How confident are you can, quickly, learn enough about a topic ...

[whatthehey]

12. The internet is actually a fine tool

If we remember the internet contains many perfectly valid resouces as well as many places of both intentional and unintentional misinformation. Even the much poo-pooed Wikipedia is mostly quite good in areas on which I am most well-informed by more formal academic sources. Would I necessarily trust it about hotbutton controversies? Not without scanning edit histories, but if I couldn't quite remember, say, the broad terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk I'd be content to scan that instead of poring through the New Cambridge Modern History Volume XII (I'm not particularly good on 20th C history; that's just the last article I read there.)

Beyond Wiki of course there are many more formal resources from universities and OOP digitized books as well as amateur resources and fora which are very useful if you know or can quickly assess who can be trusted. Given a fairly short time which would vary depending on complexity and interest level and restricted to just the internet I'm pretty sure I could be decently well informed on any topic within my intellectual ambit. I'm never going to be able to master technical astronomy or theoretical physics regardless of source because my math is just not that strong. I give up at about Calc II sadly. But if you want me to become reasonable undergrad level on, say, the history of Scotland before the Act of Union, I could do pretty well just based on online resources.