The Legendary 5TB Shelf of Knowledge
Wikipedia has come to dominate the internet in its short lifespan of only 13 years. It has become, despite the best intentions of teachers and academics, the go-to resources for just about everything. It is now the collective knowledge-base of the Millennials, with articles of comparable quality to the Encyclopedia Britannica, on obscure topics, and near with nearly instantaneous updates.
Wikipedia is perfectly tailored to a generation who grew up on the revolutionarily visual Eyewitness Books, which offered a surprisingly radical (now contemporary) twist on the previous dense text that made up encyclopedic knowledge.
It’s only fitting that a generation poised at the beginning of a new era of freedom of information would latch on to something as anarchistic and radical as Wikipedia. Any protestations by adults or teachers could be summarily labelled as either backwards or ignored simply out of adolescent spite. But by far the biggest boon to Wikipedia’s success as far as millennials were concerned was its sheer practicality.
Googling just about anything would lead almost always to a Wikipedia article — and within each article would be links to even more articles, allowing you to go as deep as you like into the key players of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, or whatever the topic might be. There was just simply no equivalent when you needed a quick, all-in-one resource on a key player in a paper you were writing, or the themes in Hamlet. Where other services might offer a paywall (Sparknotes) or simply be incredibly dense and dull (most textbooks) Wikipedia offered a source of organized, useful information.
One unfortunate consequence of this early adoption is a tendency to have too much faith in Wikipedia’s accuracy and neutrality. And, while Wikipedia might be a wonderful resource, it is still in the hands of everyday people — unpaid volunteers. In addition, it relies on independently verifiable sources, and when these sources don’t exist, or are not reliable in and of them, Wikipedia suffers.
And so, Wikipedia has quite a number of not-so-good articles, with any number of inconsistencies and biases that render them so. In fact, Wikipedia keeps a list[link list]. The grand total comes out to just over 1000 articles. These include the typical issues, and in fact, represent a cross section of the topics that polarize our culture today. As a product of communal editing practices, it is an incredibly interesting way to learn what people have to say. Of course, you have to remember to look behind the curtain.
