It’s that time of year when we all start treating Wikipedia like a guilty pleasure. It looks something like this: final paper number three. You need that historical context from an easily decipherable source, and you’ve spent so many hours on Google Scholar already; you open Wikipedia, read a few pages with gluttony, and return to your paper with the information you needed. You might not know how to cite it or how to cover the Wikipedia trail so that your professor could never know about your antics, but you at least have some clarity.

We’ve all been there. But there is some irony to our attitude towards Wikipedia, considering our anti-academy, pro-subjectivity worldviews. Or at least, those anti-academy, pro-subjectivity worldviews many of you say you have. To me, Wikipedia is the embodiment of this, providing us with an alternate means of producing knowledge and a canon that is, honestly, exciting and hopeful.

A lot of today’s critiques of academia and the academy revolve around the idea that the academy has created a false understanding of Western ideas as being the objective truth. Many criticize the objective voice of the white, European perspective—indigenous, pre-colonial, and non-European modes of knowledge, ways of knowing, and systems of being are disregarded under the claim of a single, objective way of being applicable to all. And many connect the academy and the voice of academia to this, as the academy produces the knowledge, theory, and thinkers that give us ways of understanding the world. When the academy has a singular perspective, worldviews beyond this perspective are obscured, leading to the same issue we talked about previously.

This is pretty obvious to most Wesleyan students. But from this critique of the academy, I see Wikipedia as an alternative with immense possibilities. Wikipedia de-centers the notion of a single objective truth by design, instead creating a crowdsourced encyclopedia that relies on a volume of perspectives, rather than perceived “reputability” of a single perspective, an idea that can obscure non-dominant perspectives and silence both dissent and marginalized voices. Wikipedia instead invites all to contribute, building information through collaboration, and the combination of hundreds of perspectives that can create more holistic truths through accumulation.

Much of the issue with the presence of the academy and its control over our collective worldview is the assumption that an objective truth exists. Critiques of academia often focus on the assumption that modern academic knowledge is the objective truth and that the canon and academy exist to define and create objective truth—this, of course, minimizes so many other truths under the notion of a singular objectivity. Wikipedia’s inherent ability to undermine the idea of a singular objective truth gives it a lot of power. The design of Wikipedia, constantly creating a database of information sourced from its millions of users, privileges no singular perspective above the rest, democratizing information and de-centering the notion of a singular, truthful narrative.

I see Wikipedia as an imperfect, yet somewhat radical, alternative to the academy. It offers us a way of accessing knowledge no longer dependent on the construction of a canon or notions of objective truth based on a white male academy. Wikipedia gives us a democratic alternative to the exclusivity of academia that is non-hierarchical and privileges no information above any other. So perhaps instead of framing Wikipedia simply as a necessary evil, we can think of its design as perhaps something commendable. No, it is nowhere near perfect, but it offers us the possibility of new ways of producing and accessing knowledge. Through its democratizing design, it offers us the possibility of imagining a world beyond the canon, where knowledge is non-hierarchical and there is no one truth to be found.

Akhil Joondeph is a member of the class of 2026 and can be reached at ajoondeph@wesleyan.edu.