Do you know if anyone's done quantitative research on that? Should be pretty straightforward to sample some articles and see if that pattern is common? (I'm not trying to passive - aggressively suggest you're wrong, I'm honestly curious)
[ed: I should add that I've started to form a habit of looking at the revision history and talk pages of wp articles - in addition to references. And I really do think the added transparency is a very real added value over dead tree encyclopedia. ]
I referenced this earlier, but got no answer. It is from 2005. I haven't seen anything after that.
"Wikipedia is about as good a source of accurate information as Britannica, the venerable standard-bearer of facts about the world around us, according to a study published this week in the journal Nature."
(Please Google a better source for that paper. :-) )
I am willing to believe that "sensitive" information about living (and relative unknown) people along with companies/political parties is being more gamed in Wikipedia today, than ten years ago.
If you fix it a second time, including a clear explanation in the commit message, you'll be accused of vandalism.