To my amusement, the Battle of Midway articles in Japanese and in every other language are different. Very different. While the Battle of Midway articles in the other languages are derived from the English one, the Japanese one accounts for a different story of the battle, one more similar to Parshall and Tully's Shattered Sword.

For one thing, the Japanese point of view contains a full battle analysis section, step-by-step blaming everything from the fleet composition, the fleet formation, the optimism of the IJA, the Aleutian operation, poor carrier doctrine, poor damage control, Nagumo, and so forth. It also blames the Japanese reconnaissance heavy cruiser Chikuma's floatplane for not spotting and reporting the American fleet, as opposed to the US version which blames that of the Japanese cruiser Tone. It has over 500 citations to the US's 147. And the US story of the battle reads as if somebody had read Shattered Sword and belatedly tacked on a few points to the original story. The Japanese version on the other hand probably has a better explanation of the American side of the battle than the Americans did. It's partly why I find it so amusing when people tell me that Japan prefers to forget about their defeat in World War II-they damn themselves in that article far more than anybody else I've seen.

The wikipedia pages for my specialty are awful. But it also feels unfair to critique them, as my field is so new. But I'm going to do it anyways.

For example the page on Erotic Literature lumps together ancient writers such as Sappho and Catullus (without distinguishing between them or their very different styles and purposes). Then it jumps right to the 17th and 18th centuries--skipping over the person a different wikipedia article names as "the inventor of modern literate pornography."

You'd think they'd add Aretino to the Erotic Literature page if they were going to link to it in the first paragraph.

Another example is the page on the Society for the Suppression of Vice which is wrong on so many points. For example:

The Society was founded by William Wilberforce following a Royal Proclamation by George III in 1787 the Proclamation for the Discouragement of Vice, on the urging of Wilberforce, as a remedy for the rising tide of immorality

That would be incorrect, as Wilberforce actually founded the Proclamation Society, and opened it to church leaders and upper class individuals. The SSV was founded because the middle classes felt like the Proclamation Society was useless and was not being nearly aggressive or active enough--the SSV brought dozens and dozens of cases to court in their first six months, in comparision to the Proclamation Society's three or four in a few years.

Then the entry goes on to say

The Obscene Publications Act came into force in September 1857, superseding the 1787 Proclamation.

Completely failing to mention that the SSV spent fifty years advocating and pushing for this law--it's not like they were just eliminated by this law, they helped to write and advocate for it, and pushed it through a very reluctant House of Commons. They found it necessary because their lobbied amendments to the 1824 and 1838 Vagrancy Acts were not useful in prosecuting pornography.

It end by saying

The Society was absorbed into the National Vigilance Association in August 1885.[12][citation needed]

Citation needed indeed--the Society was not asorbed into the NVA at all, they had ceased to exist before that date. They were two very different groups with different purposes...but that's another paper.

While the Wiki page on Carthage is pretty awful already, the subpage "List of monarchs of Carthage" is downright wrong.

Until 308 BC Carthage was ruled, at least officially, by monarchs, in the sense of the word that executive power was held by one person. It also seems for the time period below to have been passed down in the clan of the Magonids. The title itself was most likely Suffete.

How wrong is it? Well, Carthage never possessed a monarchy. Experts agree nearly unanimously on this issue. To be sure, Greek sources do give the title "king" (βασιλεύς) to various prominent Carthaginians, but it appears quite obvious from the literary and epigraphic evidence on the whole that "king" (βασιλεύς) merely represents an approximation of the Punic špṭ (Latinized as suffete) meaning "judge"--an office more equivalent in function to the Roman consulship (two annually-elected špṭm served concurrently)--rather than mlk meaning "king." Even more egregious, a Punic inscription dated to c. 450 BC (around the time when Greek sources start mentioning Carthaginian "kings") records "the twentieth year of the rule of the špṭm (suffetes) in Carthage," which means, of course, that Carthage's republican constitution was already in effect. So contrary to what the blurb above says, Carthage was not ruled by kings "in the sense of the word that executive power was held by one person," nor were these imaginary kings called suffetes, a title which actually belongs to the city's chief elected magistrates.

