Your progression is basically the exact same progression as things like Wikipedia, and web search in ggeneral. So, I guess we dont need to hypothesis. Just look around and see how its played out.
How many people take the first result on Google as gospel when looking things up?
Google search and Wikipedia both started out being fairly reliable to their source of truth.
Google pretty much guaranteed that their top results were relevant to the search query. And wikipedia had an army of people making sure everything was backed up by the references.
Crucially, neither claimed to be an arbiter of truth.