I think, therefore IB

Do you remember when teachers were agitated and dismayed and moaning into our Nescafe in the staffroom about Wikipedia? ‘Unreliable,’ we lamented.

Wikipedia’s now become a relatively trusted and frequently visited website. It’s often the first stop for students (university and high school) researching  assignments, adults checking a fact, and even journalists refreshing their memories. Unlike peer-reviewed journals, the ‘pedia is written and edited by amateurs (mostly), volunteers, ordinary people who are not credentialed, PhD-ed experts. So how did we come to trust it so much? Did the ‘pedia get better, or is it an illusion – other web-based sources are even worse?

The ‘pedia’s story is, in many ways, a mirror of our digital age. When it was launched in 2001, the idea that “anyone can edit” seemed reckless, even dangerous. But over time, its collaborative model produced something remarkable: a living, constantly updated repository of human knowledge. Its openness invited thousands and then millions of contributors to fact-check, debate, and refine information in real time. That communal process is inherently imperfect but it also corrects errors faster than traditional publications can. In a world that moves at internet speed, authority has become less about formal credentials and more about transparency and responsiveness.

Our dependence on the ‘pedia also reveals something unsettling about us – convenience and no-cost seems more important to us than credibility. A neatly summarised article, complete with citations and a clean interface, feels authoritative, even when we don’t verify its sources. This trust speaks not only to the ‘pedia’s success but also to a broader problem: our declining skill of critical thinking. We skim, we accept, and we move on, rarely questioning who wrote an article, what their motives were, or whether alternative perspectives might exist.

The ‘pedia’s popularity is a triumph of collective intelligence, but it’s also a test of our discernment. It shows that humans are capable of remarkable cooperation, yet still vulnerable to the illusion of knowledge. Perhaps the lesson is not to distrust tje ‘pedia, but to understand it for what it is: a starting point, not an endpoint. In the age of open information, our greatest responsibility isn’t to reject accessible knowledge, it’s to engage with it – critically.

The ‘pedia tells two stories at once: one of human ingenuity, and one of human gullibility. Which story defines us depends on how carefully we read and whether our teachers taught us how to think critically.

---