All of our sources (admittedly quite limited) suggest that, before the establishment of the suffeteship, Carthage was under the administration of its senate (the "Mighty [Ones]," or ’drm in Punic). Tyrian senators supposedly accompanied Elissa-Dido during her exile, further evidence that the foundation of Carthage represented an official enterprise sanctioned by Elissa's brother King Pygmalion (pgmlyn in Phoenician), and Tyre may also have appointed a governor (skn) over Carthage, which was apparently the practice at her other colonies.

Misconceptions about the nature of Carthaginian government seem to have stemmed largely from the French archaeologists Gilbert Charles-Picard and Colette Picard, a husband-wife team who wrote a number of popular books (translated into English) on Carthage in the 1960s. The Picards subscribed to some rather antiquated notions, believing, for example, that the Carthaginians, "like all Semites," suffered from religious fanaticism and were less capable of grasping the finer points of aesthetics and philosophy (they also underwent some detrimental influence through the local African population, who were "by nature allergic to technical activity, and also to practical intellectual disciplines which seek to discover natural laws and to make use of them to improve the lot of man"). Naturally, Carthaginian government needed to evolve from "simple institutions [=priestly kingship], similar to those of other Semitic peoples, to a complex system which Aristotle was right to compare to the constitutions of the Greek city-states." Other scholars (particularly Semitists) routinely criticized the Picards, especially on the question of kingship, but the damage had already been done. You can observe this on the main Wiki page, which lists "Monarchy until 308 BC, Republic thereafter" under "Government."

I've pointed this out before, but the articles for Aristophanes, all his plays, and Greek Comedy in general are superb. Far, far better than they should be. They are extensively cited with regards to the primary source material and delve in detail to the context, poetic forms and other aspects of the plays. I have a theory that editing the Wikipedia page may have been a class project from a Classics professor teaching a course on Old Comedy, because the pages are in many ways as good if not better than many introductions to translations I have seen.

The worst article, almost hilariously so, is the one of the Medes. Not because it is poorly written or presents information poorly, but because it is a fantasy. The article as a whole is based on Herodotus' account of the Medean Empire, which most historians and archaeologists today and for a few decades have agreed was a giant misunderstanding of the complex situation in Mesopotamia. So while the information is true to Herodotus, it is somewhat like having an extensive article on Arthur's Empire based on Geoffrey of Monmouth.

To my continuing surprise and relief, the articles on Pius XII and his actions during the Holocaust aren't terrible. You would think that would be a low standard to meet, but given that I find most of the books on the subject to be terrible the fact that Wikipedia hasn't fallen into either the anti- or pro- Pius camps is somewhat remarkable. Both articles feature a couple hundred references, largely featuring the major works on the subject. Both articles have good bibliographies. Largely the articles consist of snippets of those major works, which is good. For all the vitriol that is usually spewed over this subject the treatment given to Pius XII is fairly reasoned and well-sourced.

The Spanish Civil War article is a good overview of an immensely complicated subject. José Antonio Aguirre's article is pretty good as well. The Civil War article is a bit thin on the ideological underpinnings of the various groups, but you could go on for dozens of pages on that subject to be honest (and Paul Preston does, for instance). The article on Archbishop Gomá is quite lacking, as is that of Father Tusquets. Wikipedia in general seems to struggle with people that contribute to ideology (at least in the fields I work with), so it may be a general problem with the medium rather than neglect.

Overall Wikipedia deals with these two subjects pretty darned well, especially given the fact that these subjects are usually debated by non-historians to make current political gains. With brevity being the worst offense I have to consider myself lucky--others will have far more questions based on bad Wiki articles than I will.

They seem to have (largely) fixed it, but the article on Etruscan was for some time absolute garbage. They finally got around to really overhauling it when this particular asshat who runs a particularly annoying pseudo-linguistics site jumped on and redid the entire article with whatever garbage "theories" (if you can call his ass-backwards arguments that--they weren't even speculation, since he couldn't provide any actual reason why he might think some of the things he said) he could spew, and then aggressively made ad hominem attacks on anybody who called him out (they banned him, and later when he raised his ugly head here we were forced to ban him as well). Even so, the article still has some...questionable information on it. Which is not surprising, given the fact that we really don't know much about the language, but at least Wikipedia could try to point out that these "theories" are usually speculatory at best.

