The Wiki will save you:

Did you know that former child actor Richard Eyer, who played the boy who runs “afowl” of the goose in William Wyler’s 1956 film Friendly Persuasion, is now an elementary school teacher in Bishop, Calif.? Or that in the process of carbonic maceration, which is used to produce Beaujolais wine, fermentation takes place inside the individual grape berry?

Of course you didn’t, you idiot.

That’s why you should thank your lucky stars for Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that not only sports thousands of articles on useful information, but also on things you didn’t think existed, or was even important enough to know.

Talk about information overload. One minute you’re looking up the cultural background of some random province in Spain, and the next thing you know, the entire episode history of Rescue Rangers is staring back at you in all its glory. That is what makes Wikipedia not only useful in our quest to impress our friends and strangers with useless information, but also in our often desperate and pathetic attempts to write research papers.

Let’s get serious for a minute. Wikipedia is a godsend for anyone who needs to find research fast. Before the introduction of Wikipedia, you had to sign into multiple servers and Web sites and then scroll through thousands of articles and text that usually contained far too many numbers and multisyllabic words. But now you throw a keyword into the Wikipedia search engine and — bam — everything you can possibly think of is right there, waiting to be copied and pasted for your convenience.

Recently, there has been protest from college professors and other educators about the accuracy of the information presented on most Wiki articles. In other words, someone’s just jealous that they had to use the Dewey Decimal System when they burned out 20-page-long research papers at the last minute.

First off, I highly doubt any of the “Wiki’s” information is inaccurate. I mean, yeah, anyone can write an article and therefore create their own biased take on a subject, but I highly doubt the people who run the site would let anything that isn’t the objective truth get by them. And anyone who writes an article on the episode history of a television show probably doesn’t have a life to begin with, so my best guess is that they know more about it than I ever would.

Secondly, even if it is inaccurate, and that’s a stretch, mind you, who cares? The last time I checked, most history books are written by the people who win the wars, math books contain errors in every page and most research findings are debunked as soon as they’re published.

Our whole world is one of inaccuracy, so what’s the big deal if we sacrifice a lot more precision if it means one less trip to the library?

[Reach columnist Eric Uthus at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu.]

The Wiki will kill you:

So I was reading the “criticism of Wikipedia,” entry on … Wikipedia. Apparently, the millions of articles on the “free content encyclopedia project” can be edited by anyone. Read that again.

Anyone.

That means your uncle Larry can “edit” the entry on George Washington and have fun with the facts. Perhaps some poor second-grader from Minnesota will learn that our first president chopped down a banana tree and loved jazz. Or that Tom Brady was the first man to walk on the moon.

My dear colleague will probably say that the eagle-eyed editors of the Wiki would surely spot such gross errors before they cause any irreparable harm. But everyone edits the Wiki. Sure, there are a handful of full-time editors, but how much of a dent could they possibly make in the vast ocean of information that is Wikipedia?

This is rather akin to saying that a gaggle of fishermen could police the Mediterranean. That’s crazy talk.

Wikipedia is addictive, destructive and contagious. It should be destroyed in the fires of Mt. Doom (or Orodruin, Sindarin Elvish for “fiery mountain”). A more literal equivalent is Amon Amarth, or the “mountain of fate,” which is a fitting name for such an epic volcano. I just learned that from one of the many extensive articles on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

OK, I’ll stop using it. I can quit. I promise. Unlike Facebook, Wikipedia is a drug, and just like any drug, it can be smuggled across international borders and sold on the black market. That’s why we have to thwart it.

By “we,” I mean the Drug Enforcement Administration, an agency of the United States Department of Justice that wages the infamous war on drugs. It’s the lead agency for the enforcement of laws on controlled substances, and shares concurrent jurisdiction with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Darn it, I did it again! That little factoid nugget came to me straight from the Wiki. What’s happening to me? It’s like I have all the world’s collective knowledge at my fingertips. I know if I cite Wikipedia on a history paper, the TA will hang me by my backpack straps for all the class to see.

This sort of power is dangerous — too dangerous, in fact, to remain in the hands of ordinary people. It’s an equalizing force similar to the invention of writing, the printing press and the development of the Internet, and look where those got us.

So, perhaps that’s not the best example. Wikipedia is different. It’s too easy to use. It’s too egalitarian. Knowledge should be the exclusive purview of the bourgeois. That might sound elitist, but it’s true.

The masses should be kept in blind, obedient ignorance — err, I mean people should have to use authorized encyclopedias and not open-source reference works such as the Wiki. To do otherwise is to fill people’s heads with dangerous ideas.

[Reach columnist Will Mari at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu.]