Why does the myth persist that Wikipedia has "hired people who check" articles?

Like many of Wikipedia's "internal public myths," this one can be dated back to 2006, when co-founder Jimbo Wales began to make speeches about "emphasizing quality over quantity" and claiming that a new "advisory board" would help deal with quality and reliability issues. This article in PC Advisor is a good example:

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=6...

The advisory board was eventually created, but of course the people on it are mere names, they don't do anything content-related whatsoever, and they're just as unpaid as everyone else. In fact, most of them know less about Wikipedia's actual problems than the average Wikipedia administrator.

Wikipedia/Wikimedia propaganda has never and will never make it clear that users, administrators, arbitrators, advisory-board members, and other apparatchiks are unpaid, (mostly) anonymous, and non-qualified as reference-publication writers or editors. Unfortunately, lazy journalists see the word "administrator" and "board member" and assume there's money involved, and worse, often simply publish these misleading Wikimedia press releases verbatim.

So, just to be absolutely clear, there are no paid fact-checkers on Wikipedia. You also cannot buy stock in Wikipedia, and Wikipedia does not accept advertising, meaning that there would be no consistent income stream with which to pay fact-checkers even if they wanted to.

There is, however, a great deal of pop culture trivia, porn, defamation about people you've never heard of, and endless arguing about minutiae on Wikipedia - all of which is enough to give it a high Alexa ranking.

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Because people still like how fast and easy Wikipedia is and they don't want to face the fact that it's grossly inaccurate.

I assumed that Wikipedia was user created but they did have "fact checkers" somewhere.

But I have consistently (especially concerning Black celebrities and even some major historical points) seen where there are things on it that are WRONG.

So what you are saying rings true, to me.

I don't know anyone who believes that.

It's an attitude that rather breaks the model. If you don't attempt to fix things yourself, but rather rely on some sort of imaginary fact police, then Wikipedia would never be accurate...

I used to freak out when I seen that I could edit any article I want. But the truth is when your done editing any one else that sees the article can't see it... Only you. It's weird.

Yes this IS a user updated site.Yes it does employ some people. Yes you can invest in the company or buy stock. When a website seemingly knows everything then it retains a certain god status. How could something that almost knows as much as Google be entirely influenced by users? How could the little guy do so much?