Wikipedia Can't Make Up Its Mind About Lee Harvey Oswald

Inconsistencies and inaccuracies across the global platform undermine its credibility

"Mother and Dutiful Son" by Michael McDonald. (Oswald is flanked by James Angleton, the CIA official whose staff monitored Oswald for four years before JFK’s assassination.)

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, regularly registers as the top “hit” on search engines queried about any major historical topic. Since its founding on January 15, 2001, the English-language edition of Wikipedia’s has the most articles of any edition (6,642,098), comprising almost 11 percent of articles in all Wikipedias in all languages.

But is the English-language Wikipedia a reliable source on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy?

The discrepancy between the English-language Wikipedia page about Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin who denied killing JFK, and Wikipedia pages in other languages illuminates differences of historical interpretation that custodians of the English-language edition hasten to deny.