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Old 05-09-2009, 10:15 AM   #35
sirbruce
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Most errors on Wikipedia fall into two categories:

1. Major unrelated to the substance of the article. This is easily seen and usually corrected in a matter of minutes.

2. Minor vandalism which may be related to the substance of the article but which is quite obviously absurd on the face of it. These sorts of errors may take longer to correct but again are usually evident just by reading.

A vandal is extremely unlikely to make a more subtle change; for example, changing a number slightly or replacing a scientific word with another. Even so, these are usually seen and corrected.

The chances of a student citing such an article, during the relatively small window of time it's vandalized, and not noticing the error based on context or other reading at the time are extremely small.

This leaves original mistakes by the article author in factual information, which then has to pass through many, many different others who never notice it. This can happen, but again, the chances are very low, and are just as likely to happen in other encyclopedias or reference works.
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