Gregory Maxwell wrote:
The trivial counter to your argument is that there have been plenty of products that caused harm slowly enough or at a infrequently enough rate that LOTS of people still purchased/used them.
It's not that people who smoke think "I don't mind cancer", it's that they don't experience the negative effects often enough to encourage them to make another decision.
Are mistakes in Wikipedia really harmful? My very first edit was to fix a minor mistake. That seems to be a common origin story. One of my favorite tricks for getting people to engage with intranet wikis is to leave obvious mistakes or omissions. And in a wiki-based startup I'm involved in, we are concerned that staff building the site too much can reduce community involvement.
I don't think many people take up smoking for the cancer. But judging by the number of anonymous little fixes, a lot of people edit Wikipedia because of damaged articles.
William