I think sum total is probably overstating it, but Wikipedia provides more than enough of a scaffolding to massively accelerate rediscovery of math. It's less about teaching and more about giving inquiring minds a roadmap with some answers filled in. How far do you think Euclid would have gotten if he could've read Wikipedia for the entirety of his life?
> How far do you think Euclid would have gotten if he could've read Wikipedia for the entirety of his life?
Much less far than he actually went, given that Euclid is known solely for compiling existing work. There's not so much reason to do that when it's already been done and you're happily reading the compilation.
In Euclid's day, "compilation" meant taking disparate and sometimes halfheartedly proved theorems with wildly different terminology and framing and laying them out in one consistent chain of deductions. So I have trouble writing him off as a trumped up textbook author.
It's like saying the formalization of continuity by Weierstrass and Bolzano was compilation because prior mathematicians had already been working with the concepts.