Classics articles in general on Wikipedia tend to use either information which is outdated by at least 50 years (and often which wasn't even completely accepted back then either) or knew theories which they claim are promising but untested and which generally nobody besides journalists take seriously.

I'd like to ask: Do any of you ever attempt to correct wikipedia? I mean, I understand that you have real lives, busy ones, and it would be a monumental effort to correct some large fraction of it... but do you ever get the urge to go in and change those 3 sentences that are just abysmally wrong?

And if you do this on occasion, do those changes remain or are they reverted?

The wikipedia page for Haitian Vodou is actually pretty darn good. KONSABA and some dedicated practitioners (there is some overlap) really took it upon themselves to fix it. It isn't perfect and it gets vandalized frequently, but it is a pretty good starting place and the reference list is great. There are a few things missing from the history section, though. They discuss the importance of enslaved peoples from the Kongo on the religious practices but they don't talk about the syncretism/creolization that occurred in the Kongo prior to being brought to San Domingue (see: historian John Thornton's work). The history section is also missing a lot about the interactions and issues between Vodou and the Catholic Church (see: Kate Ramsey's work.) Lastly, I think it needs to go into depth more about the changes that happened when Vodou went from rural to urban (see: Liza McAlister's work.)

Like others I have found editing to be a frustrating experience. But maybe I'll add some of my own photographs in the future so that there are some more recent ones. In general, I am impressed considering how bad most of the information about Haitian Vodou is when you just go searching online.

Wikipedia tends to include tremendously minority views in the mainstream, because it's hard to figure out what the consensus is. Take this section as an example. It makes three points:

1. The traditional view is that Yiddish evolved from Middle High German

• Weinreich did a scholarly treatment of this
• This would've happened in the Rhine
• The other view is that Yiddish is relexified Sorbian
• This would've occurred with migrations of the Khazars

But this is a massively massively massively wrong understanding of scholarship. The Slavic relexification hypothesis is tiny. It's just Wexler. Case in point, in one paper arguing it, half his citations are to himself. He also has a bit of a pattern--he thinks damn near everything is relexified. Modern Hebrew is relexified Yiddish, Ladino is relexified Arabic, etc.

So it's really the "consensus view" and the "one guy" views, which absolutely should not be equated. Even Wexler's papers acknowledge he's in the minority, and Katz once referred graciously to Wexler's work as "adding flavor to the debate of Yiddish origins". What's more, the actual active debate in the origin of Yiddish is totally ignored. Katz, who is mentioned, actually thinks Yiddish originated along the Danube, and has published papers to that effect. But that is ignored.

Personally, I have no interest in getting in edit wars with proponents of theories. I do correct clear factual errors. Wikipedia once said that in the Boston dialect, "start" was pronounced /stɑ:t/ (along with park, car, yard, etc). It isn't. The fact that that vowel is actually /a:/ in Boston is a defining characteristic of the dialect, which is used by Labov to define what Eastern New England English is.

Similarly, wikipedia used to claim that John Kerry was a speaker of Boston Brahmin English. That's just wrong. He doesn't. 5 minutes on youtube can prove it. The claim was cited, but the citations did not actually say it--one was an article about how Kerry grew up wealthy, but not as part of the classical Brahmin class (which is the opposite of what wiki implied. If you're not from that class you probably don't have the dialect), and another had a parenthetical about him having a Boston accent (which isn't the same thing).

But who knows how many articles have similar errors, and those are just the obvious factual wrong ones I bother fixing.

edit: Other than that, more niche linguistics articles are pretty good.

The Wikipedia page on the Quaternary extinctions event(the global extinction of pleistocene megafauna in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene) is actually very good. It provides a balanced and thorough discussion of the competing hypotheses - overkill, climate change, disease, second order predation, and comet impact. Each hypothesis is described adequately for an encyclopedia and counter arguments are provided. It is well sourced, with up to date references by prominent authors.

