Do you generally restrict yourself to reading pages about subjects you know well enough to recognize false information when you see it?
Eric Burns, who used to run a webcomic criticism site called Websnark, once wrote a piece in which he pointed out that obscure subjects are less likely to have reliable information. The main thrust of the piece he wrote was that he wanted more webcomics to have Wikipedia articles, but along the way he makes the point that when an article covers a topic well-known and dear to the hearts of the sort of geeky types who are likely to spend time editing Wikipedia, mistakes or misinformation will be caught and corrected rapidly. But when it’s a more obscure topic that only a very few people will know about, that’s not as likely to happen.
As a test of this, he went to the article on his own hometown (a small town people who aren’t from the area aren’t likely to have heard of) and deliberately inserted one piece of false information. Specifically, he said the town has a ship-building industry, when in fact it doesn’t. Then he monitored the page to see if anyone else would correct it. He waited two weeks and then corrected it himself, because no one else had touched it.
Is it “blatantly false” to say that a town with no ship-building industry has a ship-building industry? It’s not obviously false unless you’re familiar with the town. It was a subtle error no one unfamiliar with the subject would have caught, but it was still completely factually wrong.
And I would argue that, whether or not we want to call it “blatantly false”, its subtlety makes it even more pernicious. I once went to the article on Cicero to look up some detail or another about his life. When I got there, the header of the article said his name was Marcus Godzillius Cicero, and that he was a Roman politician and giant lizard who destroyed Tokyo. Okay, ha ha, funny prank. No reasonable person is going to think that’s true, so vandalism like that probably didn’t lead to anyone getting a low grade on a history paper. I think we can all agree that’s “blatantly false”, and the fact that it was reverted very rapidly from when I saw it speaks well of Wikipedia that may or may not cancel out the ill it speaks of Wikipedia that crap like that was able to get in there in the first place.
But the example of Eric Burns and his hometown isn’t anywhere near that level of obviousness. How many people saw the article during the two weeks he let his own vandalism stand and didn’t realize they had read wrong information? How many more would it have been if he had let the experiment run more than two weeks? Or forgotten about monitoring it and never went back to fix it? How long would it have taken before somebody came across it who knew better and fixed it?
Overall, I’d say information on Wikipedia always has to be taken with a grain of salt. For obscure subjects, errors can stand for a long time. But even with better-known topics, vandalism gets in, and if you happen to see the page before corrections are made, you can get false information from it. The prankster who did the Godzillius Cicero thing was clearly not trying to be subtle, but I happened to see it during the short time it was there, and what if they had wanted to be more subtle? What if they had made only plausible changes that only someone who knows a lot about Cicero’s life would notice, like giving the wrong city for his birth, and the wrong age for his death, and the wrong number of children he had? Wikipedia is largely reliable for well-known subjects, but if you see the page while misinformation is there, and don’t know the subject well enough to recognize it, and don’t seek out other sources to corroborate what you saw there, you’re still going to be duped.
