The Encyclopedia’s Own Library. What the Wikipedia Library and the Open… | by Jake Orlowitz | Regarding Wikipedia | Jun, 2026 | Medium

"While one founder of the movement warned that we had been corrupted, the movement’s leading advocacy organization was working right beside us, under a theme that happened to be Open for Collaboration. The family claim was real.

A decade on, we can do something rare in arguments about the future of knowledge. We can check the score.

The Wikipedia Library became one of the unexpected triumphs of the Wikimedia movement, infrastructure woven into experienced editor’s lives such that many Wikipedians don’t imagine the project without it.

The open access movement achieved something stranger and sadder. It won the argument, transformed the industry, and then watched the industry absorb the victory, repackage it, and sell it back to the academy at a huge markup.

Both stories are true, and holding them together reveals a great deal about how good things survive inside broken systems."