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Wikipedia is already taken seriously enough by most people under the age of 50 that I know. That said, it does still have issues and by its very nature is pron
by CodeSgt 4y ago
Wikipedia is already taken seriously enough by most people under the age of 50 that I know.
That said, it does still have issues and by its very nature is prone to organized disinformation campaigns. Yes, it will be corrected in time, but if timed correctly it could be too late.
Imagine this:
A post on social media site X goes viral. The post makes some wildly divisive claim about an American political figure. The claim is untrue, but the posts virality leads many to believe it. Simultaneously, a group of dedicated attackers change the political figures wiki page to match the disinformation in the viral post, keeping it like that until the posts virality cools down. The Wikipedia article gets linked in the comments of the post. The hundreds of thousands of people who saw that post at its peak all now believe the false claim. The malicious actor benefits.
- hulitu 4y ago> Wikipedia is already taken seriously enough by most people under the age of 50 that I know. Seriously , yes, enough , no. And i would say people under the age of 18 and their teachers take Wikipedia as a serious source. There are some good articles on Wikipedia but the majority is lacking quality.
- Akronymus 4y agoThen media outlets start picking up on it and include it in their reporting, then reporting on reporting happens and so on, then someone adds it to wikipedia with the news source, and then that gets uaed as a reference without saying so. Then those new artikles get added to the wiki and it becomes an established fact.
- akolbe 4y agoWikipedia has a list of cases where this precise sequence of events occurred: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_incidents#Known_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...