is that people (possibly wrongly) believe what they read on wikipedia, but nobody believes fucking anything they read on reddit! the rest follows from there.

There is certainly now a disinclination to do anything to improve Wikipedia, largely brought on by the obsessives who make up the "extremely active editors". You can barely mention the most obvious facts without being accused either of advertising or original research. The casual multitudes that made the site what it is just get put off.

I really find this annoying because to me it shows a fallacy of thinking.

Why should you *not* show skepticism of other types of writing? Just because it's printed by some corporate major publisher is not a guarantee that the material is correct. You're putting a lot of faith in "professional" editors that also might not be fact checking or promoting a bias (Ann Coulter's publisher comes to mind here).

You should be skeptical of writing on the internet, but should be just skeptical of everything else. Everyone is human, everyone has bias, everyone has an agenda, everyone screws up.

I have to agree with Jimmy Wales on this - this is experiment is just as "insightful" as demonstrating to people that you can get away with vandalism.

Yes, it's not that difficult to troll Wikipedia. Just as it's not that difficult to scam old people, dump your trash in the forest, or scratch cars in a parking lot. You would most likely get away with it, but it does not mean that there is a huge security risk in parking lots that the world needs to be made aware of.

Society is based on the fact that most of the time, most people are not assholes, and therefore we don't need a policeman following everyone at all times. People don't troll or vandalise because they see it as the wrong thing to do - and the small risk of getting caught, and humiliated or punished is sufficient to discourage the less ethical ones.

Yup. Trying to convince someone that there was an obscure serial killer who lived and died 100 years ago is a lot different than trying to convince people that, say, a leading national figure is Muslim. However, the latter can also work because it's helped along by the "big lie" effect.

If you're willing to openly flout research ethics, it's not very hard to produce disinformation in many different venues, most of which rely to a greater or lesser extent on trust.

Here are some other things you can do:

1. Create an authoritative-looking website on an .edu domain with false information about historical events. Odds are, bits of it will eventually start to percolate into the literature and academic talks, especially if you're well-regarded in the area, and the false information is relatively obscure.

2. Insert false historical facts slightly off the main article thesis into peer-reviewed articles. For example, write an engineering paper for an IEEE journal, and then insert a historical footnote with made-up biographical information. This will typically get a weak level of peer review, because IEEE journals will be primarily reviewing your technical contributions, not your historical footnote. Later, "launder" this false information into a more prominent position: write a more historical article, which cites the previous footnote as a source, thereby upgrading it. Now the peer-reviewed literature has confirmed your false information. Now you can really get it enmeshed in Wikipedia: write a Wikipedia article that cites your paper.

3. If you're invited to contribute an article or two to a specialist encyclopedia, one of those "Biographical Dictionary of [Field]" type things, insert false information into it. These carry some authoritative weight, but facts in them are rarely checked in detail, because the work of putting the encyclopedia together at all usually strains resources as it is, so authors have to be trusted.

If anything, I would say that Wikipedia is somewhat more resilient than many of these avenues are. The trick is that its resilience is somewhat eyeball-weighted: if you insert fabricated information into a widely read article such as [[George W. Bush]] or [[Byzantine Empire]], it will be noticed much sooner than if you insert it into a very obscure article that isn't linked anywhere, where nobody is even going to see it until some bored editor hits "Random Article" enough times.

This is probably because the admins are very quick to remind editors that they are the real owners, with a revert.

Even if all of your complaints about Wikipedians are true, I still say screw you for being a vandal.

You make a good point. Next time I want to know what the atomic number of lithium is, I am going to check Reddit given their penchant for hard hitting fact finding.

Wish I could mod you to infinity. Britannica for generations portrayed itself as objective because it hired subject matter experts to write its articles. But anyone in any given field knows that there is no one "objective" individual capable of writing a truly neutral article. People should have a healthy skepticism of *any* source, no matter how authoritative they portray themselves as.

