The best way to deal with this in my opinion is to
always
have the reference for the statistics handy. That way you can
always revert and say, "Sorry, that's not what the reference
says. Provide a new one if you want, but the numbers have to
match up." Personally, I'm less concerned that the figures
are "right" and more concerned that they match our cited
reference for them, because if they are wrong in the latter
case it isn't our fault.
For what it's worth, I do lots of things on Wikipedia, but fact checking
is very rarely one of them. Whether the population of City Fooboo is
3,458,345 or 3,458,365 isn't my thing. Yet I agree that the figure
really ought to match a cited source. Given that I don't care to go and
find out the real figure (every time I've attempted to do something
similar I end up with three different figures), I find myself in a bit
of a quandary. Especially when there actually isn't a cited source...
{citeneeded} is a start, but I'd really like to somehow flag the user's
edit for subsequent checking. In the same way that people look for the
presence of logged-in users' edits as a sign that the article has
undergone very basic checking, I would like to explicitly disclaim such
a suggestion.
In short: I would *really* like more advanced meta data on diffs. Both
to be able to provide more information on edits as I make them, with
flags etc, and to be able to comment on *other* people's edits. Even a
simple "disputed" flag would be better than nothing. But even better,
have two flags: "disputed" and "fact check required", and allow any
user
to set them. But only allow admins or the user who set them to unset
them.
Steve