Wikipedia might be one of the only cool things left on the internet, next to Google Maps and that site where you can feed random cats. So much of the web has turned into bot farms and walled gardens, but Wikipedia is still free and run by volunteers. For some internet users, it’s the launchpad for research. For others, it’s the textbook itself: Many people don’t bother to look into the cited sources, taking Wikipedia as the official record of history.
I’ve always been curious about the secretly influential cabal that edits Wikipedia. There’s no barrier for entry: Anyone can make an account and edit, even a ten-year-old. Editing a non-fiction entry like a news event seems relatively simple—cover the facts—but it’s hard to imagine a board of obsessives agreeing on a subjective field like music. The default is to copy journalist consensus, but when have music nerds ever reached consensus? There can be too many conflicting takes, and also not enough of them: Many new-gen artists and scenes simply don’t have enough coverage from publications deemed reputable by Wikipedia to qualify for a page, which is partly the result of music journalism‘s slow erosion. I’ve noticed this especially with the last decade’s worth of underground music, where essential sounds and scenes often don’t have a page or are relegated to a tiny sub-section of a broader topic.
That is, until recently. A batch of new Wikipedia writers have made a concerted effort to write entries for some of the most electric underground weirdness of the 2020s, to the chagrin of some longtime posters and the excitement of the artists getting their flowers. It’s weird to think that just a handful of passionate, bored internet dwellers are sculpting the archive that people a decade from now will use to learn about this moment.
One is Emilia, a 23-year-old from Vienna who made their first edit on a page for the experimental artist Fire-Toolz in 2024. Emilia is just as likely to edit pages for niche art as mainstream news, hopping from rising artists like FearDorian and Lucy Bedroque to Charlie Kirk, where they added a bit about how some Austrian fascists held a vigil after his death. Wikipedia editing motivates Emilia to learn; she effuses about how attaining “Extended Confirmed Status” (your account exists for at least 30 days and makes 500 edits) grants access to the Wikipedia library, which contains scientific journals like JSTOR. On the younger end of the spectrum is a plucky 16-year-old known as AUU, who joined the site at age 12. He’s a Canadian who specializes in Haitian culture and hyperpop; outside Wikipedia, he crochets and plays the cello.
Then there’s Kelechi Wisdom, a 20-year-old from Manchester known as Aradicus, who’s significantly contributed to the Wikipedia presence of basically every 2020s uber-online microgenre (dariacore, hexD, digicore) as well as older sounds that didn’t have pages or much detail (landfill indie, recession pop, shitgaze). He’s spent 1,000 hours grinding Wikipedia since last July, essentially speedrunning the underground. Contributions include pages for the Lithuanian cloud prince Yabujin, Massachusetts weirdo LUCY, tread rap crew Reptilian Club Boyz, and the Web3 streaming service Nina Protocol. He created a page for that one night at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976 when the Sex Pistols played to a crowd that included future members of Joy Division, the Smiths, and Buzzcocks.
Wisdom’s profile page also includes rants ridiculing the Windmill scene, and saying Mark Fisher ruined 21st century art and that Kurt Cobain would shit his drawers if he heard Bladee’s “Deletee.” At one point, the profile included a diatribe against Anthony Fantano, but it broke Wikipedia’s civility rule around bashing living people. In between periods of feverish data-dumping, he manages to find time to skateboard and ride five-hour trains down to London to see bleood perform.
