In a few weeks, the Swedish Academy will award the Nobel Prize for Literature of the year 2025, alongside the four other awards, awarded since 1901. In accordance with the wishes of Alfred Nobel, the Nobel Prizes honor “each year people who have rendered great services to humanity, allowing considerable improvement or progress in the field of knowledge and culture in five different disciplines: peace or diplomacy, literature, chemistry, physiology or medicine and physics”.
Let us take a stab at this ceremonial ballet by suggesting that the next winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature either Wikipedia. Yes, Wikipedia, this free online encyclopedia that we consult to check something, find a classical text, discover the Peloponnesian War (Ve century BC) or the Kandy dwarf toad… Or contribute by correcting a typo, adding two or three lines, a paragraph or even creating a page.
Conformity to Alfred Nobel’s “powerful ideal”
Is this preposterous? Absolutely not. First of all, let us observe that the online encyclopedia – universal sharing (unprecedented by its scale) of knowledge – meets the testamentary requirements of Alfred Nobel by having “demonstrates a powerful ideal”. Added to this is an extraordinary faith in the abilities of humans to create this knowledge together, expose it, discuss it, improve it, from a simple contribution to the most scholarly requirement.
By providing simple and immediate access to a universal field of knowledge, this encyclopedia also supports reading in a world where it seems to be inexorably marginalized. And a demanding read: some articles are incredibly in-depth, full of erudition, details and references. A sort of clever arm of honor for videos lasting a few seconds, forgotten shortly after being published. In this regard, Wikipedia has a political vision. Like entire sections of literature.
In line with the “powerful ideal” of the founder, the Nobel committee sometimes surprises with unexpected choices (Bob Dylan in 2016) and, more often, political ones. Several writers opposing authoritarian regimes have thus been distinguished: the Soviet Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1970), the Chilean Pablo Neruda (1971), the Frenchman of Chinese origin Gao (France, Italy, etc.), shame on them.
This political requirement is all the more necessary as Wikipedia is now threatened by “progress” in artificial intelligence. Thus, in Google searches, “homemade” summaries are now put forward, happily plundering the free resources of the online encyclopedia. The student who was quietly pumping Wikipedia now asks ChatGPT to do it for him. These missing clicks gradually destroy the visibility of the encyclopedia, reduce its number of visitors, indirectly threatening its funding (pay a few euros after reading this article).
A universal and profoundly literary project
Furthermore, and even if it does not appear at first glance, the online encyclopedia project is eminently literary. It covers many forms: synthesis and analysis but also story, poetry, exquisite corpse, draft…
Indeed, Wikipedia is first and foremost a blank page. Whether the inspiration is there or not, everything is there to build. Write a first draft, align paragraphs, identify references, take care of your style, insert quotes, synthesize your thoughts… Suddenly, your work is taken up and improved, sometimes reduced or destroyed. Here, we insert a clarification. Here, we delete a risky sentence. Elsewhere, a whole development is required. Each click is an inspiration or a deletion. Erasures whose history is carefully preserved: what memory, what “manuscript”!
Write under a pseudonym? It is the entire history of literature that must be invoked here. Voltaire! George Sand! George Orwell! Lewis Caroll! Trevanian! Vercors! Emile Ajar!
This four-handed writing (let’s call it that although the number of Wikipedian fingers is immeasurable) is known. Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain thus wrote the series Ghosts. Beneath Delly’s love novels were Jeanne-Marie Petitjean de La Rosière and her brother Frédéric. Let us also think of the Goncourt brothers.
Write with several people? There is also a proximity there with exquisite corpses, with the exception that the game created by the surrealist writers provided that each contribution be made while ignoring the previous one. In Wikipedia, sometimes all it takes is a little bad faith for this to happen…
Write under a pseudonym? But it is the whole history of literature that must be invoked here. Voltaire! George Sand! George Orwell! Lewis Caroll! Trevanian! Vercors! Emile Ajar! It probably happens to celebrities to enjoy the anonymity that the internet allows to contribute to the encyclopedia and not just to correct the page that concerns them.
