What would you do if everyone knew about wikipedia?

Question

If everyone who asks questions in the S&M (science and math, of course) section discovered wikipedia, there would only be 3 types of questions remaining:

-homework copypasta

-strange "what if" and "do aliens exist" questions, and

-"2012? omg I heard the world will fall into the sun?!?!!!!!1112222" questions (these may even be reduced, as Wikipedia also possesses the answers to this question)

In the event that this were to occur, would you continue spending time on YA or would you rediscover the sun? (So many questions we answer about it, and yet, how rarely we see it...)

Answer 1

True, true.  And also Google...

I wouldn't have so many easy questions to answer but there are still questions not covered by Wikipedia - ones that the advantage of age give me.

Answer 2

i know that this info is available, im just to lazy to search for it

that's why i just look on here

Answer 3

I'd probably spend a lot less time on YA.  But not everything is on Wikipedia and a lot of askers don't care even if they do know of it.  "Myopia" later avatar "Hyopia" asked 2012 questions at least 60 times over a few weeks.  I answered him a few times before I woke up.  

The first q I answered was how to take the radio out of a 1980s Mercedes-Benz S-class.  I have also given detailed answers on how to fix up a new car battery that had been overturned and lost it's acid and how to detect whether a Mercedes Benz air conditioning switch is faulty.  

I also know exactly how some gas chromatograph gas analysers work, something of patents, kites, underground coal mining, ancient Egypt, radio, Nevil Shute, consumer banking (rather dated now), steam locomotives,  the recent history of oil lamps and how to maintain them, English porcelain and china, a few towns in Australia, the Piltdown jaw fraud and why creationism itself is fraudulent.  

I know that the occult is 99.99% nonsense but there are a few things that seem inexplicable, if the stories are true of course.  

I am to some extent a professional searcher.  I know where to look for some information where Wikipedia is just the start.  Many of these internet sites though are paid, e.g. STN, Chemical Abstracts and Medline and not available to the general public.  

But PubMed is free and pretty good, there are things like the Great Big Book of Viruses, Mrs. M. Grieves "Modern Herbal", the Gutenberg project, Sacred Texts, PubChem, Google Patent, Google Scholar, the US and European Patent Office sites, ChemSpider, the Wayback Machine etc.  

I know how the International Patent Classification works for many of the chemical classes but not the US system.  I know some or many patents are fraudulent, and some applicants are frauds but there is nothing that the patent offices can do.    

I know of Phil Plait, Steve Prothero and Steve Dutch who have detailed refutations of creationist lies, Moon hoax garbage and the 2012 twaddle.  Also the Ratbags site in Australia that goes for the jugular on anti-vaccination frauds, faith healers, most of the pseudo-medicine stuff around, and also smashes the Bermuda triangle.  

Then there are The Straight Dope, Snopes, d**n Interesting, Jim Loy's pseudoscience pages, Frank Steiger's similar.  All these have detailed information on this and that, and it  cannot be found in Wikipedia.

I remember when Alta Vista was the leading search engine, just a few years ago.  I have used a computer that ran CPM.  

I'm 59 years old.  I've read a lot of books, seen a lot of towns, been told a lot of stories, told a few myself, watched a lot of better quality television and a lot that was trash, listened to a lot of radio and read quite a few magazines and newspapers.  I've met a lot of people from coal miners to former heads of state. I know Muslims and Hindus and chatted casually to a Sikh who lives not far away.  I've experienced a few ordinary coincidences and one or two that were pretty peculiar.  

I remember Sputnik 1 and saw the last stage of the rocket pass in orbit over Australia in 1957.  I saw the first ever satellite TV broadcast maybe 10 years later.  

I vaguely remember the Cuban missile crisis, the Profumo affair,  the self-immolations of monks in Vietnam, watched the last two Apollo landings on TV and on the same TV saw a North Vietnamese tank drive through the gates of the US Embassy in Saigon.  

I first heard of global warming in the late 1970s. Over 14 years I analysed air almost daily and saw CO2 rise from around 320ppm to around 345ppm. I know a fair bit about coal testing.  I've read the Nobel Prize winning paper in "Nature" describing the dideoxy chain terminating technique that led to the genome projects, I've got a basic understanding of the polymerase chain reaction and I know what a monoclonal antibody is.    

I remember the Munich Olympics and the troubles in Northern Ireland that claimed more British and Irish lives than any Islamic fanatic, yet never seemed to need freedom-limiting legislation or shooting of Brazilian electricians at London railway stations.

I was out tidying up the garden in the local winter Sun this afternoon.  Darn sulphur crested cockatoos have been eating the cones on my thuja conifer and dropping chewed off twigs all over the place, not to mention the remains of the cones.  There were five of them in the tree last weekend.