A client once called to say an entry had the wrong founding year. He was right, he had the incorporation papers. The entry cited a magazine profile that had transposed two digits.
What happens next surprises people. The correction is not made because the client knows better; it is made only once a published, reliable source says so. Wikipedia does not adjudicate what is true. It records what is verifiable.
The threshold for inclusion is verifiability, not truth.
This is not pedantry. A private fact, however certain, cannot be checked by a reader with no access to the incorporation papers. A magazine’s error, once printed, is at least checkable, even when wrong.
The fix is not to argue with a volunteer editor. It is to get the correction published somewhere citable, a corrected article, a regulatory filing, an errata notice, and then let the entry follow the record. Wikipedia trails the world; it does not referee it.