So in a quarter of a century a universal writing has emerged and, far from the sacralization of the “great writer”, democratic: any contribution is welcome, as long as it conforms to a few simple rules. Wikipedia makes writing accessible to everyone.
The comparison is essential with another encyclopedia, that – eponymous – of Diderot and D’Alembert, a splendid model of collaborative writing. There are then some 158 contributors to this immense work, most of them anonymous. Wikipedia has amplified this model: contributors by the hundreds of thousands, on a global scale, to produce the greatest literary challenge of our time.
Translations, hypertext and hoaxes
As was already the case in the 18the century, Wikipedia was gradually enriched and developed, thanks in particular to numerous translations. Articles in English initially, translated and synthesized, today almost all available in around ten languages. Wikipedia reminds us every day of the importance of the profession of translator, without which entire sections of literature would be unknown to us. And we will congratulate the proofreaders, always quick to improve an article with discreet but essential contributions.
Another very literary development: in Wikipedia, thanks to hypertext, each article is linked to other articles, existing or to be created, in the manner of embedded stories or an inexhaustible novel with drawers. Or, to be more modern, a magnificent bric-a-brac of prequels and sequels, with ever-widening ramifications.
Sometimes a hoax emerges, unmasked more or less quickly, possibly archived. In very situationist terminology, it is assimilated to “sneaky vandalism”. Literature has known several: Jean du Chas and Concentrism (thank you Samuel Beckett) or Bilitis (well done Pierre Louÿs) and we don’t forget the wonderful Jean-Baptiste Botul. Yes, trolls also belong to the literary project.
Editing wars and text neutrality
Finally, through its hushed tussles between more or less seasoned contributors, Wikipedia is obviously part of the literary salon as well as the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, with great reinforcement of rhetoric, theater and bad faith.
These conflicts owe as much to the sensitivity of certain subjects as to current events. Because Wikipedia is the first literary experience of global writing in real time, which flirts with journalism, but differs from it by capturing the essential (what will remain). For my part, I am always fascinated to see that a sporting trophy or a death is immediately integrated into the online encyclopedia. And immediately verified, even contested.
The Nobel committee could also reward Wikipedia for its extraordinary productivity, since the encyclopedia has produced 7.1 million articles in a quarter of a century and is accessible in 342 languages.
Because is there another place in the world where a paragraph, a sentence, sometimes a word provokes so much debate? It’s about finding the perfect shape, a challenge obviously but one that involves endless exchanges. And there is a horizontal debate in which no one can claim any intellectual superiority.
The encyclopedic requirement is expressed here in the hope of bringing out a neutral point of view (the “Wikipedia style”?). Impossible challenge? In doing so, she does not escape the numerous debates relating to language and its violence, its way of translating oppression or emancipation. “It is in the word that we think”said the German philosopher Georg Hegel (1770-1831, thanks Wiki). By striving to find a common (rather than neutral) language to listen to and understand each other, by preferring argument to authority, Wikipedia offers us a great lesson in literary composition every day.
Value does not wait for the number of years
Created in January 2001, Wikipedia will soon be 25 years old. Both early youth and prehistory for the internet. The Nobel committee could also reward the online encyclopedia for its extraordinary productivity, since it has produced 7.1 million articles in nearly a quarter of a century and is accessible in 342 languages (source: Wikipedia, of course).
A universal treasure, that even the Encyclopedists of the Enlightenment could not have imagined. A treasure that we consult regularly without realizing its importance, as it has become part of our practices and our cultural heritage. We do not sufficiently appreciate its importance at a time when artificial intelligence and its various uses bombard us with approximations and lies, a digital jungle in which we navigate – blindly – on sight.
Incidentally, the 10 million Swedish crowns (nearly 910,000 euros) allocated to the winner by the Swedish Academy would be welcome for the Wikimedia Foundation, which finances the project and guarantees its independence. So yes, let’s give the Nobel Prize for Literature to this “powerful ideal” what is Wikipedia!
P.-S.: And as soon as this is achieved, let’s open a Wikipedia page to collectively write the speech receiving the prize in Stockholm.
