Found this today. Not quite sure what to make of it, but it seems legit:
"Can Social Networks help the progress of Astrophysics and Cosmology? An experiment in the field of Galaxy Kinematics. By Paolo Salucci"
http://arxiv.org/abs/1004.1190 Submitted: April 2010.
"This paper is crucial part of an experiment aimed to investigate whether Social Networks can be of help for Astrophysics. In the present case, in helping to eliminate the deep- routed wrong misconception of Flat Rotation Curves of Spiral Galaxies, more rapidly and efficiently than the traditional method of publishing peer-reviewed papers and organizing a number of international conferences. To reach this goal we created the Facebook Group "Rotation Curve are not Flat " that we filled with all the evidence necessary for an immediate and definite confrontation with the above fallacious legendary belief. In this paper, we solicit the interested Astrophysicist/Cosmologist FB users to join this group. Finally, the paper informs the Astrophysical Community that a widespread belief is instead an hoax, whose consideration may slow down the progress of science and that must be taken care by innovative means of communicating scientific advances. This test case may anticipate the future in which Web n.0 will become an effective scientific tool for Astrophysics."
and then ...
"In addition, the presumption of perfect flatness of the RCs was incorrectly considered as a consequence of the nature itself of particle dark matter. It was later realized, after the measurement of thousands of high-quality RCs that these rotation curves actually show large variations with radius, and that a similar outcome is predicted within ΛCDM theory the commonly-accepted scenario of galaxy formation. In the early 90s, the FRC paradigm was abandoned by researchers studying galaxy kinematics, but not entirely by the community at large. These more accurate observations came too late, however, the legend had 15 years to spread among the larger scientific community of cosmologists and extragalactic astrophysicists, and has left in it a strong permanent mark. Of course, several papers describing the correct observational scenario were published, but they were outnumbered by works in which the old paradigm was maintained as a generic and casual statement."
i) Do we have any legend believers out there ? and;
ii) I can think of a faster way to test the Social Networking hypothesis ...
Cheers