July 8, 2025, 6:23 am | Read time: 2 minutes
Wikipedia is often the first and trusted website for information of all kinds. However, a new study finds that many articles on Wikipedia are outdated or incorrect.
For decades, Wikipedia has been considered the go-to online source for reliable information on almost any conceivable topic. The freely accessible encyclopedia is used by millions daily–whether for school research, journalistic work, or quickly resolving everyday questions. However, a new study casts a critical eye on the timeliness and accuracy of many entries on the platform. In fact, many Wikipedia entries are considered outdated and simply incorrect.
Wikipedia Articles Outdated and Incorrect, Study Says
A study conducted by the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung” (FAS) analyzed around 1,000 randomly selected articles from the German-language Wikipedia. Initially, the sample was reviewed by artificial intelligence and then evaluated by human experts. The result is alarming: At least 20 percent of the articles examined contained outdated information, and another 20 percent had factually incorrect data. Given the more than three million articles on the German-language version of the site, this suggests a potentially high number of problematic entries on Wikipedia that are outdated or incorrect.
The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the platform, emphasized to the FAS that Wikipedia is not a source for up-to-the-minute news. Additionally, it is run entirely by volunteers who write, edit, and maintain the articles. Observers see this as a structural weakness: Volunteer authors can make mistakes or lose interest–both of which can result in incorrect or outdated content remaining online for extended periods without correction.
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Wikipedia Issues Also Challenging for AI
This issue gains additional urgency in the age of AI-powered chatbots. Many of these systems use Wikipedia as a basis to generate answers to user questions. If incorrect information is not corrected there, it continues to spread–automated and unchecked. This could undermine trust in digital knowledge sources in the long term.
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A possible solution, according to Austrian organizational researcher Leonhard Dobusch, quoted by “heise online,” would be to employ full-time editors. They could systematically ensure the quality and timeliness of the content–similar to how traditional print encyclopedias operated. So far, however, the Wikimedia Foundation has refrained from adopting such a model and continues to rely solely on the voluntary contributions of the community.