Having a good and accurate framework of facts already built up in your brain helps you evaluate new facts, though. The internet is great, but to a certain extent, how useful it is at finding you new facts is directly based on how good you are at evaluating the reliability of those new facts, and that is largely based on having facts already in your head.

And beyond that, you have to have enough facts to know what to look for in the first place. You have to be able to recognize interesting things when you hear them in context. If I say to you "Zanzibar has the most rapidly grown industrial sector of any nation with a similar GDP in the region", you have to have a lot of facts already stored in your brain to make any sense out of that; otherwise it just sounds like I said "Blah blah has the blah of any blah with a blah blah blah in the blah". Wikipedia and Google won't help you at that point.