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.
Editing on different accounts since he was 14, Wisdom was banned repeatedly from the site for adding things with no sources or engaging in “edit wars,” which involve repeatedly trying to add information after someone else reverted the changes, instead of letting the Arbitration Committee of 15 editors settle the beef. After going through the official un-ban process last year, he even reconciled with Binksternet, a 64-year-old Wikipedia power user who’s been editing the site since Wisdom was in diapers. Bink once banned Wisdom, but later forgave his indiscretion and offered kudos for working on so many “niche genre” pages.
Wisdom, who believes that “internet music” is the most defining musical paradigm of the century, has made it his job to create a constellation of Wikipedia hyperlinks. “Before digicore was a page, it redirected to hyperpop. It was very important to fix the web,” he says. “You click on ‘jerk’ and it goes to the [2000s] jerk rap [page], it makes no sense.” He’s working on a new SoundCloud rap page because clicking “SoundCloud rap” currently redirects to the page for “mumble rap,” which he thinks is a “crime against humanity.”
“Most of this Wikipedia shit comes from the fact that I wanted to know the most innovative, important music of my generation. But there was no way to know,” he explains. “There was [also] no lineage to explain where everything was coming from—no ‘Juice WRLD is coming from the scene that Black Kray started.’ There was nothing.” He believes he may have already inspired another set of underground-focused Wikipedia heads. “I feel like if I quit now, I’ve kind of started a wave. I was making a Kuru draft yesterday, and then one of the guys finished it for me. He followed the way I’ve been editing the pages and citing stuff.”
Other Wikipedia editors are a little bewildered by his monstrous churn rate. Issan Sumisu, a 24-year-old from Leeds who’s made 32,900 edits over the last 10 years—creating pages for everything from Raider Klan to Loathe to Lil Aaron—exercises more caution. He introduced Wisdom to the informal policy of “Too Soon,” or letting events develop fully before trying to prematurely historicize them. At one point, Sumisu threw some articles about the new wave of grunge-y, VST-heavy shoegaze into the bottom of the shoegaze Wikipedia, noting that some people were calling it “zoomergaze,” something to keep an eye on. But Wisdom ran with it, making an entire zoomergaze page that Sumisu thinks shouldn’t exist. A precocious page could distort how the music is seen.
To his credit, Wisdom is also aware of the risks: “If a cloud rock page gets made now, it could, I don’t know, define the genre too early,” he reasons. “Let’s say a digicore page existed in 2021. Would that have changed the scene in a way? If people search it up and go by the definition? That kind of rewrites the scene.”
Navigating music Wikipedia is so tricky because there is often no objective truth. Sumisu’s first interaction with Wisdom came after he attempted an overhaul of the indie rock page, which she had mostly written. Wisdom wanted to make it more of an etymological history, “indie” as shorthand for independent music rather than the actual sound. Sumisu reverted his changes.
With a decade in the Wiki-hole, Sumisu has watched the cycles of excited newbies come and go. He’s been attacked by the manager of a beloved band and once got in a fight with some lunatic who demanded that “metal” be removed as an inspiration for grindcore; the dude eventually made a YouTube video threatening to leak Sumisu and a few other Wikipedians’ addresses. Sumisu has become very meticulous, poring through boatloads of sources and double-checking the work done by journalists to make sure the history is accurate.
The lack of mainstream coverage of newer scenes, as well as music writing’s diffusion into a new wave of blogs and Substacks, has meant that people like Wisdom and Emilia don’t have enough sources to make pages for influential acts like xaviersobased’s 1c34 collective. It’s also resulted in more “source stretching,” or making logical leaps when there isn’t evidence to support them. Wikipedia has long considered user-generated content like blogs unreliable, but it seems to be slowly adapting to the times. “Right now, if it’s a Substack or a WordPress, it’s automatically flagged as not being a reliable source,” Sumisu says. “But I feel like [editors] will probably go, Well, they have these people who wrote for ‘real’ publications, so obviously there’s some kind of authority here.”
As AI spawns hallucinations everywhere, hopefully Wikipedia offers a counterbalance. The site recently made it clear that people can’t write entries with AI, which was becoming a huge problem. “I was dooming a bit ‘cause there was this influx of slop pages, like ChatGPT pages of random people every month. It was just crazy,” recalls Wisdom, who had to fix the page for Florida underground rap group Metro Zu after it was robo-defaced. While Wikipedia writing looks mechanical as an outsider, there’s an art to synthesizing information in a way that’s engaging without editorializing. For Sumisu, editing Wikipedia can come with an inexplicable aesthetic pleasure, akin to when he was a child and spent hours gazing at houses he built in Minecraft. “I really like looking back at an article and going, ‘That one looks pretty.’”
Teachers scolded us for citing Wikipedia in essays, but at least these pages have a human touch. “[Wikipedia] being user-generated is actually a huge advantage,” Emilia says. “Now it’s like, ‘Oh, this makes it so much more reliable than other information on the web.’” Maybe it’s a good thing that, as Wisdom says, this website is basically “the biases of like 300 people.” In an optimistic view of Wikipedia’s influence, these writers could serve as the most tapped-in invisible hands, shaping what future generations learn about today’s scenes so they’re propelled to make more than just ancient pastiche.
These editors do the work because they care. They want to read every available interview about what they’re interested in. They get a kick out of contributing to the global consciousness. “There’s this George Orwell essay where he was arguing for the importance of planting a tree in your life,” Emilia muses. “[Wikipedia] scratches that same itch for me…. someone who in 20 years wants to read about [Japanese rap trio] Dos Monos—well, there’s a page for that now.” “This music just means so much to me,” Wisdom says. “This is my generation’s culture, our zeitgeist, and it’s not written down like the psychedelic era or whatever was happening in previous generations. It almost feels like people wanna write it off. I want really peripheral shit like vampjerk to be logged for fucking history, bro.”