#8 Wikipedia has unleashed my inner nerd (Andrew Krump)

Beginning in late high school, I began obsessively reading Wikipedia. There are many days when I'll spend 3+ hours getting stuck in what I call the "Wikipedia wormhole". It starts with a simple question and results with clicking a series of article links, usually ending on something completely different from where I started. The Wikipedia wormhole has distracted me from doing countless hours of homework on my originally planned timeline. The vast majority of the knowledge I've acquired through this Wikipedia surfing is of little practical use, but I think I would be deadly in any sort of trivia competition as a result. Whenever a question pops into my head, I almost immediately look it up on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia and search engines have almost completely eliminated verbal arguments based on pure definite fact. I imagine back in the 1980s, friends would argue for hours about things that today we can look up in a matter of seconds. Overall, I think this is beneficial, but there is also a falsely acquired "expert" syndrome that results. Formal learning is highly structured and requires that you learn basic concepts before delving into more complicated concepts. Wikipedia lets you jump right into quantum mechanics. While I doubt many people who read a Wikipedia entry on quantum mechanics will claim that they are physics geniuses, it does leave the sense that you now "know something" you didn't before reading the article. The problem is, this "something" probably isn't what you think it is. In a field as complex as quantum mechanics (or medicine, or biology, or chemistry, etc.), there is an incredible amount of background required to understand the subject in any real amount of depth. Being unaware of the vastness of a subject leads you to think you know much more than you really do about it. The result is everyone eventually thinks they're an expert, and they lose faith in the claims made by actual experts. Read an article on ibuprofen and its synthesis? Congratulations, you're now a medicinal chemist!

Wikipedia obviously also has the dual problem/benefit of being open source. Anyone can write or edit an article, so in school we're always told not to use it as a source. Overall, it seems that the articles are fairly accurate, but I have certainly seen some that are poorly written or obviously false. And here again, trust and laziness usually prevent readers from digging deeper. Finding corroborating sources takes time so most people will just take what they read as fact because it came from "somewhere" and presumably it must therefore be true. This attitude is even more obvious when we get into the era of fake news or any sort of non-definite claim. You simply find a "fact", accept it, and run with it. The result is that many of us seem unable to even come to a consensus about what a "fact" is anymore.

I think Wikipedia does much more good than harm. You can learn about almost anything in a relatively approachable fashion. The dangers of Wikipedia, and the internet more generally, come when people no longer feel the need to verify information, if only because there is now so much more of it that it becomes more difficult to process. We should all try to be honest with ourselves about our level of knowledge of a subject, or eventually we can't even agree on what a fact is.