The most erroneous articles currently on Wikipedia

[Lumpy]

I often hear that Wikipedia should not be taken as necessarily correct or authoritative. Can anyone post some links to current articles that are good examples of why Wiki should not be believed uncritically?

[Shot From Guns]

How about the pages listed under Category:NPOV disputes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAT:NPOV)?

[Biffy the Elephant Shrew]

Sequence of performances at Woodstock (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodstock#Performing_artists_and_sequence_of_events). The Incredible String Band did not perform on the first day (they were originally scheduled to do so, but postponed their set until the second day because of rain); Melanie's "Birthday of the Sun" is not listed in her set even though the song appeared on the Woodstock 2 album; there are several discrepencies in the order of the acts on the second day compared to more authoritative lists.

[Ponderoid]

In a perfect world, every single error that is mentioned as an answer to the OP's question should become a former error, right here, right now. If you know that there is an error in a Wikipedia article, and you can prove it, don't just complain about it on some other message board. There's a nice handy "edit" button at the top of every article. Please use it. :)

*** Ponder

[Keeve]

See their page about Paul McCartney (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Paul_McCartney&oldid=296804864), which claims in the very first line that he was born in 1842.

Fortunately, that page has been fixed, and now shows his correct birthdate in 1942.

[BorgHunter]

Can anyone post some links to current articles that are good examples of why Wiki should not be believed uncritically?
Nothing should be believed uncritically. Question everything.

That's how I see it, anyway.

[Bad Astronaut]

A related point that can be mentioned here is the study (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4530930.stm), published in Nature in 2005, that concluded Wikipedia's science articles do not have significantly more errors than Encyclopedia Brittanica.

Of course in Britannica you won't occasionally find an edition stating that the population of African elephants has tripled in the last decade :)

[Quercus]

It's not (as far as I know) an erroneous article itself, but there's some information about other wikipedia articles (such as elephants) that suffer from occasional innaccuracy at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_in_culture#Wikiality

[troub]

I know someone who once completely made up an entire article about an obscure colonial conflict between fishermen and bankers (again, totally made-up). Complete with fake citations, and very well-written in general. He figured it would be received skeptically and discovered quickly as a ruse. Much to all of our amazement, that article stayed there for years (it was just recently deleted as a hoax, as a matter of fact). It becomes point #1 in our arguments for why the accuracy of Wikipedia shouldn't be blindly trusted.

[Cerowyn]

A related point that can be mentioned here is the study (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4530930.stm), published in Nature in 2005, that concluded Wikipedia's science articles do not have significantly more errors than Encyclopedia Brittanica.That study was roundly criticized for not weighting errors according to significance. A quick search of The Register's website (www.theregister.co.uk) will find the relevant dispute reported.

[Bad Astronaut]

That study was roundly criticized for not weighting errors according to significance. A quick search of The Register's website (www.theregister.co.uk) will find the relevant dispute reported.
Very Interesting. The article is here (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/23/britannica_wikipedia_nature_study/).

But Nature sent only misleading fragments of some Britannica articles to the reviewers, sent extracts of the children's version and Britannica's "book of the year" to others, and in one case, simply stitched together bits from different articles and inserted its own material, passing it off as a single Britannica entry.

Quite damning for Nature. Unfortunately the article does not make it clear where The Register got their information from.

[CC]

Nothing should be believed uncritically.
Even the above, presumably. Where does that leave us?

[Indistinguishable]

You should believe "Nothing should be believed uncritically" to the extent that rational analysis shows it to be a trustworthy principle. The idea isn't "You should consider everything false"; it's just "Don't turn off your critical thinking".

[ZenBeam]

Very Interesting. The article is here (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/23/britannica_wikipedia_nature_study/).

Quite damning for Nature. Unfortunately the article does not make it clear where The Register got their information from.Here's the Britannica response to the Nature article (PDF) (http://corporate.britannica.com/britannica_nature_response.pdf). Interesting reading. Does anyone know, did Nature ever respond to these criticisms?

Also, from the Britannica response:
Contrary to the usual practice of making all data freely available in order
to facilitate a study’s replication by others, Nature declined our repeated requests
to make the full reports available.Did Nature ever make the full reports available?

[Alex_Dubinsky]

Nothing should be believed uncritically.Even the above, presumably. Where does that leave us?It's conceivable that some things should be believed uncritically. Obviously.

[Terminus Est]

Nature's rebuttal to Britannica's criticisms (http://www.nature.com/nature/britannica/eb_advert_response_final.pdf) [PDF].

