, but just a place to learn things” and, in a positive way, boring:
It is transparent, it is citation-based, it’s globally accessible, it’s self-correcting and – I cannot emphasise this enough – boring. It’s boring. And in a media landscape designed to amplify the drama and the outrage and the conflict, the fact that Wikipedia’s kind of boring is one of the most beautiful things about it. I want a place that’s not about trying to get views. […] It’s one of the only places on the internet where you can see how the sausage is made. You can read the real arguments, you can check the sources, you can decide for yourself how you feel, and it is not designed to get clicks.
Wikipedia and the Destruction of Trust (Hank Green. Nov 16, 2025)
Notably, as Wikipedia (like the other Wikimedia projects) does not depend on ad revenue like the big social media companies do, it does not have to be designed to be addictive. By comparison, last week Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stand in one of many current and upcoming social media trials in the U.S. that seek to hold Meta and other social media companies responsible for harms to its users, specifically children.
As part of Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary, it has created a fascinating, interactive trip down memory lane illustrating the website’s growth and development. The page ends with a short, humourous personality quiz that I took twice because I enjoyed it so much.
The first time, I came out as the Consensus-Driven Collaborator: “You’re super curious, friendly yet argumentative, but not in a bad way. Your future is shaped by open source technologies, open discourse, and a lot of behind-the-scenes teamwork.” Honestly, that sounds a lot like me, or at least who I strive to be.
The second time, the quiz pegged me as a Data-Driven Researcher: “You’re inquisitive, analytical, and maybe a bit too pragmatic, but not to a fault. Your future is well-thought through and you have the data to back it up.” That’s not far off the mark, either, from my personal ambition (including probably being a little too pragmatic at times).
My ongoing work of editing and refining my music history lecture material would be much harder (and, to be honest, much duller) without Wikipedia. Not impossible, of course, far from it, but the result would not be as good and I would not have as much fun putting it together. (It would, however, probably get done quicker without the rabbit holes to fall down into…)
A few days ago, I made my donation for this year. While I will not disclose the precise amount, I will propose this reflection: If I can spend the equivalent of €280 per year on a newspaper subscription which I read almost daily, can I not then spend at least half of that on something I use even more often, both for pleasure and for work?
Donating to the Wikimedia Foundation is something I do gladly for several reasons, including but not limited to: I get incredible joy and use out of it, and I want to do my part to keep it away from corporate or private equity influence. Even if you could or would only donate €10, I wholeheartedly encourage you to do so, too.
(Or, if you’re a dedicated Wikipedia reader like me, you could also purchase the absolutely delightful Wikipedia rabbit hole t-shirt – and wear it with pride.)