Oh, you know Wikipedia. Don’t try and deny it. And you love it. If you need to write an essay on something you don’t understand, or learn the plot of the latest movie fast, or are struck with the sudden and all-too-common desire to know what the cultural capitol of Australia is, where’s the first place you look? Wikipedia. It’s a fantastic resource to be sure: easily the biggest collection of knowledge of our time. It’s phenomenal. And there’s a simple reason for that.

It’s open.

There are other reasons, of course: it’s online, so you don’t have to keep or rent an expensive and heavy set of encyclopedias around for every time you want to look something up. And, of course, it’s free. But more then that, it’s the concept that it can be edited by anyone– notably, (since they’re the ones that care) up-to-date professionals. This means, that page you just read for your homework on cellular respiration? Probably written by a real biologist. And given the instantaneous edit speed and constant updating of the site, Wikipedia can easily be more correct than a textbook.

Sure, it’s not perfect. There are marriage proposals interspersed with the history of El Salvador, comments from viewers of “The Colbert Report” on the African Elephants page, and blatantly false facts regarding oil spills added by Exxon staff. But the community surrounding Wikipedia is large and constantly wary. For example, when I tried to change the founding date of said cultural capitol of Australia (which, by the way, is Melbourne) from 1835 to 1814, it was caught and corrected within 35 minutes.

Though errors are possible, there’s another factor that makes up for that. A factor that makes Wikipedia appealing and lets it grow, one that has also heralded the spread of open-source applications like the operating system Linux and the Creative Commons license: their total freedom. Open means for everybody.

For instance, that operating system I mentioned (yes, you can run your computer on something other then Windows or Mac) works great, and doesn’t hold you to a copyright code or a terms-of-use agreement designed to keep you paying, just like Wikipedia. You can do whatever you want with it: edit it, tailor it, share it with your friends, and make it fit your needs. Granted, programming your own operating system is something best done in Ms. Martin’s computer classes, but anyone who knows how to type can edit Wikipedia.

On one level, it’s no wonder this scares the dickens out of poor science teachers who just want you to know your photosynthesis. Who can tell what’s right and what’s wrong? However, information is checked again and again, and that decades-old book your teacher would advocate is comparatively eons out of date. The anyone-can-edit approach does mean that incoming information must constantly be checked, but Wikipedia encourages correctness and the latest data even more. The site itself doesn’t even claim to be ineffable, but it’d be silly to throw out a fantastic resource that operates on the values of equality and liberty for the sake of occasional vandalism.

Best of all, the worldwide amount of “open”  material is growing every day. Apart from websites and operating systems, things like pictures and software, as well as blogging platforms and soda recipes, are free for the taking. Who needs to scrape cash to buy Photoshop when there are dozens of similar image editors that you can get for free? It’s easy to see why open content may well be the way of the future. Wikipedia is only the glorious start. And while teachers may not let you cite the website on your homework any time soon, it’s well worth your time to see what’s out there.