The Encyclopedia’s Own Library. What the Wikipedia Library and the Open… | by Jake Orlowitz | Regarding Wikipedia | Jun, 2026 | MediumSitemapOpen in appSign up<br>Sign in

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Regarding Wikipedia

How to estimate the value of an infinite encyclopedia

The Encyclopedia’s Own Library

What the Wikipedia Library and the Open Access movement won and what they lost over a decade in a paywalled world

Jake Orlowitz

14 min read·<br>2 hours ago

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Photo by Ed Robertson on UnsplashIn September 2015, I set off a small war between two groups of people who agreed about almost everything.<br>The occasion was a press release. Elsevier, the Dutch publishing giant that open access advocates regard as the industry’s defining villain, announced it had donated 45 ScienceDirect accounts to top Wikipedia editors through a program I founded called The Wikipedia Library.<br>Michael Eisen, co-founder of the Public Library of Science and one of the architects of the open access movement, saw the release in his Twitter feed and reacted the way you might expect a man to react upon discovering his closest ally holding hands with his oldest adversary.<br>He branded it WikiGate, called Elsevier open access’s biggest enemy, and warned that getting in bed with the company would eventually corrupt Wikipedia itself.<br>The fight that followed was robust. Glyn Moody amplified the criticism in Ars Technica. Wikipedians pushed back. Eisen, to his enormous credit, kept insisting that he loved Wikipedia and that this was a family argument, which it was.<br>I wrote a response on the Wikimedia blog, borrowing my central point from Wikipedian Martin Poulter, who put it better than I could: Wikipedia aims to be an open access summary of all reliable knowledge, which is a different thing from a summary of only open access knowledge.<br>Eventually we convened a public conversation to hash it out. Eisen asked me to candidly admit that these weren’t simply generous gifts that expected nothing in return. There were invisible strings. I conceded the point and from then on started referring to our paywalled ecosystem as one of partnerships rather than donations.

Weeks later, during Open Access Week that October, SPARC, the library coalition that anchors open access advocacy in the United States, co-hosted a global edit-a-thon with the Wikipedia Library to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of open access itself.<br>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.<br>A decade on, we can do something rare in arguments about the future of knowledge. We can check the score.<br>The Wikipedia Library became one of the quiet triumphs of the Wikimedia movement, infrastructure woven into experienced editor’s lives such that many Wikipedians don’t imagine the project without it.<br>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.<br>Both stories are true, and holding them together reveals a great deal about how good things survive inside broken systems.<br>The case against the Library<br>The 2015 critique of the Library came from the founders of a movement with a genuine moral core, and on its own terms it was right about nearly everything.<br>Academic publishing was, and is, an economic absurdity. The public funds research. Scholars perform it, write it up, and review each other’s work for free. Publishers then acquire the copyright, lock the results behind subscription walls, and sell access back to the universities that produced the work in the first place, at institutional rates that outpace inflation.<br>Elsevier’s profit margin in 2014 hovered around 37 percent, a figure that would make most software companies blush. When a sick patient or a researcher in Lagos hits a $35 paywall in front of a publicly funded cancer study, the obscenity has a face.<br>Against that backdrop, the Wikipedia Library looked to some like collaboration in the darker sense of the word. We took free access from the very companies whose business model the movement existed to dismantle. Our editors then cited paywalled papers in the world’s most read reference work, generating visibility and a gloss of public spiritedness for publishers who had earned neither.<br>Eisen’s sharpest claim was that Wikipedia was providing massive advertising for Elsevier and getting essentially nothing in return. A mere forty-five accounts, set against billions in subscription revenue, looked less like a real donation than a meager tip.<br>The critique contained a theory of change, that openness spreads through refusal. If the institutions the public trusts decline to launder the reputations of paywall...