I mostly fact check and do notable research for obscure Wikipedia articles. This is usually a no drama environment sure I have helped delete articles that later became notable and removed true facts lacking sources. Many of these things have fixed themselves over time. My biggest fear with Wikipedia is citogenesis https://xkcd.com/978/ I have found one in a major news paper, this took three months to take down.
There has been a little bit of furor in some circles in Japan, regarding the status of Yasuke, who was a favorite of Oda Nobunaga, whether he was a samurai or not. Around September of 2015, a user by the name tottoritom made numerous edits to the Yasuke article, citing to yet-to-be-published papers by Thomas Lockley. Coincidentally, tottoritom's user page introduces himself as Thomas Lockley too, and Lockley happened to also have lived in Tottori. After some time, the citations were changed to refer to a book that Lockley published in Japan (in Japanese). (Now, if the two are indeed one and same person, he has broken a Wikipedia rule on not publishing original research.)
The book become a basis for a romanticized novel he published for western audiences, which I believe inspired the production of Netflix animation for the same character. From then on, the view that Yasuke was a samurai gained foothold, which caught some Japanese historians off-guard.
He's also had his hand on the Britannica article of the same title, and now Wikipedia cites the Britannica article too, thus completing the cycle.
I find it odd that Yasuke would be a Samurai, when Toyotomi Hideyoshi, one of the three unifiers and a general under Nobunaga, was not.
After unifying Japan in 1590, Toyotomi Hideyoshi did not become Shogun because he was born a peasant. Only Samurai could become Shogun, and Hideyoshi was famously not one. You couldn't become a samurai, you had to be born one.
I edit a bit and it seems mostly accurate but I've followed covid origins for a while and the bit "While other explanations, such as speculations that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a laboratory have been proposed, such explanations are not supported by evidence." isn't really true. There is evidence but for some reason they only want to cite papers from the scientific establishment saying the scientific establishment is innocent.
Anything even slightly controversial across political lines cannot be trusted. Math and technical topics that don't address any drama or controversy are usually fine for reference, but there are almost always better resources if you're trying to learn about a topic from scratch.
No. I usually edit directly in Wikipedia, my edits are sourced and uncontroversial I try not to deal with the bureaucracy. I took the time to contact the original news outlet and they did the correction pretty fast, Wikipedia had been referencing a secondary sources and those were not that helpful. About five emails, maybe four hours of my time.
