Wikipedia Breaks Academia's Monopoly (Score 1)

Was it von Clausewitz or David Sklansky who said "If I know something, and my opponent is unwilling or unable to learn that thing, I take my opponent's money"?

The Wikipedia\Google\Gutenberg Project learning "stack" allows me to process information in a manner orders of magnitude more efficiently than bookreading. I no longer feel guilty about not reading paper books because they are seriously obsolete.

Back in the early 1980s I was a baseball stats guy. As the only kid on the block with Street and Smith's annual preview I was at a huge advantage. Ten years later, with Bill James and rotisserie leagues, everyone was a stats guy. My monopoly was broken.

Same with trivia: prior to Trivial Pursuit, Bar Trivia games, and Jeopardy I was pretty good at trivia; ten years later *everyone* is good at trivia. Again, broken monopoly.

For centuries academia had a monopoly on information. Wikipedia helps break that monopoly, and it is no wonder the academic community has such antipathy toward it.

It's not what I have learned at Wikipedia over the past few years that amazes me; it's the knowledge that academics *know better* than the careerist pap they spew that really freaks me out.

So let the academics and the television watchers say what they will about Wikipedia. I for one will count my lucky stars that I have at my fingertips access to an unprecedented wealth of information.