My favorite examples of horrid wiki entries are the ones for Native American tribes in Northern California, e.g. Hupa, Yurok and Karuk. These pages contain virtually no information, glaring errors and very few references - mostly dated and tertiary. A classic example of utter nonsense is the first sentence in the history section of the Hupa. Here it states that the Hupa migrated from the north to Hoopa Valley about 1000CE. Although it provides a source, A Native American Encyclopedia, Oxford Press 2000, this is not a settled issue. It is, at best, casual conjecture. Given that the history section is two short paragraphs, the shortcomings are glaring. The same can be said for the wiki pages for the other tribes.

Edit: links

As a regular contributor (though not so much recently) I like to think that the articles where I work the most in, ice hockey, are alright. Without focusing on ones I've specifically added a large amount of information, I know there are quite a few dedicated individuals who actively scour newspaper archives and books to improve articles, including a large number of retired players/historic events.

Now obviously many current players/teams/whatnot pages are subject to random issues that plague nearly any contemporary topic, but the historic ones are not bad, and if I may boast a little, are probably some of the most complete sources of information anywhere about some players/topics, either in print or online.

not entirely sure if this is allowed, but in rosemary85's post, she mentions

I hasten to add that primary sources are not forbidden by Wikipedia policy[1] ; but some policies[2] do firmly declare that one should not "analyze, synthesize, interpret, or evaluate material found in a primary source yourself; instead, refer to reliable secondary sources that do so." This is the opposite of what historians and philologists actually do.

is this what we call historiography? referring to secondary sources that do analysis, comparing various secondary sources to conduct a more throrough analysis, etc.?

while the analysis of primary sources is "actual" history?

This one.

There's no mention of the overflights of Dimona that took place on May 17 by Egypt, which heavily contributed to the alarm.

This section makes no mention of the support for fedayeen guerrilla sabotage operations in Israel by the Arab states destabilizing the border. Only one passing remark U Thant made about the guerrillas is mentioned, and Syria's response. Jordan and Egypt were also involved, near the end, with allowing guerrillas to operate out of their borders.

There's hardly a single mention of Operation Dawn, Nasser's and Amr's (Egypt's) cancelled plan to attack Israel on the 27th of May. There's no mention of how the intervention by the Soviets got them to stop, how close it was to happening, etc...

There's also not a mention of Egypt's and Jordan's Arab Conference plans (with Syria, who they do mention) to divert the Jordan river themselves. It only mentions Syria doing it "in response" to Israel doing it (which is true, but leaves out a lot of the events and two key players).

Israel would retaliate with raids on Syrian positions, including the use of air power

This makes it sound like this was common. Air power was very rare, and used only sparingly. Eshkol only used air power in the incident they mention because Syrian artillery barrages hadn't stopped and showed no sign of stopping in a border flareup, and they were out of range of tanks from my understanding.

There's a gigantic paragraph of speculation with one cite for the whole thing. And Mutawi's book, from my understanding, relies on interviews made over 30 years after the war, which doesn't lend itself to favorable conclusions as far as memory go.

Hardly any mention of just how influential Dayan was, how Israel feared going to war without an ally, none of that. Dayan practically made the decision to go to war, there's no mention of him in the cabinet reshuffle. They mention Rabin's breakdown, but nothing about how Weizman was so influential just like Dayan in getting the plans together, and almost launched an attack himself that Eshkol didn't OK on the 26th (I believe that was the day) of May. No mention of the Mossad chief meeting with the US before the war. Barely any mention of how Amer put in horrible generals due to playing favorites, or how ardently he pushed war. No mention of how the Foreign Ministry didn't get the memo from the chief of staff, they just insist Egypt mobilized anyways. And there's no mention of the propaganda campaign meant to lull the Egyptians into a false sense of security, where troops were pictured on vacation (and a few thousand given leave), then the pictures were sent world-wide to press organizations. And there's the whole "No one's even around to conduct a war, relax" type of comments coming out of Israel, to the point that generals were reportedly playing tennis in Egypt when the airstrikes hit.

It's not the worst, but it's the little things that irk me. Never bothered with editing all this in, though.

You'd think it would be more thorough, but Cinéma Vérité.

I've written extensively on the roots of this topic for my Film degree--primarily Dziga Vertov's early work.

Monoskop, among many others, appear to be better sources for this sort of information.

http://monoskop.org/Dziga_Vertov