About ten years ago I saw an anonymous Wikipedia user who had edited dozens of articles about Mario, Sonic and Putt-Putt, rotating their names so that the articles about Mario were now about Sonic, the articles about Sonic were now about Putt-Putt, etc. I'm sure those changes were noticed and reverted almost immediately.
Looking deeper into this user's edit history, I found a series of edits to articles about films, changing their running times by adding or subtracting a few minutes. I have no idea whether these changes were ever noticed, but Wikipedia absolutely depends on the kind of person who'll obsessively go through their VHS collection and check each movie's Wikipedia sidebar against the info on the back of the box.
It's impossible to fact-check everything we read, and it's impossible to be aware of every kind of scam, so we rely on heuristics to guess whether to trust any given source. One of the heuristics I've found most useful is to consider what the author has to gain by lying, but sometimes I think about the guy randomly adjusting movie running times and I just have to lie down.
i have never in my life agreed with the premise that "nobody would do that, there's no reason" and neither does anyone else. just look at the people you've met in your life. you know full well that a ton of people just do things without a lick of rationale.
The crumbling edifice of our entire present society rests on the pernicious myth of the "rational actor."
