Noah Rayman of Time wonders whether Wikipedia, one of the Internet’s great triumphs, can remain relevant. The nonprofit reference guide, currently under the leadership of Soviet-born, Berkeley-educated executive director, Lila Tretikov, faces myriad challenges, but it certainly has a better shot at continued pertinency than Time does. An excerpt:

In many ways, Wikipedia represents the utopian ideals of the early Internet as conceived by the researchers and academics who created it: a vast database of knowledge, available to all humanity, for free, forever. For millennia, encyclopedias have been a hallmark of civilization, from the enormous Four Great Books of Song of 11th-century China to the crowning intellectual achievement of the Enlightenment Era, the humanist Encyclopédie banned by monarchs across Europe. It is the original cloud. Or as Wikimedia’s “vision statement” puts it: “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.” But as the Web has spread around the globe, becoming an engine of commerce more than an academic or literary paradise, the place of a free website run by a nonprofit and largely curated by a handful of volunteers is far from certain.

Indeed, the future of Wikipedia has increasingly come into doubt over the past few years. Some observers question how long the website can stay relevant. Behemoths like Google and Facebook—the first and second largest websites, respectively—have billions of dollars at their disposal to pursue lofty goals like cataloguing the sum of knowledge or connecting every human being to the Internet. By contrast, Tretikov heads a non-profit with a relatively meager annual budget of $59 million that comes almost entirely from donations. A team of about 215 full-time employees headquartered in San Francisco oversees the work of roughly 85,000 active volunteer editors who seem to have divergent views about almost everything, from proper punctuation to the role that the Foundation should play in the operation of the site. “I do not envy Lila Tretikov’s position,” says William Beutler, a Wikipedia editor since 2006 and author of The Wikipedian, a blog that reports on the goings-on of the website and its army of editors.

Lack of resources is not Wikipedia’s only challenge.•