page_title: Criticism of Wikipedia
section_title: Lack of methodical fact-checking
hierarchical_section_title: Criticism of Wikipedia / Criticism of content / Accuracy of information / Lack of methodical fact-checking
caption_attribution_description: English: John Seigenthaler Sr. speaking at the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce's "Birmingham Innovation Group" (BIG) in Nashville, Tennessee.
context_page_description: Most criticism of Wikipedia has been directed towards its content, its community of established users, and its processes. The principal criticism it receives concerns the online encyclopedia's factual reliability, the readability and organization of the articles, the lack of methodical fact-checking, and its exposure to political and biased editing. Systemic, gender, racial, and national biases have all been criticized, while corporate campaigns and other conflicts of interest have been highlighted. Further concerns include the vandalism and partisanship facilitated by anonymous editing, clique behavior, social stratification between a guardian class and newer users, excessive rule-making, edit warring, and uneven application of policies.
context_section_description: Inaccurate information that is not obviously false may persist in Wikipedia for a long time before it is challenged. The most prominent cases reported by mainstream media involved biographies of living people.
  The Wikipedia Seigenthaler biography incident demonstrated that the subject of a biographical article must sometimes fix blatant lies about his own life. In May 2005, an anonymous user edited the biographical article on American journalist and writer John Seigenthaler so that it contained several false and defamatory statements. The inaccurate claims went unnoticed from May until September 2005 when they were discovered by Victor S. Johnson Jr., a friend of Seigenthaler. Wikipedia content is often mirrored at sites such as Answers.com, which means that incorrect information can be replicated alongside correct information through a number of web sources. Such information can thereby develop false authority due to its presence at such sites.
  In another example, on March 2, 2007, MSNBC.com reported that then-New York Senator Hillary Clinton had been incorrectly listed for 20 months in her Wikipedia biography as having been valedictorian of her class of 1969 at Wellesley College, when in fact she was not (though she did speak at commencement). The article included a link to the Wikipedia edit, where the incorrect information was added on July 9, 2005. The inaccurate information was removed within 24 hours after the MSNBC.com report appeared.
  Attempts to perpetrate hoaxes may not be confined to editing existing Wikipedia articles, but can also include creating new articles. In October 2005, Alan Mcilwraith, a call center worker from Scotland, created a Wikipedia article in which he wrote that he was a highly decorated war hero.  The article was quickly identified as a hoax by other users and deleted.
  There have also been instances of users deliberately inserting false information into Wikipedia in order to test the system and demonstrate its alleged unreliability. Gene Weingarten, a journalist, ran such a test in 2007, in which he inserted false information into his own Wikipedia article; it was removed 27 hours later by a Wikipedia editor. Wikipedia considers the deliberate insertion of false and misleading information to be vandalism.
caption: American journalist John Seigenthaler, the object of the Seigenthaler incident
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