The sphere the four figures are lifting is the Wikipedia logo made solid: a puzzle globe with gaps still in it. That incompleteness is the whole argument of the piece. An encyclopedia that anyone can edit is never a finished object, only a thing currently being held up. The figures themselves are nude and undecorated, without period clothing or attributes to fix them to any nation or century, and the final version includes both men and women — the initial model had featured only male editors, and it did not survive to casting. The commission cost about 50,000 złotys, roughly $13,500 or €11,700 at the time, paid by Słubice's regional authorities. As municipal art budgets go, this is close to pocket change.

The design came from Mihran Hakobyan, an Armenian sculptor who knew the town from the inside: between 2010 and 2013 he studied Polish philology at the Collegium Polonicum in Słubice. So the world's first Wikipedia monument was made by a foreign student of a language he had come there to learn, for a town whose case for itself rests on the college he attended. It is difficult to think of a more fitting provenance for a statue about strangers building something in common.

Słubice has an unusual biography. Until 1945 it was Dammvorstadt, the eastern suburb of the German city of Frankfurt (Oder) directly across the river. When the postwar border was drawn down the Oder, the suburb woke up in a different country and became a Polish town in its own right, with 685 inhabitants at the end of that year. A border crossing to Frankfurt opened in 1972. The Collegium Polonicum, a joint Polish-German university institution, opened its doors in 1998. Deputy mayor Piotr Łuczyński said the memorial "will highlight the town's importance as an academic centre" — a place that spent centuries as somebody else's outskirts making its own claim, and choosing knowledge as the ground to make it on.

The idea had been floating around since about 2010. When the unveiling finally came, representatives of the local Wikimedia chapters and of the Wikimedia Foundation stood in Frankfurt Square together, and Dariusz Jemielniak gave the opening address — a professor of management, a longtime Wikimedia activist, and that same year the author of Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia, a book written from years inside the community the statue honors. Polish Wikipedia had passed a million articles by then and was among the largest language editions in the world. None of the people who wrote those articles were named from the podium, which was the point.

Stand in the square with the Oder a few hundred metres west and Germany on the far bank, and the sculpture makes a small, sincere case. The encyclopedia most of the planet consults daily is not a machine and not a company. It is an enormous number of unpaid strangers, most of whom will never meet, holding something up together and arguing about it constantly. Public art has always struggled with collective anonymous labor — you cannot put a crowd on a plinth. Hakobyan's answer was to put four people up there and refuse to say who they are. The globe above their hands still has holes in it. So does the work.