Conversation

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Clearly I have smarter millennial friends than you 😀 Sure there’s some availability bias but that’s true of all media. Academic western libraries have their own biases.
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Obviously all archives & data sources have their limitations. But the peril of the Internet isn't just that it makes people more heavily weigh their judgments toward the latest news & information; it's also that the myth of the Net is that it's the only data source anyone needs.
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In general people triage, and pick their beyond-the-internet digging battles. If you’re not a professional academic with access to a good library and no cost to digging deep whenever, you have to pick battles. The Wikipedia gloss usually replaces ‘nothing’, not a scholarly tome.
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You’re judging random curiosities by academic research standards. Basically, in 1988, a random nerd who wondered about a question would conclude “too much trouble to figure out” and move on without ever learning *any* answer. In 2018, they’d look up Wikipedia at least
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Most random curiosity does not, and should not, seek more than satisficing. It’s better than knowing no answers, and better than trying to dive deep on everything indiscriminately. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing sure, but I prefer it to elites+illiterates condition.
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Well, if the standard is “satisfying random curiosity” then yes, Wikipedia is the best thing ever. But if the standard is producing more knowledgeable (the OP said “better informed”) citizens, I beg to differ.
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They *are* better informed. Just not about the things *you* think they ought to better informed about. Things that will give them more agency and opportunities and community in their own lives. “Better citizenship” is your priority for them.
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I think Nils and you are talking about slightly different things: his "knowledge" is more in line with how it works in soc-sci or philosophy, where you are expected to understand the heritage of an idea and how it responds to everything that came before it
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Wikipedia does encourage people to acquire CliffsNotes-style overviews of things, which is excellent for maths and physics (the radius of the first orbit in a hydrogen atom needs no context) but perhaps less so for the kind of "liberal arts" knowledge that citizenship goes with
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I think you’re demonstrating my point: if Wikipedia didn’t exist, maybe you’d actually read a book. And then you’d be much better informed. By analogy: it’s like how, when you take away a kid’s device, they go play outside — which is good for them, even if they whine about it.
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Hm, my use of it has definitely moved away from science/math over time (as I found a niche where I'm comfortable looking at more authoritative sources first). Anecdatum: a quick search in my browser history for this month says it's mostly econ, linguistics, medicine, and Marxism