Knowledge Acquisition through Authoritative vs. Communal

Having knowledge is commonly associated with being "correct". However, some people are more knowledgeable or "correct" than others. This is where tension arises in the realm of knowledge acquisition. Before the internet authoritative knowledge was the only source and therefore the best. The movement known as web 2.0 changed that as people had new mediums with which to communicate. As a result this left people in search of knowledge with a choice.

In my own experiences, I have certainly witnessed tensions between authoritative and communal knowledge. None of my teachers in high school approved of the use of Wikipedia at all, not even as an encyclopedia with which to begin research. They presented Wikipedia in a poor light that made me suspicious of the site as well. However, it was difficult to not use Wikipedia given its convenience. The information on communal sites such as Wikipedia is constantly being renewed and improved, something that is difficult for an authoritative source to do because it would imply that they were wrong in the first place. Furthermore, the way Wikipedia is set up, promotes learning even more as you end up going in tangents you might not have thanks to hyperlinks within the text. It is difficult to claim one source as more useful than the other, because each has its merits, but in terms of convenience, communal sources and Wikipedia specifically win hands down.