Philip Roth vs. Wikipedia

Wikipedia's position is that they don't give a fig for the truth; they want their articles to represent the consensus of secondary sources. If those sources are wrong, well, too bad. I take their point, but sometimes this leads to bizarre outcomes. Unable to move Wikipedia's editors, Philip Roth has published an open letter in The New Yorker trying to set the record straight about the inspiration of one of his own novels:

My novel The Human Stain was described in the entry as “allegedly inspired by the life of the writer Anatole Broyard.” (The precise language has since been altered by Wikipedia’s collaborative editing, but this falsity still stands.)

This alleged allegation is in no way substantiated by fact. The Human Stain was inspired, rather, by an unhappy event in the life of my late friend Melvin Tumin, professor of sociology at Princeton for some thirty years. . . .

I feel for Roth, and his essay convinces me that he is telling the truth in this case. But Wikipedia obviously simply cannot take his word for it. If Wikipedia were to start accepting authors' statements about the origins of their own books, would they then have to start accepting politicians statement about their own motives and actions? If Roth really wants to fix the entry, he should get one of his friends to publish an article about The Human Stain in a peer-reviewed journal, so Wikipedia can cite it.