If the inaccuracy is provable by evidence found in what Wikipedians consider to be reliable sources, then you can just remove or correct the claim, citing the appropriate source, and if there is a dispute it gets discussed on the talk page or, if consensus is not reached there, at some other discussion page where there are more eyeballs.

If the inaccurate version is the mainstream story as found in the bulk of recent reliable sources (like scholarly books and newspaper stories), then correcting it is harder: you need to find sources that are even better than those, e.g. by a respected historian who specializes in something topical writing a peer-reviewed journal paper. It works even better if you wait for a scholarly consensus to crystallize around the improved version of the story. In the mean time, the language of the article can usually be changed to present something neutral to readers, e.g. saying that the traditional story as presented by scholars X and Y is A, but that scholar Z disputes this and proposes B instead.

Few car owners spend a lot of time thinking about the stuff their car didn't screw up or have a good basis for comparing those to a wide range of comparable vehicles.

What kind of "left" version are you imagining?

> after all, primary sources are better

This is sometimes true, and sometimes not. For some topics, the Wikipedia article is an amazing overview, significantly better than available alternate sources.

> in the case the Wikipedia author was wrong, I will avoid a mistake

Wikipedia authors are not the only people who can be wrong. All kinds of sources, including primary sources and scholarly secondary sources, contain factual errors, sometimes subtle ones. You should certainly try not to say wrong things, which is why you should approach all sources with a critical eye.

But people cite non-primary sources all the time. The most important thing is to say where you got your ideas/claims, because when you don't, the result is misleading to your readers. If you get your claim from one source, but then cite a different source, that's terrible practice that causes significant trouble. But this happens all the time, and telling people to "never cite Wikipedia" is a major contributor.

There are also plenty of pseudonymous Wikipedians with credentials that they keep secret or vague. As long as they don't edit pages where they have an undisclosed conflict of interest, that's also fine.

Credentials can lend someone credibility in discussions. They just don't grant special editing privileges.

This of course also happens plenty when Wikipedia isn't involved, but for whatever reason people seem to have the mistaken idea that citing Wikipedia is inherently bad. There's no rule against citing Wikipedia, or tertiary sources in general, from professional work.

When a later person (e.g. a scholar or Wikipedia author) is trying to understand your work, it's incredibly helpful to know where some claim or idea came from. Otherwise they have to jump through extra hoops to trace the actual attributions and figure out where mistakes came from.

Wikipedia's original research policy is not relevant to what works you should cite in academic papers. A Wikipedia article is not supposed to contain the original research of its authors, because it's the wrong venue for such work, and because when such material is added it typically turns out to be nonsense or spam, but rejecting it on the grounds that it is unsourced is much easier.

But Wikipedia must always be cited if you use it, otherwise people reading your work (including Wikipedia authors and other scholars) cannot trace the provenance of the ideas you discuss.

"This is a much more powerful term. I can do stuff that's unbelievable. I called Google, Google Maps. They wouldn't have taken my call in the first term. Now they kiss my ass."

Apparently the availability of animals like moa, extinct flightess birds weighing hundreds of kilos with few or no other predators, put a lot of evolutionary pressure to grow big to fill the niche.

Apparently these birds evolved from relatively small eagles who accidentally ended up in New Zealand less than 2 million years ago, then evolved to a larger size faster than almost any known vertebrate, growing to be like 10x the size of their ancestors.

It seems once humans arrived in New Zealand around 700 years ago, the eagles relatively quickly disappeared.

In 2025 in the UK men age 45–64 had a suicide rate of about 24 per 100,000, which is the highest it has been in the past half century, and is higher than other age categories. In the mid 2000s, the rate was like 17 per 100,000.

From your link, in the USA the overall rate for men of the same age is about 30 per 100,000, but varies dramatically between states.

But "so fortuitous a coinicidence" is redundant and confusing; it means, basically, "so coincidental a coincidence".

In any case, neither of these words is the right choice in the context of the previous comment. A word like "incredible" or "unlikely" or "amazing" would more clearly express the idea.

It's quite a good method for approximating any arbitrary smooth periodic function.

My best guess is that the originators of this model (perhaps as early as Hipparchus, but at any rate someone by the time of Ptolemy) didn't think there were literally circles being combined, but had a pretty clear idea that they were trying to make an approximate model to fit the data. A previous model, from Eudoxus, was also probably pretty accurate but more cumbersome to compute with, involving approximation of the visible planetary motion by the combination of uniform rotations of some imagined sphere(s) centered on the earth. (We don't know exactly because the books about it don't survive, so all we have are vague descriptions by other people.)