There's a whole show about Wikipedia, and it's delightful - and hopeful
Annie Rauwerda performs her one-woman show, Depths of Wikipedia Live, at August Hall in San Francisco, on Friday, Feb. 13, 2026. (Lizzy Montana Myers/For the S.F. Chronicle)
Lightsaber chopsticks. Berserk llama syndrome. Meat-shaped stone. Nuclear Gandhi.
Those quirky entries - intentionally funny or not - might not be found on a more traditional, statelier encyclopedia. But on Wikipedia, as its legions of fans know, such rabbit holes abound, and Annie Rauwerda, the creator of the hit social media account Depths of Wikipedia, is its Alice.
"She finds the best of the best," said Thomas Latendresse of Montreal, who attended "Depths of Wikipedia Live," Rauwerda's buoyant comedy show at San Francisco's August Hall on Friday, Feb. 13.
Rauwerda'a tour, which runs in the U.S. and Canada through April 4, comes at an inflection point in the 25-year-old site's history. In its early days, its crowd-sourced model made it the frequent butt of jokes, a la, "It's on Wikipedia, so it must be true." The era of AI slop, however - including hallucination-studded summaries at the top of Google search results - has upended that notion. Now, "It's one of the last places of good information you can find on the internet," said the mononymic Axle of San Francisco before Rauwerda's show started.
Annie Rauwerda performs her one-woman show, Depths of Wikipedia Live, at August Hall in San Francisco, on Friday, Feb. 13, 2026. (Lizzy Montana Myers/For the S.F. Chronicle)
At August Hall, Rauwerda blended a PowerPoint presentation with artfully chosen Wikipedia slides - e.g., Jeffrey Toobin's page, where the table of contents proceeds from "early life and education" to "Zoom masturbation incident" then "publications" - with a jittery, giggly upspeak in hyperdrive. It was the bearing of a zealot who knows she only has an hour to enthuse and has to cram as much in as possible.
Just like on social media, her commentary zinged. Wikipedia, she said near the top of the hour, "has everything that matters and everything that doesn't." Surveying a cringingly flattering set of descriptors for Franz Kafka, she noted, "It's like he wrote them himself."
The show became a de facto meet-up for fellow fans of the site. "Wikipedia editor" jackets were sold and worn as merch. One attendee had made a cardboard cut-out of the site's globe-shaped puzzle logo.
Emeline Brule, who runs the Bay Area Wikipedians User Group, poses for a photo at Depths of Wikipedia Live at August Hall in San Francisco on Friday, Feb. 13, 2026. (Lizzy Montana Myers/For the S.F. Chronicle)
When Rauwerda asked if any Wikipedia editors were in the audience and started asking them which pages they'd worked on, she soon exclaimed, "Wait, I know who you are!" Referring to editor Britta Gustafson, whose username is Dreamyshade, Rauwerda knew she'd written the first-ever entry on Pablo Neruda, drawing on a grade-school essay.
Rauwerda gave the evening a canny arc. She quickly moved from an assortment of humorous entries to idiosyncrasies built into the site's very structure. One is the fact that Wikipedia uses only photos in the public domain or released via a Creative Commons license. The result is often jarringly unflattering photos of celebrities or curiously unrepresentative images of household objects.
Annie Rauwerda performs her one-woman show, Depths of Wikipedia Live, at August Hall in San Francisco, on Friday, Feb. 13, 2026. (Lizzy Montana Myers/For the S.F. Chronicle)
The site also provides a forum for persnickety editors to have long, serious-sounding arguments about inanities. For example, is there a "cat length committee" that determined whether the internet meme Longcat broke "any international records"? Or should there be a category for songs about the boys being back in town when there's only one such song?
At one point Rauwerda brought a local friend, software engineer and digital artist Riley Walz (who has an impressive Wikipedia page himself), onstage for a trivia game. Sample question: Among the entries for orange the color, orange the fruit and orange the word, which is the longest, and which gets the most views?
The answers, which I won't spoil here, reveal the kind of truths about human nature that make you think, "Yeah, we really are like that."
An attendee sports Wikipedia merch at Depths of Wikipedia Live at August Hall in San Francisco, on Friday, Feb. 13, 2026. (Lizzy Montana Myers/For the S.F. Chronicle)
That's what the whole site does, too. Fans love to cite the truism that it shouldn't work in theory: Why would so many people contribute countless hours of unpaid labor to build something they couldn't monetize?
In the audience before the show, Mike Michon of San Francisco provided one answer. Two decades ago, he said, he edited the Wikipedia page for "dive bar" with a photo of the Merrimaker in Los Osos (San Luis Obispo County).
"Back then it was tough to upload photos," he explained. He checks it periodically, and each time another editor has proposed a new photo, moderators have overrided the change, saying there was nothing inaccurate about Michon's original.
"I take incredible pride in this," Michon told the Chronicle.
Annie Rauwerda performs her one-woman show, Depths of Wikipedia Live, at August Hall in San Francisco, on Friday, Feb. 13, 2026. (Lizzy Montana Myers/For the S.F. Chronicle)
For her part, Rauwerda cited an editor's explanation of the site's appeal: "You can correct other people on the spot without asking their permission."
If that makes the human race sound like a bunch of red pen-wielding know-it-alls with far too much time on their hands, a more hopeful reading is that we have a stubborn inborn belief that truth exists, and together we can find it.
"Wikipedia, I think, is a testament to humanity," Rauwerda said. "Even if this was the only thing humans ever did, I would be so proud."
