Wikipedia, the next best thing to osmosis

As the song says, "... The more we get together the happier we'll be...".

I can sit in front of Wiki P. for a few minutes and present myself as a genius a few minutes later. Seriously, it is like the osmosis brain dump I wished for as a child. With this tool I can "learn at my own pace" and digest chunks of information based on relationship rather than the predetermined course of a textbook. Not so long ago I would crack open a smelly, slightly outdated copy of an encyclopedia from the darkest, most dreary part of a library to find a small paragraph about my topic and hopefully a picture in color.

Rather than sitting and waiting for Britannica to update their hardbound and very expensive next edition, we now have Wikipedia. Wikipedia is different in that it can be edited by around 6.5 billion people or as far as population of the world would allow. Of course, there are people that might slip in poor information but again, billions of people can help catch that error. So while credibility can be a concern here, context is a key to truth.

By context I refer to the links that propagate entries and help add drill down tactics to information. This ability to link through connected information offers context to actually help verify factual information from different angles. The social experiment is a very good one. You give the mass population a helpful tool and you give each person equal access to the system. The majority using the product seem to want it to succeed and so the "neighborhood watch" program goes into effect.

Now laziness can come in many flavors of discipline. For some it would seem lazy that I pull away from the Dewey decimal system where I grab volume A and look up Alexander the Great. While reading about Alex I come across the word Hellenistic so I go back to the stacks of books and find a dictionary then look that up. You see the trend and probably live it as well. Anyway, with Wikipedia I look up Alexander and most of the obscure words or terms will have a hyperlink already. Right away I have the information I need. Pretty cool... but is it lazy? Well, I have learned more information in a less amount of time. Isn't that the important component of all of this? Or is it a balance of some information and the discipline of doing more leg work. Knowledge itself is powerful to most people so I imagine that more time spent in actual study outweighs the old "craft" of research but I could possibly be wrong.