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Before you put too much faith in Wikipedia...

Check the mistakes in its entry on "New York City", as found by a NYC newspaper....

Broadway runs east of Seventh Avenue north of 45th Street. Donald Trump owns an office building on Sixth Avenue. Lee Brown, the early 1990s police commissioner who presided over the highest murder rate in the city's history, was a hero in the war against crime.

In what otherwordly New York City can this be true? In the wacky world of Wikipedia ....

But it's a joke ... like its notoriously wrong-headed story on Hunts Point, which (to the neighborhood's dismay) cites 20-year old crime data.

Other entries read like dumb bus-tour guides' off-base spiels. One states that the East Village "is considered part of the Lower East Side" -- by morons, maybe, but not by anyone who has ever crossed Houston Street. Nor was the East Village "formerly known as the Bowery."

It would take all the space on this page to straighten out the Times Square article's zany misconstruing of past history and ignorance of how its present-day current condition came to be. But for a hint of how out-to-lunch it is, just check out the top photo depicting the scene looking south from 45th Street. The caption helpfully mixes up Broadway and Seventh Avenue, perhaps accounting for the dazed look of confused tourists I see there every day.

Count on Wikipedia to omit the most important single fact on a given subject. Of the New York Palace Hotel, it says former owner Harry Helmsley hired architect Emery Roth to design a 55-story tower to "blend in" with the historic Villard Houses at the site. Of course, although the entry's writers (maybe the hotel PR people?) don't mention it, Helmsley infamously tried to demolish the Villard Houses -- a widely reported preservation saga of the 1970s that's common knowledge to locals, but unknown to Wikipedia.

Because anyone can tap into the site and put in his or her two cents, it's not uncommon for an article to contradict itself. Anyone trying to learn about the Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site will end up with a headache hoping to figure out what the endless entry is trying to say. It's such an incoherent maze of mangled chronology and outright falsehoods, you don't know where to laugh first.

For starters, there's no "residential tower" planned at Ground Zero. A museum will not highlight "many of the different aspects of the past and future World Trade Centers." The Port Authority did not "organize a competition through the LMDC" to come up with a master plan in 2002...

Wikipedia is no smarter about our power players than our landmarks. Donald Trump's entry says he "completed" 1290 Sixth Ave., an office building he neither built, owns nor has anything to do with...

At its worst, Wikipedia dangerously rewrites history. Take the entry on Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. When Kelly replaced Lee Brown as commissioner under Mayor David Dinkins in the early 1990s, we are told he "saw the continuing reduction of crime that started with Lee Brown's community policing concept." Most New Yorkers who recall that period will guffaw at that, but readers outside the city or newly arrived might take it as true.

In fact, although crime dipped ever so slightly in Dinkins' last 18 months in office, it assuredly did not under Kelly's predecessor, a top cop so lame he was widely ridiculed as "Out of Town" Brown. Nor is it true that Kelly "aggressively pursued quality of life issues such as the squeegee men" - that didn't start until Rudy Giuliani was elected and he made Bill Bratton his first police commissioner.

Wikipedia unfathomably goes on to say the new Giuliani administration tried to "minimize the effect of the crime-fighting policies already in place." Wha?

Nowhere is Wikipedia worse than when it comes to the history of this newspaper ... "Since 1976, it has been owned by Australian-born billionaire Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation." Except, of course, that for six well-chronicled years it was not -- from 1988-mid-1993, a period that was crucial in the paper's history and was the subject of a book I wrote, "It's Alive!". Wikipedia lifts one irrelevant quote from it without mentioning the book...

The dimwitted entry claims The Post's famous 1983 front-page headline, "Headless Body in Topless Bar," was written by a onetime employee named Paul Beeman. In fact, it was written by then-managing editor VA Musetto ... Mr. Beeman did not even work at The Post in 1983...

So remember, when relying on Wikipedia for information more obscure or controversial than the difference between Seventh Avenue and Broadway, it's reader beware.