Lemmy is the public kitchen.

dėfŭnct’, a. Dead (the ~, way of mentioning a particular dead person), no longer existing. [f. L ᴅᴇ(functus p.p. of fungi perform) dead]

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English. Edited by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler, based on The Oxford Dictionary. Fifth edition (1964). Revised by E. McIntosh. Reprint 1972.

Last year I had to fight tooth and nail to delete some bullshit article based on Cold War era propaganda that nobody bothered to directly scrutinise and criticise (there was thankfully enough related information out there that undermined the article indirectly). These days I checked a dozen books to confirm a term regularly used on WP is made up by whoever created the page two decades ago, so I’ll have to try and dispute it. A friend of mine has spent years looking for historical documents confirming some statement that’s been repeated by historians in passing since mid-20th century with no proper corrobating info, obviously repeated on WP as well. Sometime last year there was a reddit thread by a relative of some minor desceased celebrity from 90s who said the celebrity’s WP article is entirely based on one journalist’s sensationalist book that even got their year of birth wrong; the relative was advised to contact WP’s legal team to see if they can solve that somehow.

No, these are not major bits of misinformation, but in specific areas and for specific people they are important. Not claiming GWB is still the president of the US is a very low bar that Wikipedia has already passed like 15 years ago, rather I’m talking about the limits of their sourcing policy. Many sources will say who’s the current president of a country, but what do you do when there’s one source that got something wrong, two other ones that just repeated what the first said (a very common thing, obviously), and nothing else?

If there’s actual, provable lies about a notable person in the encyclopedia, then there should be actual, provable truths to combat it

No, not necessarily. Lots of false info spreads around, including serious academic publications. People who publish books and articles don’t always do additional verification of the stuff they read elsewhere. And if nobody publishes something containing the correct version of the story, you as a WP editor don’t really have a reliable source that you can use against the existing ones. I’ve seen this happen multiple times. Wikipedia is nominally meant just to convey what the sources say, not do active research or provide you with the capital T Truth.

Sanger was laid off from Wikipedia early on, started a competitor site that failed, and then returned to Wikipedia not so much to contribute but to rail against the project, his only credentials being setting up some of the crucial rules for the site two decades ago. It was really pathetic, like an ex pestering the other one years after the breakup, unable to move on. I hope he finds a better hobby now.