What I see happening is that the interwebs are taking away the financial, and to some extent the career-advancement, incentives to document general knowledge and either not replacing them at all, or replacing them with political, ideological, or narcissistic incentives. None of these replacement incentives are long-term, and all of them are likely to attract people who are biased and, frankly, care little about the truth.
Moreover, as reference information becomes more easily and freely accessible, you might actually have a slight short-term increase in knowledge acquisition by the average person, but IMO you also foster a culture in which people get out of the habit of acquiring knowledge for its own sake, simply because the need to have it "at the ready" is lessened, or even eliminated.
Another point that isn't often made is that reading information on a computer screen is inherently more distracting than reading it out of a book. You've constantly got e-mails and other alerts popping up, you might have MP3's or videos playing at the same time, you're almost certainly playing Freecell in a background window, and in general you're probably thinking you should be doing something else (i.e., work). And even with a website like Wikipedia, which doesn't have advertising, there are still links everywhere, and you're thinking "should I click this?" when you should be trying to retain facts.
Finally, I think we can mostly grant the idea that writing and researching a fake-encyclopedia article has a positive effect on one's own knowledge-retention and thought-organization capacity, at least with regard to the subject being written about. (Editing alone, not so much.) But the result of that is that the people "building" sites like Wikipedia get a false idea of the effects of their own efforts - it's making them smarter, so it must be making everyone else smarter too, right?
Ehh, maybe not.
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