Lots of Wikipedia articles have become well-cited but that façade begins to break down as we dive into more niche topics. Editor wars are real and impossible to resolve most of the time due to how obsessive the involved parties are. Some of them are rather damaging to what narrative is being shaped on some of these articles. The power to control edit access rests in a small group of administrators/moderators who are relatively anonymous. This has served the site well so far but could be a weak point should something occur in the future that fundamentally challenges the integrity of Wikipedia.

> Lots of Wikipedia articles have become well-cited but that façade begins to break down as we dive into more niche topics.

A lot of the time they're just making the citation up. Wikipedia's page on French toast says this:

> The earliest known reference to French toast is in the Apicius, a collection of Latin recipes dating to the 1st century CE, where it is described as simply aliter dulcia 'another sweet dish.'[8] The recipe says to "Break [slice] fine white bread, crust removed, into rather large pieces which soak in milk [and beaten eggs] fry in oil, cover with honey and serve".[9]

The problem is that the reference to eggs doesn't exist in the Apicius. It comes from an "augmented translation" that was written in 1936; the eggs are original content from that "translation". The sidebar's claim that French toast originates in the Roman empire is a lie, and so is the claim that French toast appears in the Apicius.

This has been noted on the associated talk page forever, but (apparently) so what?

More on the obscure end of things, I'm also annoyed by the page on Chen Shimei ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Shimei_and_Qin_Xianglian ). It claims that Chen Shimei, a stock dramatic character which the page itself dates to 1594, is represents an attempt at character assassination against an official of the Qing dynasty, which began in the mid-17th century.

The claim (that the fictional character is based on a historical person) used to be cited to a newspaper article which did not itself cite anything. That citation has since been removed, but the claim lives on in the page without even a fig leaf citation.

Great examples and I absolutely agree. The problem here is the lack of visibility/attention due to these topics being extremely niche and largely inconsequential to the real world, yet a matter of principle for a site that tries to present its contents as factual knowledge. Sometimes it takes just one extremely dedicated user to completely lock down any changes on a particular topic and I've experienced this too.

You can fix these errors if you want to. Anyone can edit Wikipedia.

How would I fix the errors? I know Wikipedia is lying to me. I can delete the information, which is pretty likely to get reverted. But I can't replace it with correct information; I have no idea when the idea of bread fried in eggs is first documented, and I have no idea whether or not the stock character of Chen Shimei is based on a historical person. For all I know Wikipedia is lying about the publication date of the story they cite. It's more likely they're lying about the character being based on a historical person, or the time when that person lived, but I can't tell, because there's no reference to anything I could look up.

You can add a "not in citation" or "dubious" tag to the reference that's there, or another cleanup tag: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Template_index/Clean.... A lot of Wikipedia articles are waiting for someone with the right references to come along (or for the right reference to come into existence), and until then the best anyone can do is insert warnings that the article is poorly cited.

I added {{failed verification}} to the French toast article. That was immediately reverted. What's the process for correcting Wikipedia again?

Generally agree, although I've noticed a lot more normative language creep into articles ("unfortunately", "unluckily", "helpfully", etc) that really have no place in a resource purporting to be encyclopaedic.