Wikipedia, the secondary/overview font of much of the “knowledge” available on the Internet, is 24 years old this year. Growing pains and legitimate complaints lodged against its “crowdsourced” biographies, histories, science and facts in its early years notwithstanding, it’s endured because it is a reliable source of quick-read articles on this or that — “Cliff Notes” summaries as we used to call them when avoiding reading “Moby Dick” in high school or figuring out why Emmanuel Kant mattered in college.

It’s not a “primary source,” but it summarizes such legitimate sources and links to them. If an article isn’t as reliable as they demand, they say so and urge those with inside knowledge to add links to back up the assertions of fact in each piece.

Writing an opinion blog filled with reviews built on of facts, I link to Wikipedia all the time, because they “fact police” their work and it’s an easy place to get a reader of a review, profile or obituary up to speed on what you’re talking about. A good example of using it was for my review of “The Commitments,” based — like “Rosie” and “The Van” — on a Roddy Doyle novel, a few days ago.

The Internet Movie Database, generally the last word authority on movie production details, inexplicably has deleted or never listed Doyle’s “The Snapper,” which became a movie shortly after “The Commitments.” Not Wikipedia.

It’s run by a foundation and they’re fundraising.

With the Internet awash in misinformation that has all but replaced religion as Marx’s “opiate of the masses,” almost all of it manufactured by agenda-driven oligarchs and totalitarians and passed on by their gullible stooges, with mainstream media pretty much wholly compromised, sites like Wikipedia the nearly bullet-proof fact police at Snopes.com are a firewall against lies and the liars who tell them.

I just donated. I urge you to as well.

Veritas potestas!