What Do You Lose From Overusing Wikipedia?
Is Wikipedia making us less attentive, dumber even?
It’s quite an ironic notion for a platform that has the noble purpose of making general information available across a wide audience at no cost to its viewers.
But I think the idea that the road to hell is paved with good intentions fits in pretty well here.
What I mean by that is the road to ignorance and misunderstanding is paved with the idea of creating a universal knowledge base, as an analogy, if you will.
Do you ever get the feeling that your use of Wikipedia to quickly look up and briefly gain an understand the context or background of something you’ve never heard about is somehow altering how you fundamentally think?
The idea that mass volumes of information becoming available, easily disseminated, and accessible at the touch of a finger creating a dulling effect on our ability to critically reason through problems is not a new one.
For instance, Nicholas Carr proposed the idea that the instantaneous nature of Google’s search functionality and ability to serve up a cocktail of useful and relevant information at a moment’s notice might actually be messing…
