Yesterday I made my annual (and very modest) donation to Wikipedia. They do a campaign drive every year and as someone who firmly believes in the democratization of knowledge (and impressed with the peer review model the site utilizes), I pledged my support.

I even tell my students if they wanted to ignore me in class and read Wikipedia articles instead, I wouldn’t stop them. An article a day for an entire year would make them infinitely more knowledgeable than the equivalent time they would spend on social media, video streaming or gaming.

Yeah yeah – I know the argument about it not always being accurate or having entirely reliable sources.

Its power is in being able to correct any inaccuracies quickly, as opposed to the swath of student textbooks that need to be updated every year at exorbitant costs.

However, this isn’t meant to be my love affair with the site, but rather what it stands for: the gatekeepers to information are gone.

Sites like Wikipedia, Khan Academy, edX, Coursera, etc. have piled their resources into offering the world free, unlimited access to knowledge… about anything… for anyone. This was unheard of even twenty years ago.

If education is the key to a better future, supporting an infrastructure that offers it to free for the world is a great place to start.

They’ve taken away all the barriers and gatekeepers that once prevented a person from accessing the entire sum of human knowledge. The next step is to take away the barriers that would give the person the time to access it.

Until someone can come up with that (my province of Ontario came close by piloting a Universal Basic Income project… which then got cancelled before we could see the results), we’ll have to settle for availability.

Anything that will encourage more people to serve others, especially when it comes to making people less ignorant, is worth the support.