Yes, given that textbooks are notorious for being outdated and having outright errors.  And given that Wikipedia is seen by many eyes.  Once in a great while someone will prank it and put some rubbish up, but almost immediately it will be taken down

For example, from the Forbes Magazine expose in 2000:

"ONE DAY IN MARCH OF last year Leonard Tramiel, a balding, dark-bearded man of 45, sat alone in a science classroom in Milpitas, a middle-class community on the south end of San Francisco Bay. Having earned a Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University and having made a bundle in Silicon Valley, Tramiel now taught occasionally around the Bay Area as a volunteer.

Savoring a few quiet moments before 30 eighth graders surged into the classroom, Tramiel opened their astronomy textbook, Prentice Hall's Exploring The Universe, to the lesson for the day. Tramiel was surprised to see that Prentice Hall had inadvertently reversed two photographic images, giving a misleading impression of how the moon looks as it passes through its phases. Tramiel turned back a page. The book said that the moon probably had been born when a giant asteroid had struck the earth, tearing a chunk of material from the planet, and that the Pacific Ocean may be the hole left behind. What was this doing in a science textbook? The asteroid theory hadn't been taken seriously for over 30 years. Tramiel turned back another page and read that the far, or dark, side of the moon had been photographed for the first time by the Lunar Orbiter, a U.S. space probe. He knew for a fact that the Soviets had taken those first photographs.

Three errors in three pages. At home that night, Tramiel read the textbook cover to cover and found dozens of errors--of fact, of interpretation, of concept.

Two other Bay Area scientists Tramiel showed the book to, the director of space at NASA's Ames Research Center and an astronomy professor at a local college, termed the Prentice Hall book "horrible."

His interest in textbooks now fully aroused, Tramiel examined a new Prentice Hall book used by his older son's private middle school in Palo Alto. According to the title page, Science Explorer Astronomy had been written by Jay M. Pasachoff, a professor of astronomy at Williams College whom Leonard Tramiel knew to be a renowned scientist. But the book contained such idiocies as references to a "history book from around 800 B.C.," when books did not exist, and to the "rotating"of the earth around the sun, when every schoolboy is supposed to know that the earth rotates on its axis but revolves around the sun. Tramiel checked in with Pasachoff and was not surprised to hear how the errors got in the book--in the editing process, after the book left Pasachoff's hands.

It isn't just Prentice Hall, owned by Pearson Plc., that churns out rubbish for our children to learn by. Scott Foresman, another Pearson company, Holt Rinehart and a range of other publishers are guilty of producing textbooks condemned by experts for their errors and omissions. The whole $4 billion elementary and secondary textbook industry has the problem. In the intensely lobbied textbook selection process in states like California, intellectual content takes a back seat to salesmanship, political correctness, self-esteem for the students and the need to dumb-down lessons so that one product can capture a large market. In the U.S., textbooks sell well if they are designed to hold the attention of children accustomed to MTV and spiffy Internet graphics; they don't sell well if they are challenging. Says Diane Ravitch, a leading historian and analyst of education: "You get a snappy visual package, but it's more like a comic book. The packaging overwhelms the content." -- http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2000/1030/6612178a_print.html

This is just PART of the article, and one of many, many such articles and exposes.
Source(s):
http://www.amasci.com/miscon/miscon.html -- a list of many such articles

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