I can say that by and large the Wikipedia articles about me and my work are accurate. Sometimes errors slip in but they are not fabrications, and generally quickly corrected.
Speaking with my historian’s hat on I very rarely read a wikipedia article in my corner of the field that doesn’t contain errors. That said, use it pretty much on a daily basis …
There was a great study long before generative AI that asked people who were knowledgeable in certain subjects to rate the perceived trustworthiness of Wikipedia articles and basically they all said they trusted it on the subjects they knew, but not the subjects they didn’t know.
This is why I gained an enormous amount of skepticism about the news media - every time an article or broadcast talks about something I have personal knowledge of, they get easy stuff wrong. Like, they say X happened on Tuesday and I was *there* and it was actually a Monday, except in Kirabati.
I wrote a weekly column about odd Wikipedia articles for 8 years, and despite the steady drumbeat of "Wikipedia is riddled with inaccuracies," I only came across two or three in all that time. Nearly all the mistakes I found were grammatical.
