[WikiEN-l] Viral marketing?

[Fastfission]

On 8/15/05, Ben Yates <bluephonic at gmail.com> wrote:
> How well can wikipedia protect itself against this unfamiliar sort of
> systemic bias?

Not well, but it doesn't matter much. If it is information about
something somebody cares or knows about, interested people will see it
and verify it or change it and so forth. If it is not something
someone cares about, then it hardly matters, except when people gloat
about how they "gamed Wikipedia" by doing something nobody noticed.

It's not worth getting any more flustered about that sort of thing
than it is the occasional journalist or whomever who adds deliberate
misinformation to a page about some obscure Tsar and then says, "Ha,
Wikipedia couldn't demarcate truth and fiction for a whole week!" The
people who think that every page of Wikipedia will be accurate 100% of
the time and that 100% of all errors (deliberate or accidental) will
be caught are the same people who probably 1. don't understand the
point of Wikipedia anyway, 2. wouldn't like that point even if they
understood it.

In reality, if Wikipedia proves useful and reliable enough for most
people, it will be used and enjoyed. Such has been demonstrated
adequately so far and will continue to be in the future. If a few
people want to misuse Wikipedia, so be it. Not even the hard sciences
can protect against deliberate fraud.

FF