Wiki-phobia

Love it. Hate it. Ridicule it. - We face a deeply engrained fear that's paralyzing us in harmful ways - Wiki-phobia.

Gone are the days of casually perusing library stacks or aimlessly searching dictionaries or encyclopedias for things we don't know or didn't know we didn't know. (This is my romanticized memory of acquiring new things.)

If we have to scroll, we must have entered something wrong. Because the first entry for any famed person, event or topic will inevitably be the Wikipedia entry. It's what everyone and anyone will find if they're curious... if they search. And we're punishing anyone and everyone who dares to learn what we know but in a different way than we came to know it.

I've encountered a generation of high-schoolers and struggling college students scolded and shamed and punished for accessing the most basic information on important things on Wikipedia.

Insecure academics, thought police, higher-ed snobs, and greedy professors prohibiting free and open access to their storehouse of knowledge - they all form an intimidating wall in their fight to demean Wikipedia... to demean the basic knowledge of something they're trying to control... to deny anyone and everyone access to what they must be paid for.

Don't be distracted that the great majority of what's available on Wikipedia is copied and pasted from academic sources, encyclopedias and textbooks - that only means some academic isn't getting a paycheck this year for his 37th edition of Mathematics for Physics (we're no longer using the 36th edition - so don't think you'll get away with paying less than $338 for the 37th edition).

But if we don't know what most people will know about a topic - our topic - and how they will access it - then we're not well-informed - we're wiki-phobes.

You take your obscure class from an avant-garde professor on triadic patterns of Maya architecture and excitedly inform your mother about the exciting new things you've learned. When she asks you how to spell that - it's because she is going to Google it - and when she does she'll discover in 5 minutes on Wikipedia what you (or maybe she) paid $175,000 and four (or five) years of your life to find.

But she won't have endured sixteen weeks of lectures from an obscurantist sporting mediocre facial hair and a tweed sport coat with fake leather elbow patches... and isn't that really what makes it all worth it?!