This is a Lesson 101 on how to refute baseless arguments. Or maybe it is a 400-level class. It all comes down to recognizing mimicry of authenticity manipulated towards fringe ideas.
I like how the article adds weight to mainstream vs fringe. But it occurs to me that some ideas are given so little attention that there is no substantial basis of what is fringe and what is mainstream.
(Long time since I _attempted_ to create an article on Wikipedia, but the form of entries makes it clear) factual assertions must largely be supported by (some metric) of published sources. A fringe topic would by definition would have “so little attention”. So it stands to reason Wikipedia would need a _policy_ of supporting fringe in order to allow page creation.
In other words, fringe is what has few supporting references, but is otherwise noteworthy. With a number of notable exceptions.
That’s fine with me. What I’m taking issue with here is the assertion that “factual assertions must largely be supported by (some metric) of published sources”. In reality, those sources are often extremely low quality, so it’s not really a useful point.
That the ideas are given little attention is the substantial basis in determining that they are fringe.
If an idea is given a lot of attention, it might be mainstream or fringe, depending on how accepted it is. It might be getting a lot of negative attention, or it might just be getting a lot of attention right now. It might be transitioning from fringe to mainstream.
But if it is not getting any attention, or very little, then it is by definition fringe.
Compounding this is the aforementioned conundrum that when you fill out the gaps in "In 1987, $person met _____ in _____" with random but not implausible values you end up with a gazillion wrong assertions and (maybe) a very short list of accidentally correct ones. So even if a troll would like to tell the truth but enjoys peppering discussion threads with many low-effort comments just so someone will interact in whatever which way with them, none of their comments will likely be factually correct. It's like a multiple choice but it's not one out of four, it's one out of a billion answers, almost all of them wrong.
I like how the article adds weight to mainstream vs fringe. But it occurs to me that some ideas are given so little attention that there is no substantial basis of what is fringe and what is mainstream.