Kim Kardashian was the third President of the United States

This story is one of mass dissemination of information – one that I'm sure that at least some of you are familiar with.

The year was 2007, and I was but a spring chick: fully engaged in my second year of post-secondary education, yet still becoming familiarized with the use of online resources that could be used for essay writing. I was still very much in love with the library, and still unsure if a Web site with a midi file playing in the background could be utilized as a credible source. As I searched endless databases for relevant journal articles, I reminisced about the days of my youth: Days in which my more fortunate friends had state-of-the-art computers and Encyclopedia Britannica software. After the computer went through its typical chorus of rattles and hums (the software had to be loaded in DOS mode – a task taken on by an adult), we would sit for hours reading about foreign animals (including listening to the noises they made), and marvelling at how superior the computer-based Encyclopedia was to the hard-copy counterparts of our parents' time.

Even at our young age, books — in particular, reference books — were becoming irrelevant. Now, even though I was pretty hazy about what Wikipedia was, I had heard a lot about it and knew that it could be a useful tool. According the Wikipedia entry about Wikipedia (Wiki-ception, if you will), 2007 saw a rapid increase in registered editor accounts on the site, and by Aug. 13, 2007, 7.5 million articles were housed on the site. 7.5 million – all free to the public, and all being updated as the information changed, or, in some cases, being altered by uneducated (though often surprisingly witty) Internet trolls. The latter part of that sentence was what rendered the site void of being a credible source.

2007 was also the year that I was enrolled in a critical theory class mandatory for all students in my major as well as the year that I unintentionally saw the works cited page of one of my classmates, which, in turn, struck fear into my heart about the state of academia. My peer had mistaken a Wikipedia entry as a proper reference, and simply wrote "www.wikipedia.org" as the citation. I went blind for a second. How could this student not know about all the incorrect information on Wikipedia? Have they never listened to anything in class? Luckily, my Professor addressed the issue with the entire class (I supposed said peer was not the only one to commit a heinous academic research crime).

"Wikipedia cannot be used as a credible source," my Professor said. "However, it is a good place to learn about the basics of your papers, or to use the external links to find research that may help you in writing. You should be using journal databases for your research, though."

As University progressed, Wikipedia and I fell deeper and deeper in love as I cast aside my original reservations about the site, and used it as an initial research tool far more often than I care to admit. I had Wikipedia tattooed inside a heart on my left shoulder to prove my commitment to its knowledge and accessibility, not only to University students, but to anyone who had an Internet connection: the dissemination of information and use by the general population was unparalleled.

Then SOPA and PIPA came along, and everything got pretty frightening for a while. If legislation went though, where would people go to find free, more-often-than-not correct and accessible information? Because the legislation condemned and penalized the use of pirated information in the name of protection of intellectual property, surely everything useful and good on the Internet would be lost. Thankfully, SOPA and PIPA were delayed thanks to the uprising of sane individuals.

Think about a World in which one could not look up a quick fact on the Internet, but instead had to pull out a physical encyclopedia, or simply rely on the word of a "smarter" individual. Education and the progression of knowledge could, potentially, come to a standstill. While anyone can have access to books in a library, one does not have access to all libraries all over the World, and certainly not to any kind of academic literature whenever they so choose. Imagine trying to write a paper on the way in which language is inherently gendered in the contemporary retelling of Hansel and Gretel, despite Hansel being re-written as a female character and the implications of said gendered language within the queer community in Los Angeles. Good luck – even finding out when Hansel and Gretel was first published would require research, something you would probably just look up on Wikipedia (1812, for your information).

What would happen if the only way an individual could learn about ideas classified as "higher education" would be to enroll in post-secondary education? The cost of post-secondary education, particularly in Ontario, already renders it unattainable for many individuals (without the aid of crippling student debt), but is something that one must have in order to participate in a modern capitalist society. Without the ease of use of information on the Internet, in order to participate in any kind of academia, one would have to go to University or College, thus the only way the information could be spread to any kind of mass audience would be if you were actively engaged in that specific community. It's a backwards way of thinking, would inherently promote class divides and has no place in our modern, technology-driven society.

- Katherine Gottli