History of Pepper

It's history. There's bound to be vagaries of interpretation for different authors. But even given your source it doesn't seem so much inaccurate as mostly corroborated

  > De Vries attributes this decline to the loss of the spice trade

And regarding the date I don't think you can over specify the meaning of the article's sentence on Venice to induce an inaccuracy.

Vasco de Gama’s discovery of a sea-route to the spice lands ... in 1498 ... destroyed the economies of Alexandria, Genoa and Venice

Sure, you could read that as: "Venice's economy was destroyed the moment de Gama set foot on the spice lands", but it seems an equally, if not more, valid reading (and much more generous and reasonable), to assume what is meant is that de Gama's discovery eventually destroyed those economies...as in, it was an inflection point that tipped the scales in Portugal's favor and helped begin the processes that directly lead to the incumbents' declines.

Reasonable given that no one expects economies of empires to be destroyed overnight. With empire-scale reserves, and monopoly advantages the process could reasonably take a century, of course (and a century being roughly the span from 1498 to the 17th century). And generous given that, since the decline date is so easily found on a resource as common as Wikipedia, it's unlikely they are mistaken by not being erudite enough.

The lack of elaborating temporal detail is even less damning, given the economy the article seems to want to take with words, sparing a mere two sentences on large swathes of history. With this sort of compact language, who can expect them to pedantically agonize over removing every possible divergent interpretation, and achieve unequivocal precision?

I think the more likely situation is the article is perfectly accurate on that point, and you've simply read an inaccuracy into it by misinterpreting the authors' omission of absolute precision as error.

Apologies, it looks like I indeed misunderstood what you were trying to convey.