[Spooky23]

As a joke, some of my colleagues created a fake persona for another colleague after obtaining an old picture of him in punk rocker garb from college.

It was a long con, they created a fake band, added references to various obscure pages, etc. ultimately a page was created with the photo posted that followed every Wikipedia policy except for being false.

I’m sure people are doing that professionally. The problem with Wikipedia is that it’s awesome except for when it isn’t.

The weakness of the system is that it depends on arbitrary standards of notability and online reference. Not novel problems but you need to have a different kind of critical eye than other platforms.

[djur]

Completely fictitious content is bad PR for Wikipedia, but it doesn't really materially affect its usefulness as a reference. Nobody's coming to Wikipedia looking to write their thesis on a band that never existed. The reason fictitious pages like this survive is because nobody is reading them. Even infamous long-lived examples like "Jar'Edo Wens" had essentially no real-world impact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jar%27Edo_Wens_hoax

[Spooky23]

It enables all sorts of grifts.

Foolish as it may seem, people use Wikipedia to vet stuff and make decisions.

[akolbe]

Then there was the case of the man whose image was used for two years to illustrate the Wikipedia article on a serial killer.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dgpnq/wikipedia-and-google-...