It is geek week: the annual festival Wikimania is being held this year in the UK for the first time. If you can get to the Barbican in central London this weekend, you can join the argument about how to control the world, in a good way.

Wikipedia would like to believe that it is the good face of the 21st century, a digital utopia, the guardian of the original promise of the internet. With a mere handful of people employed by the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia has grown from flaky outsider into a largely reliable and vastly relied-on information source. It covers millions of subjects in nearly 300 different languages and is used by 500 million people a month.

It has become so familiar a tool, this tree of knowledge so vast that the English-language version alone would fill a thousand books of a thousand pages each that few of us ever stop to consider what it means. Nor do most of its users – as they check out the capital of Georgia or guiltily plagiarise the entry on Marx – ponder how this Eden is sustained in its spotless state of nature.

But this is a work of man (and a very few women) and even the purifying process of open access has an ultimate filter that is the few thousand editors, and beyond them a small arbitration committee. And like all utopian communities, it faces threats from within as well as without.

Wikipedia has a unique power. Of the world’s top 10 websites, it is the only one that is not commercial. Once readers assumed that meant it was unreliable, but now its voluntary system of infinite peer review lends it an authority that commercial organisations can only dream of. It is not just accurate, it is also disinterested. It is continually pushing forward the way we understand the world, like an icy stream of crystal clear water.

The challenge from outside comes from people who want to capture that authority for themselves. Hence edit wars. Some of these are very public, like the attempt in the last US presidential election to brand Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan prom king or brown noser (prom king being the preferred option) which was conducted almost minute by minute on his Wikipedia page. Wisely, his current entry makes no reference to either.

Wikipedia polices edits with sometimes laughable consequences, as when it refused to correct an entry claiming the inspiration for the Philip Roth novel The Human Stain was Anatole Broyard even though Roth himself wrote to point out that in fact it was Melvin Tumin. Most usefully, changes can be tracked. That is how it was discovered that entries relating to the Hillsborough disaster had been offensively edited from an address in Whitehall and – as the Guardian reports – so too have entries relating to the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. Edits from some IP addresses (Congress, for example) are blocked.

So Wikipedia is vigilant in defence of its integrity. It is much harder, though, to examine who decides how that integrity is defined. Whose truth is it guarding? However far it has moved since 2001, this is an organisation that grew out of the white male corporate pastures of Silicon Valley. And although the current and previous bosses of the Wikimedia Foundation are women, its processes are still dominated by white men. More than four in five of the 3,500 regular volunteer editors of the English version are male. They are also young, predominantly based in the US and Europe and they edit for fun, or to promote their values or because they feel more comfortable expressing their personalities online. In short, they are (see above) geeks.

The Wikimedia Foundation does not want it to be like this. It recognises, for example, that female editors are put off when they are treated rudely or dismissively. It no doubt applauds the Armenians’ latest exhortation to its people to contribute an article each to promote Armenian national culture and identity. But the fact remains that what you get in Wikimedia is the world according to the young white western male with a slight personality defect. Is just knowing that enough?