This paper adopts a sociology of knowledge approach to analyse the two debates on Wikipedia regarding the period 2001-2002: decommercialization, and the accusation of anti-elitism. The first problem concerns Wikipedia’s policy on raising capital using one of three possible models: as a subproject acquiring money from another profit-making company, through advertising, or as a charitable organization. A choice would require consideration of the structural tension between the means of raising capital and Wikipedia’s ideology of free information and as an encyclopedia. The second problem, which eventually led to the Wales/Sanger split and is related to the Wikipedia vs. Britannica debate, requires an epistemological understanding of the Wikipedia community’s use of textual validity rather than educational credentials in evaluating article quality. This problem centres on Wikipedia’s novel Cooperative Knowledge Generation (CKG) based on consensus, a social hierarchy determined by merit, and institutional rules that continue to change and are strikingly different from the traditional academic model. Both problems prompt an investigation of the early culture of Wikipedia’s knowledge generation process that could have implications for how it institutionalizes later.