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I don't think the XKCD really applies here, at least in my interpretation. This was more like a mystery that everyone worked together to solve rather productive

• akavel 9y ago
  Personally, I always had (and still have) a much more positive view of the XKCD. I believe it actually shows an interesting way how people try to make the world better, and share their knowledge, in face of noticed errors. I believe this mechanism can be also used with premeditation, as an interesting way to encourage collaboration and solicit help. I seem to recall, that in early days of Wikipedia, it was explicitly suggested that editors should not fix small errors and typos in articles, so as to provoke newcomers to fix them, and this way "interactively" teach them how wiki works and provoke ("positively trick") them to start collaborating. Based on this, I'm sometimes pondering whether conscious erroneous assertions (e.g in a blog article) might possibly be a better way to solicit help on the Internet (e.g. via blog comments) than explicit questions. But I'm not quite sure, and also I can't shake the feeling that it'd be manipulative.