The Last Best Place On The Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia

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Early Praise for The Last Best Place

"With his soaring gift for synthesis and close eye for detail, Cooke's latest is a rare example of the magic that happens when the right author finds the right subject at the right time. Impeccably researched, highly entertaining and deeply relevant." 

  • Sarah Krasnostein (The Mushroom Tapes, The Believer) 


"Most people who rely on Wikipedia today know little of its beginnings. This book recovers those origin stories with fresh detail and narrative flair, and shows why they still matter in the age of AI."

  • Joseph Reagle,  Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, author of Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia.


“Expertly reported, alive with fascinating details, and written with remarkable narrative flair, The Last Best Place on the Internet is a powerfully engaging work of non-fiction about a subject whose monumental vastness has been hiding in plain sight for years.” 

  • Mark O'Connell (A Thread of Violence, To Be A Machine)

“Drawing on extensive research and interviews, Cooke explores Wikipedia’s origins and evolution, its profound cultural impact, an interesting cast of characters (from passionate volunteers to pedants, hoaxers, and cranks), and its sheer profusion of information…. Cooke leaves no stone unturned, and the result is a wide-ranging, eye-opening, and entertaining survey of the weird and wonderful world of Wikipedia.”

  • LIBRARY JOURNAL (starred review)

“Like the universe it seeks to document, Wikipedia is seemingly infinite, but The Last Best Place on the Internet rises to the considerable challenge of taking its measure. Richard Cooke’s new book is an elegant, judicious, and often very moving investigation of what he rightfully describes as “one of the twentieth century’s most consequential ideas.” The ultimate wiki rabbit hole (a term with its own Wikipedia page), stuffed with delightful surprises.” 

  • Lance Richardson (Pulitzer Prize finalist for True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen)

“A book that presents Wikipedia as a truly human cybernetic institution has to show humans in all their complexity. Here, their - our - creation is shown in all its intelligence and idiocy, all its public-spiritedness and cliquishness, its unpredictability and its reliability. This book argues with wit, citations and some 'original research' that Wikipedia is us at best and worst. Lost in an internet that is increasingly made up of algorithms trained to appeal only to our worst, Cooke demonstrates that Wikipedia has become an unexpected bastion against the advance of inhuman slop.”

  • Owen Hatherley (The Alienation Effect, Walking The Streets) 

“Richard Cooke tells Wikipedia's history through vivid storytelling that is vast enough to capture the project's scale and precise enough to explain the people, technology and norms that hold it together. His sharpest claim is also the most moving: Wikipedia may be the last encyclopedia, but the human process behind it - messy, cross-national, riddled with argument - will be its lasting legacy.”

  • Professor Heather Ford (Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age)

“An invaluable peek into the history of the modern world at a very crucial time in our information landscape. Cooke navigates the politics, the prose, and the philosophy of knowledge with wit and candour, giving me a cautiously optimistic feeling about the future.”

  • Aleks Krotoski (The Immortalists: The Death of Death and the Race for Eternal Life)


“This smart appraisal of Wikipedia’s first quarter-century offers insightful commentary on its scope, significance, and inner workings, but it may prove most useful as a warning about the forces threatening it. Before it was ubiquitous, the Australian author notes in a fine-grained look at its early days, Wikipedia was weird. For a time, 13 percent of its articles were about Ayn Rand’s libertarian novel Atlas Shrugged. Educators sneered at the amateur-edited encyclopedia, but its growing number of “high-quality articles” and commitment to transparency helped forge “a lasting truce.” Today, edited by countless volunteers, Cooke characterizes it as the biggest feat of “collective cultural creation” ever mounted. He is cleareyed, noting that Wikipedia’s fact-verification process foregrounds North American and European sources, giving short shrift to other parts of the world. Wikipedia has been weaponized and exploited by bad actors, and it has a “women problem,” though his explanation for why most of its editors are men includes weak generalizations. More productively, Cooke notes that for those who are neurodivergent or “undervalued,” Wikipedia can be “a place to showcase abilities that were hidden.” An informative chapter on the history of internet wikis supports Cooke’s strongest argument: As artificial intelligence grows, it is urgent to understand how Wikipedia’s processes—the “close scrutiny and care” of human editors—are inextricably linked to its value. He worries that AI, hoovering up Wikipedia’s contents, may send it to the scrap heap. Readership has recently declined, and “the click-through rate to Wikipedia from AI chatbots” is far lower than that for Google. “For a model whose lifeblood was readers becoming editors, it was a disaster.” His judicious reporting belongs in the growing library of titles about the perils of AI.”

  • Kirkus Review 


“If you questioned why ordinary people turned out to be the best experts to write humanity’s last great encyclopaedia – read on. A wonderful book about a wonderful invention.”

  • Danny Dorling, 1971 Professor of Geography, University of Oxford UK.


“I'll be upfront - I'm a proud paid-up member of Wikipedia. I love it and I want to pull my hair out when school students are told 'don't trust wikipedia' - bloody hell, it's one of the few places on the Internet they can trust! Cooke's right - it is the last, best place on the Internet - foibles and all. This is a riveting read on one of the few things that we, as a global society, have collectively helped create on the 'world wide web' - and I'm immensely grateful to Cooke for the journey.”

  • Anna Krien (Act of Grace, Night Games)

“The Last Best Place on the Internet is a tale of idealism and absurdity, of grand endeavours and petty squabbles. Cooke's approach is rigorous, his palette expansive, and the insights he makes are rich and provocative. Befitting his subject, this is a book of entertaining and diverting rabbit holes, whose every turn illuminate in crystalline prose a cathedral of knowledge, folly, and human ambition. This is an elegy and a triumph.”

  • Patrick Mullins (The Stained Man, The Trials of Portnoy) 


“Brilliant conceived and beautifully told: the inside story of an unprecedented act of "collective cultural creation" -- the last encyclopedia human beings will ever write. A digging exercise in the archaeology of knowledge, Cooke's timing is perfect as the foundations of truth come under accelerated and automated attack.”

  • Paddy Manning (The Successor) 


“If there is an award for ‘unexpected delight of 2026’ then it has to be this book!...Will be recommending far and wide.”

  • GRANTA

“Very funny and deeply researched book…Cooke preserves a rare history of the internet before the internet ruined the internet”.

  • Guardian Australia