Supposedly Wikipedia is groupsourced knowledge, anybody can edit it. Except for propaganda. Someone ( the “IC”? political operatives?) has captured all the politically relevant articles with a fulltime staff.
Stay with me. I hate memorizing randomly generated passwords that have to be changed frequently, and also dont like to record them om a computer or write then down, so I used to memorize equations and constants by converting them to a passphrase and extracting characters and digits to make a password. This way I committed something worth remembering to memory instead of garbage.
So I was going to memorize of the value gas constant R for a password, and not having a reference handy I looked it up on wikipedia. Surely that number is uncontroversial right?
As I read it I realized the value in Wikipedia had to be wrong, because I noticed it was different digits in different units when it should be the same except for a power of ten. (like cgs vs mks).
I looked into the change history, and the middle digit was changed by an edit by an editor with a Chinese sounding name and an ip address that I reverse traced to the Hewlett-Packard campus in the valley.
So my thoughts;
1. can’t even trust physical constants on Wikipedia
2. It could be the usual: censorship and brainwashing,
It could be digital vandalism,
or It could be spycraft, like dead drop indicators (chalk on a sign or rock).
Alex, I’ll take “can’t even trust physical constants on Wikipedia” for $100!