These days, just about all of us go first to the internet for information on … any topic. All the winners of Super Bowls. The world’s cities of more than 1 million population. The capital of Burkina Faso.

A very handy tool, even if we stipulate that wikipedia, the go-to source for many searches, is not particularly reliable.

My concern? The relative lack of history for events that happened before the internet became pervasive. That is, pretty much anything in the 6,000 years of human history that came before the year 2000.

Take, for example, football players.

I have several times made a mental note about how terse the reports are for older material. And by old I’m talking about anything before 2000.

Now, you probably can find this year’s scores and individual statistics for nearly every high school in the United States. But don’t go looking for individual numbers pertaining to the 1993 Rialto Eisenhower High School football team. Those guys were 14-0 and ranked second in the country, but to the internet they are just another pre-historical team.

This applies on the bigger stages, too.

I noted it again when blogging about Eric Dickerson and Adrian Peterson. Check the Dickerson wiki link (above). On my Compaq mini, he has a 23-screen biography. Not bad. But Adrian Peterson, whose whole career has occurred in the internet age, has a 40-screen entry.

Is Adrian Peterson a better running back than Eric Dickerson? Not yet, he isn’t. Yet he is still playing and he already has about 60 percent more words devoted to his comings and goings than does Dickerson, a Hall of Famer who made the bad decision to play in an analog era — which carried into the 1990s, by the way.

Then consider Gayle Sayers, generally considered to be the best running back of the 1960s. A movie, Brian’s Song, was made about him and his doomed teammate, Brian Piccolo. Yet even with information about the movie, he gets 11 screens, total, of information. Why? Because he played before the internet era, and before most wiki contributors were born.

I know why this happens. We are swimming (drowning) in information now. Even 15 years ago? Not nearly as much. I see it whenever I research soccer scores or statistics. If it happened this side of 2000, the tournament will be recorded in depth. If it happened before … maybe, but probably not.

If anything, contributors to websites like wikipedia ought to spend more time on information we can’t find in five seconds by typing in a name and hitting “enter”. If wiki is going to be our encyclopedia, it needs more information on major events prior to the time when it became easy to write about them.

It is leading to lopsided history — more information than we need on ordinary things we can remember perfectly well ourselves, and comparatively little about important events which occurred a quarter of a century ago.