Inspite of all its pitfalls, there remains to me no more enchanting a website in the world today than dear old Wikipedia. I know, its not the most reliable source for researching an article for say academic purposes, but that doesn’t stop it being the first destination I point my browser whenever I want to know about something of which I have no prior knowledge. 

Few sites do greater justice to the ‘web’ part of the name in more gripping fashion. I’ve just finished reading an article on the Tokyo metro system, where I ended up having started my journey seeking the etymology of Mumbai, via the red buses plying the streets of the city where I happened upon a link to public transport in London and then a list of cities with rapid transit systems out of which Tokyo culled my interest simply because my flatmate had been mentioning a few days ago how it had done his head in trying to figure out the Tokyo ‘tube-map’ as it were, when he was there a couple of years ago(I said to him at the time that’s only because he’s an idiot, but now I feel I rather underestimated him). That is exactly why I love it so much. From nowhere, you can end up knowing quite a bit about something you have no idea you might even be interested in an hour back.

It works on the principle that knowledge should be free, and to me there can be no greater mantra to which I would lend my voice. Whoever came up with the whole thing would be my first pick(I quite like imagining I might one day be on the selection committee for one of these things) for a knighthood, or a Nobel peace prize (I’ve even got the ‘for’ part ready, its ‘for being the most revolutionary source of awareness in our age, without which peace shall forever remain an elusive concept’), maybe even a GQ Style award.

I know it can be a bit unreliable at times, but here you drift into the realm of how one defines knowledge. And for me, everything that is confirmed about a certain subject through rigorous testing or analysis is most definitely a necessary condition for knowledge, but not a sufficient one. For that, the random bits of trivia that the Wiki format often throws up, which may or may not be true(while acknowledging this possibility) makes for a more complete, accessible and interesting form of knowledge. That’s probably why since the first day I came across it, I was in love. It may have landed a few people in trouble in its time, but What I Know Is, its added a whole new dimension to the proliferation of knowledge in our society.