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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And I disagree about the context/history part. Wikipedia lets you go into massively long context bunnytrails. They just don’t stay on the paths academics think you ought to stay on for a subject, but jump around.
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This makes argument from assumed shared knowledge foundations immensely frustrating. Nobody reads the supporting text an interlocutor links. The only thing I've found that works is mysterious quotes that they look up themselves.
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I have no sympathy for that frustration. We live in a post-canoncity age. Get used to persuasion by means other than everybody having read the damn Great Books syllabus.
People are taught how to make themselves unpersuadable. Cultures have core canons. I don't think we have disrupted that value, not really. We are just waiting for some entrepreneur to sell us a convincing Reformation.




