What if knowledge among the masses is wrong?

During Monday's lecture we learned that the intelligence of a large group of people is greater than that of an expert. This made me think of wikipedia and how information collaboration proves intelligence of the public very true. However, there are downfalls with everyone believing, "well if everyone thinks it's true, it must be true." If a virus or disease spread through Wikipedia and changed the truth around, this would affect numerous amount of people. The following article expresses someone's frustration at finding Wikipedia not being correct and his incapability to correct the article.

http://wigblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/my-first-experience-trying-to-correct.html

I was thinking about this in class as well. With game of picking the cards played on Monday, we saw how it was really easy for the public to believe in a false statement. This reminds me of how it was rumored that The Decemberists were confirmed to play at Dillo Day. One person spreading this rumor ended in many people thinking that they were in fact confirmed. Because multiple people told me this information, I didn’t feel a need to confirm it for myself. This models the idea of the information cascades. Social Networking sites, like Facebook, speed up this tranfer of information. This also links back to how we calculated the number of days until the population was infected with a disease during the first week of classes. Because this rumor was shared to others as a status on Facebook, they reached out to many people; weak ties on Facebook have a big impact in spreading information. I believe it was within the next day, after my roommate told me that the Decemberists were confirmed (she had a weak tie with someone who put this message in their Facebook status), that the Daily published an article confirming the truth. It’s surprising how easily the general public jumps on the bandwagon.