Evidence & Updates
Check the record yourself
A book that criticizes an institution for closing its record should keep its own open. This page holds the book's revision history and the primary evidence behind it, free to download and verify.
The revision
Second printing, revised — July 2026
The second printing corrects and expands the first printing of July 8, 2026. After publication, Larry Sanger corresponded with the author, sat for an interview, and reviewed the passages that quote him. His 2002–2003 departure is now retold from the primary record. Quotes and attributions were corrected on all sides, including where the correction cut against the book's own argument, and the chapters gained new contemporaneous evidence from the Wikimedia movement's mailing lists.
Every change is public — the complete track-changes record against the first printing, word by word:
The book
Download both printings
The book is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 — use it freely, keep it free.
The evidence
The mailing-list corpus
Much of the book's sourcing rests on the movement's public mailing lists, and so do its claims about what the community did not discuss. For the second printing, the author reassembled the complete public archives of the movement's mailing lists into one normalized, machine-readable file.
- 489,491
- 2001–2026
- 9
- JSONL
The corpus spans wikipedia-l, wikien-l, wikitech-l, foundation-l, wikimedia-l, textbook-l, wiktionary-l, and commons-l, drawn from the official pipermail mbox archives (2001–2021) and mirrored archives of the surviving lists (2021–2026) — plus sifter-l, the short-lived expert-review list of 2002–2003 that survives only in Wayback Machine captures. Each line is one JSON message with a fixed schema:
| list | Which of the nine mailing lists the message belongs to. |
| source | Provenance: pipermail-mbox (official archives, 2001–May 2021), mail-archive.com (mirror of the HyperKitty era, 2021–2026), or wayback-mbox (sifter-l, from the Internet Archive). |
| date | Normalized ISO 8601 timestamp from the Date header, original timezone kept. Empty for a handful of malformed 2001-era headers. |
| month | YYYY-MM, derived from date for quick filtering. |
| message_id | RFC Message-ID. Mbox eras only — the HyperKitty-era mirror does not expose it. |
| from_name | Sender's display name, from the From header or the mirror page's byline. |
| from_email | Sender's address, from the From header. Empty in HyperKitty-era records — the mirror obfuscates addresses. |
| subject | Subject line, list-tag prefix retained. |
| in_reply_to | Parent Message-ID for threading. Mbox eras only, where the sender's client set it (~80% of pre-2021 messages). |
| references | Thread-ancestry Message-IDs. Same availability as in_reply_to. |
| url_hint | Where to read it publicly: the pipermail month archive (pre-2021), the exact mail-archive.com page (post-2021), or the Wayback capture (sifter-l). |
| body | Plain-text body, quoted reply lines included. HyperKitty-era bodies are extracted from the mirror's HTML. |
The underlying messages are public; this file saves only the work of reassembling them.
Decompresses to ~1.2 GB. The scripts that build it from the public archives are described in the book's methodology note.
SHA-256 f53153ae0dc06d0bb6c8a839387f4a736a354a1fec39e81287b883ee8f6aebff
Related
On July 16, 2026, Wikimedia Enterprise published a defense of its commercial program. The author's reply, with the audited FY2024–25 financials:Selling access is not stewardship.
Found an error? The record is open — and so is the author's inbox.