How a Raccoon Became an Aardvark

So what. At least with The Internet, Google and Wikipedia, we can see this happening. I would bet money the same sort of thing happened in 1880, the Golden Age of Authority. Some intern at Encyclopedia Britainica slipped in a minor edit, The Time cited it, and then (10 years later) E.B. cites The Times to "prove" the "truth" of the minor edit.

This has the stench of old line, mainstream media getting upset about The Internet. Too bad it's so late in the process of demolishing old line, mainstream media, and that it's so level-headed. We could use some Moral Panic to leaven the day.

I bet the average Wikipedia article gets vandalized more often than the average Britannica article did. Probably orders of magnitude more often, even counting only the instances that weren't caught.

I'd take Wikipedia over Britannica any day of the week, but it has its downsides. Two nines of reliability over millions of articles is better for my purposes than three nines over a hundred thousand, but that doesn't make two greater than three.

This is too pat a dismissal – it's intellectually akin to the way “all bugs are shallow” aphorism which is pithy, optimistic and wrong.

While in theory Wikipedia becomes more correct over time, it's not a given and there are many articles which never receive enough expert attention to catch non-flagrant errors. Wikipedia also has the unique problem that it can become less correct over time, whether due to error or deliberate attempts to subvert it for amusement, political or religious reasons, etc. You can verify an article for correctness – itself an uncommon and involved process – and link to it, only to have someone introduce an error by the time your reader visits the page.

It's almost certainly still the case that Wikipedia gets corrected faster than the older review processes but it's not clear that the error rates are as dramatically different as you suggest or that the future for Wikipedia is as uniformly rosy as you assume. Wikipedia might continue to improve or it might fall apart as the hostile culture continues to scare away editors at the same time as it comes under increasingly sophisticated attacks. Subject matter experts often have conflicting time demands and aren't paid to improve Wikipedia while marketers, political operatives, etc. actually can make it their official job.

For the lazy curious, the offending commit: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Coati&diff=2251408...

In standard usage you would only say it is called something if that were commonly used by many people. We don't update the encyclopedia every time the crank at your local coffee-shop comes up with a new pet phrase.