Yes you could, but you REALLY had to know how to use search engines, or software like Gopher and Archie. Typically you'd not be looking for dumbed down wikis, but actual papers in individual academics FTPs. Academia used the internet heavily from the get go, it was one of the things you could find.  Before spam and the Eternal September, newsgroups contained pretty much solely professional and academic discussion, and were a good resource, becoming less so further into the 90s.