[bump]

A professorial friend of mine commented to me that from what he can tell, most academic subjects' Wikipedia pages are pretty accurate because the grad students in the various disciplines tend to make vanity-style pages about their focused field of study, and also peer review the others.

As for more generic stuff, from what I can tell, it's reasonably accurate, but what kills me is when some non-native English speaker writes an article and mangles the language in the process, making the article hard to read and confusing. Then, when someone edits the article to make the fucking thing make sense, they edit it right back to the Engrish version.

[DrDeth]

In a perfect world, every single error that is mentioned as an answer to the OP's question should become a former error, right here, right now. If you know that there is an error in a Wikipedia article, and you can prove it, don't just complain about it on some other message board. There's a nice handy "edit" button at the top of every article. Please use it. :)

*** Ponder

Every time I edit a Wiki page, even for a typo, some "editor" changes it back.

[Keeve]

Every time I edit a Wiki page, even for a typo, some "editor" changes it back.I've been editing for several years. About 95% of my changes stay with no argument at all.

[Blake]

In a perfect world, every single error that is mentioned as an answer to the OP's question should become a former error, right here, right now. If you know that there is an error in a Wikipedia article, and you can prove it, don't just complain about it on some other message board. There's a nice handy "edit" button at the top of every article. Please use it.

Tried it. It can't be done. I'll give you one examples of why, and they are also, IMO, prime examples of what the OP is looking for.

The article on commercial hemp (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemp). You can't trust a damn thing in there. Almost all the references come from pro-hemp websites or 100 year old material.

It's persistently full of the usual pro-weed nonsense about hemp not needing herbicides, hemp not having any pests and do forth. A few years ago I decided to try to correct the article. I didn't remove any claim, I simply inserted references from agriculture journals and agriculture departments worldwide that stated worldwide that hemp isn't pest free, doesn't fix nitrogen and so forth. The additions I made were deleted and bowdlerised persistently for several months until I gave up. And today the article seems just as crappy and erroneous as it was then based on the first few paragraphs.

Another saga was prompted by a debate here in SDMB 3 or 4 years ago about whether forests produce oxygen. Someone linked to some Wiki article which claimed they did (reference: some kids education site hosted by a paper mill or something). I corrected the error with references to journals (including Nature), US senate reports, university websites and so forth. But because everybody knows that forests produce oxygen every week when I went back the changes had been removed, usually with a comment like "This can't be true!!!!. After a couple of months I gave up.

And these are both examples of issues of fact that are not disputed by the authorities in the field. But it's impossible to correct the errors.

But if anybody wants to play a game, I'll provide some highly reputable references for those claims and we can put them in. And then we'll see how long it takes before they are removed. Based on experience I say they'll be gone in a week at the outside.

Essentially on anything that is even vaguely controversial/emotional you can't trust Wikipedia worth a damn.

[LSLGuy]

Every time I edit a Wiki page, even for a typo, some "editor" changes it back.I've had similar. Self-appointed page Nazis have driven me away from providing anything of value. Then again, for areas I know something about, the articles are broadly accurate at their scale of detail. So I don't see Wiki as a disaster for lack of my participation.

[Cugel]

One day everyone editing WP will be junk editors, who just monitor new edits waiting for something to revert, signing unsigned comments, filling articles with {{fact}}s, inserting useless banner boxes etc.

[Neptunian Slug]

The only reason Wikipedia hasn't collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity is that the people who vandalize articles with false information aren't particularly smart. That and there are so many bullshit articles that actually finding mistakes in legitimate articles is like looking for a molecule of gold in a landfill.

If you went to President Obama's article and put out there that he was caught molesting young boys, that would get flagged in a matter of minutes. But instead of picking a high profile figure, go pick an obscure Congressman from Minnesota who dies 80 years ago. Odds are the article is only a few lines long. Expand the article tenfold with real information. Reference the hell out of it with good sources. Then right in the middle of the article, write that Congressman Schmoe was fond of molesting children. I'll bet you that it won't get caught for months. 90% of the experienced editors are busy fighting over the meaning of the word "convicted" in Donte's Stallworth's article or whether or not some obscure pizza joint in Spokane is notable enough for an article.

For a while I thought that if you wiped about half the articles on Wikipedia and placed a moratorium on new articles, then editors could focus on actually improving the existing knowledge base. Then I realized that 90% of the morons out there would probably abandon the project because they can't live without the drama.

The answer is that you will never know what the most erroneous article is because no one has cared enough to find it.