HAIFA, Israel

“MAKING fun of Wikipedia is so 2007,” a French journalist said recently to Sue Gardner, the executive director of the foundation that runs the Wikipedia project.

And so Ms. Gardner, in turn, told an auditorium full of Wikipedia contributors and supporters on Thursday in Haifa, Israel, the host city for the seventh annual Wikimania conference, where meetings and presentations focus on the world’s most used, and perhaps least understood, online reference work.

Once routinely questioned about its reliability — what do you mean, anyone can edit it? — the site is now used every month by upwards of 400 million people worldwide. But with influence and respect come responsibility, and lately Wikipedia has been criticized from without and within for reflecting a Western, male-dominated mindset similar to the perspective behind the encyclopedias it has replaced.

Seeing Wikipedia as The Man, in so many words, is so 2011.

And that’s a problem for an encyclopedia that wants to grow. Some critics of Wikipedia believe that the whole Western tradition of footnotes and sourced articles needs to be rethought if Wikipedia is going to continue to gather converts beyond its current borders. And that, in turn, invites an entirely new debate about what constitutes knowledge in different parts of the world and how a Western institution like Wikipedia can capitalize on it.