It’s all quite meta. From the Wikipedia: The Wikipedia
The Wikipedia was founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and was originally intended only to complement the Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia of the more traditional form.
Articles to the site can be added and edited by any user, though certain controversial pages are limited to established users and site administrators.
The Wikipedia was available in 18 different languages by the end of 2001, 161 by the end of 2004 and is now available in 240 languages. The English-language edition has over two million entries, making it the largest encyclopedia ever compiled.
Needless to say, the Wikipedia’s Wikipedia page is rife with information about the Wikipedia. It includes criticisms of the Wikipedia and reports of various studies on the Wikipedia’s reliability.
I happen to think the Wikipedia is our greatest cultural achievement. How crazy is it to think that, when I was growing up, we had to take time out of our regular classes in school to go to the library and learn how to use reference materials? Do kids still have those sessions, or do they just learn how to search the Wikipedia, which takes about 10 seconds?
My parents had a Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedia, and we relied on it for nearly everything, even though it was from the early 1980s and perpetually thought the Soviet Union remained intact and the Berlin Wall upright.
We don’t need any of those things anymore, because we have the Wikipedia. And sure, maybe there are some errors, but those real encyclopedias, it turned out, had some errors too. And they didn’t have millions of users policing them all the time and editing out the most egregious of the mistakes.
The Wikipedia does, and it’s pretty damn accurate. I figured this out when I asked a doctor about a prescription medication I was taking and he went to its Wikipedia page to find out more. My wife is in med school now, and everyone there apparently relies on the Wikipedia for everything. At the very least, it can point people to more “legitimate” sources in the citations.
I have an iPhone now, which means I have access to the Wikipedia almost always. This has been, without a doubt, the best part about having an iPhone, and probably the best thing about technology ever. Unless I’m in a subway tunnel, I can get whatever information I want whenever I want it. It’s crazy, and it’s part of the reason the Wikipedia is the best thing humans have created.
In a related story, I co-founded a Taco Bell wiki a while back, and it sits mostly unedited. Get on it, Internet.
Tedquarters 
Question: Does the infinite, ubiquitously available bank of knowledge enhance our comprehensive intelligence as a species by allowing us to “stand on the shoulders of giants”? Or does it devolve our capacity to research, rationalize, and discover by reducing the process to a point where the process itself is taken for granted?
Follow up question: Could I have done a worse job of phrasing that paradox?
This is a great question, Joe. I feel like there are two ways of looking at it: Pessimists would say that as we learn to rely on computers and machines more and the investigative powers of our own minds less, people will lose the capacity to, like you say, “research, rationalize and discover,” and we’ll devolve into a setting like Idiocracy, the awesome Mike Judge movie.
I’m more optimistic, though. I think and hope curiosity is timeless, so the wealth of information available will only whet the appetites of those eager to learn more. I’m guessing that we’re going to see some massively awesome developments in the coming years as more and more people are able to communicate and share knowledge over the tubes. I mean across the board: art, science, whatever.
yeah, i’m of a like mind Ted. And I suppose you could use human history as a case study and come to the conclusion that whether we’ve progressed or regressed as a society in retrospect is just as subjective as it would be when considering the future.
You are obsessed with the Bell.
…And rightly so!…
as much as i love this world of instantly available information on anything in our pockets, i do feel it has ruined the fun of debating trivia.
an aside: who the hell pays for KGB to answer random questions? are we ever somewhere where someone doesn’t have a smartphone with a data plan?
also my droid laughs at your iphone ted
Sadly, Wikipedia is frowned upon in the high school community. Rather, teachers tell kids to use it as a launching pad instead of a resource
wait! what happened to the USSR and the Berlin Wall ????
dykstraw – don’t be silly. You know you want an iPhone and are just too cheap to buy your way out of the Verizon contract.
AT&T + NYC = fail
My parents had the full set of the ‘New Book of Knowledge’ encyclopedia. That thing was like the gospel.
Also, I’m not sure how all this works but I would say that 95% of my internet searches, no matter what the subject, result in a wikipedia page as the #1 result.
Every new doc you see from this point on, has based their knowledge on Wikipedia. At least, thats whats getting me through!
However, I’ve found Wikipedia to frequently be wrong. Its a great starting off point, but for something serious, you always have you use better sources.