Letter to the Editor

Why Do Professors Hate Wikipedia?

How different is information from Wikipedia than from that which comes from a professor?
Internet information is unverifiable, but so are professors’ lectures. We have all heard our teachers offer inaccurate or opinion-jaded information that goes unchallenged.

Moreover, any study of post-modernism shows that what makes most information valid is general consensus. Open programs like Wikipedia purvey information in a democratic means. That is, common people can edit and alter the entries without being the intellectual elite. The internet’s open editing software is just a new way that information by social consensus is purveyed.

Why then, do professors offer scorn to Wikipedia and other internet sources? To the career intellectual, Wikipedia and internet knowledge looks exactly as robotic assembly did to Detroit auto workers. At one point in human history a person was needed to lecture or write about ideas, hence the need for a class of academics. Today these people are not as necessary to purvey information as they can be usurped by modern technology. Experts in an intellectual field thus can only function as an authority, because the internet is a faster and more adaptable vessel for knowledge.

For the modern world, professors are like the medieval popes who determine what information is and is not canon. Historians note that the church’s power over information was threatened by the printing press. The internet outstrips the printing press in its ability to empower people and defrock elites. Perhaps the informed class fears this revolution of spontaneous order and open information on the web.

In short, professors do not so much hate Wikipedia because it is inaccurate. Rather they fear it because it is their replacement.

—TJH

Dear TJH,
Where else could you find an extensive list of every episode of “Legends of the Hidden Temple,” complete with entry links to each hisotrical figure in each episode and an intricate step-by-step layout to each temple layout? Certainly not your professor, unless he’s that guy from “Legends of the Hidden Temple,” no, I doubt even he knows that much.