@opphunter88 Edits propagate by accident all the time. Just look at academia I can give examples where entire fields were predicated on single studies done decades ago, and those studies were bullshit. They couldn't be reproduced or they were just wrong. There might have been a conspiracy, but you don't even need one. I've seen it first hand in many contexts, and I'm going to give you a very funny, but secular example.

You can stop reading here if you just want to take my word for it, but I am going to get into the long form of this.

One of the hobbies I have are tabletop role-playing games and my favorite tabletop role-playing game for very many years was World of Darkness. If you've ever seen Vampire: the Masquerade, the video games about it etc, then you know what I'm talking about, but world of darkness and compasses all the other common supernatural critters that you can play in that game as well. Now, there's sort of a culture behind these games. People write their own homebrew rules and pass those documents around online as PDFs. Some of these house rules and homebrew mechanics that people made up get traction. People edit these documents, they splice other people's work into their own, and so on.

One of the big "splats" in this game line is Mage: the Awakening. In it, you play as a wizard and the key game mechanic is that you can kind of make up your own spells on the fly but there are constraints that sort of limit what you can do based on your character's stats. Anyway, there's a kind of book that the players of this game pass around called a grimoire, which is a book of spells that people made up. These aren't real spells, like things you do in real life, it's just a game, but they group them together.

There are a handful of spells that I wrote which appear in basically everybody's grimoire. A lot of the spells I wrote, people who played this game thought were radiotic. But a handful of them everyone seems to like, and everybody's grimoire seems to have them, to the extent that people consistently presuppose that these spells I made up in my basement apartment playing this game online, think are canon. Like you need to correct people on this topic because they think the original game authors really wrote them and are taken aback when they check the official manual and they're nowhere to be found.

This is a very secular example of what I'm describing, and it took place without any kind of conspiracy. Things propagate all the time and it's a crap shoot which ones are real and which ones aren't.

@caekislove