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From 15 January 2013 to 17 January 2024, the section Condom § Lambskin contained a very dangerous misrepresentation. While empirical studies show that lambskin condoms are ineffective at preventing the transmission of certain STIs, particularly viruses such as HIV, the article falsely claimed that this is an assumption or untested hypothesis.
There's no way to know the damage that this decade-long falsification did, although some Fermi estimation suggests it probably didn't cause anyone to get HIV.[a] I was curious to know, though, if our article had been cited by anyone advocating such condoms as safe. A Twitter search turned up nothing obvious, but I did find this great burn on Wikipedia from 2011:
@juryk trying for tell me that wikipedia is reliable.. Sure and so is lambskin condoms
I don't know if Joey Poai, the author of that tweet, knew how great an analogy they were making. The problem with lambskin condoms isn't that they don't work at all. It's that they miss the small things, and the small things are the most dangerous. The same is true of Wikipedia. If that section had said "Lambskin condoms are more effective than latex condoms", it would have been reverted pretty quickly. We catch the big things. But a subtle lie, one that can insidiously worm its way through an article like an HIV virus through the pores of a sheep-derived intestinal membrane, we still are ill-equipped to catch. And like small viruses, small lies damage our reputation—and potentially, our readers' safety—in much bigger ways than big ones.
On the other side of the analogy, the solution is simple: Use a better form of barrier protection. What is Wikipedia's equivalent of that? What is our latex or polyurethane condom against misinformation and disinformation?
The sad truth is there is no easy fix. But there is a hard one, one that you as an editor can start implementing now: Read every article critically. Don't assume that everything stated authoratatively is true. Be on the lookout for implausible claims or apparent contradictions. See where the sources go. Just because 1,000 editors have looked over the same statement does not mean it's correct. We may not have the same prophylactic options as the human body, but you can be our immune system.
Notes
edit- ^ Specifically: Based on readership statistics, HIV rates in the countries that most read Wikipedia, and a few wild guesses as to decisionmaking, there have probably been a few cases of someone reading the section, deciding to use a lambskin condom instead of safer barrier protection because of it, and then engaging in a sexual encounter where there was a risk of HIV transmission, but HIV transmission rates (which are relatively low, not that anyone should ever bank on that!) and the relatively high baseline transmission risk due to condom misuse tip the estimated number of excess infections to below 1.