...and right now Wikipedia "peer review" amounts to a pissing match between jerk editors. It's past its peak unless this gets fixed.

Society worked in the most part 100 years ago because everyone knew that (a) everyone was watching and (b) people cared about their environment. So if someone yelled "Stop thief!" a lot of people in the area would pay attention and grab the thief.

The Kitty Genovese case was the announcement to the world of that sort of community involvement had ended. It had been coming for a while, but that was really the big thing that people could point to. You might not remember this, but it was where a young woman was screaming she was being stabbed for something like a half an hour before finally succumbing to her wounds. Nobody came to help or even called the police.

Today it is clear that nobody cares. They have their own lives to live and if someone wants to dump trash in a public part, so what? If one person is killing another, people walk by thinking "glad is not me" without a thought that it easily could be. In some ways it is true that most of the time most people aren't assholes. But the tendancy towards unthinkingly unkind behavior is increased when people are sure nobody is watching - hence while many will not shoplift almost everyone will pirate stuff in the privacy of their home rather than pay.

The Internet isn't helping out much here, as people hide behind pseudo-identities and handles. This means the co-worker you are trusting at work may be the asshat that is screwing with your daughter's head on the Internet. You just don't know and if done properly will never know. And the co-worker may be a great buddy in public where people can see but on the Internet feels immune and invulnerable.

Since the 1960s we have seen a great lessening of social involvement. People don't care what their neighbors are doing as long as they don't bother them with it. People will walk by panhandlers on the street - which is a good thing - but also just walk by someone injured. Women are taught from birth that if someone wants to help them they probably have an agenda that isn't good. While in 1920 Officer Friendly was the neighborhood cop today we know that cops are there to sodomize powerless people with broomsticks and do whatever it takes to get their quota of tickets, and again, nobody is watching, nobody cares and nobody is going to do anything.

The risk of getting caught is almost non-existent today. If you chase down the statistics you find that major crimes - like armed robbery - have at best a 10-20% chance of resulting in jail time. Murder is a little better, rape is a little worse. The odds are definitely in favor of the criminal and they know it. Now, on the street it works out because after 5 to 10 such crimes they certainly do end up getting caught, convicted and jailed just because the percentages work that way. But it really sucks to be told that your rapist will certainly go free this time but will be caught eventually.

Do not believe for a second that "society" is watching your back today. Your community doesn't care and isn't interested in your problems or difficulties. You might have a few friends that do, but not the community at large. And because of this each one of us is less safe and less secure. No, I don't have the answer to this because I'd say it is the result of population, immigration and just population density itself. But it is not 1950 and June Cleaver isn't interested in what your children are doing any more.

I'll be more blunt than you were. They call him a Muslim because i's the next best thing to calling him a Nigger, which they know they can't get away with.

No, it's more like what happens when you go around screaming "YOUR RELIGION IS INCORRECT" at the top of your lungs outside somebody's window. Or, even more aptly, what happens when you go spraypaint it onto the side of their house. If you just walk around telling people that Jesus was a con artist, or the devil or whatever, I, as a nonreligious person, would think you were basically harmless and kind of funny. If you went and spraypainted those facts onto the side of my apartment, on the other hand, I'd be almost as pissed as any random religious fanatic.

But the other side of the Kitty Genovese case [onthemedia.org] is that the media constructed a narrative -- "38 people watched and did nothing" -- that demonstrably wasn't based in fact. There were maybe 2-3 people who (probably) knowingly ignored it, and at least one who tried to help. Most of them had no idea of what was going on.

It's worth thinking about why the story became what it did. From the media's point of view, mayhem sells -- "if it bleeds, it leads" -- and a ghastly, horrifying story is made all the more attractive when you add the "38 witnesses" angle. From a political point of view, there are certain...advantages...to making people feel fearful, cynical, and isolated. When you combine that with the right mix of anger and indignation, it can be very useful indeed.

Maybe if you believe no one cares, it's partly because the people who control the narrative want you to believe that no one cares.