WorldNetDaily shows why nothing in Wikipedia can be trusted

WorldNetDaily offers some of the vandalism of their Wikipedia entry and of their editor Joseph Farah here. It includes lots of smears and lies, and it shows yet again how nothing you read in Wikipedia can be trusted.

To illustrate that, on November 16 of this year, someone changed Farah's entry to include this: "It is a widely known rumour that Mr. Farah is a closet homosexual and has been repeatedly criticized for his hypocrisy" [1]. That was removed by another user 22 minutes later, and a Wikipedia defender would probably say that "the system worked": they frequently claim that any vandalism or errors are changed within minutes or hours.

However, it also means that anyone who visited that page during those 22 minutes saw an inaccurate entry, and some of those visitors might believe the inaccuracy. On a popular or timely entry or one that isn't closely monitored, false statements could be seen by dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people. And, many false statements are much more subtle than claims like the above; those false claims might persist for months.

When reading a Wikipedia entry, how do you know whether the entry you're looking at is stable and fairly accurate, or whether it was changed to contain an inaccuracy just seconds before? Wikipedia articles change all the time, and the only way to know whether you're looking at something that contains inaccurate information is to comb through the history and the talk page. Only then can you determine whether there's an edit war going on, whether there are things that the administrators at Wikipedia don't want to appear on the article page, and so on. And, the vast majority of reader aren't going to do that.

On a side note, WND makes a major but not unexpected error, linking directly to Wikipedia using text containing "WorldNetDaily profile page", which slightly helps Wikipedia turn up in search results for their name. This is a problem I've noted before, and the solution is to stop linking to Wikipedia. If you have a website that links to them please go put all your links to them in the format used below.

[1] That false claim was added by someone using the IP address 41.153.224.228, which appears to be in Egypt. You can see the edit that deleted it here:
en.wikipedia .org/w/index.php?title=Joseph_Farah&action=historysubmit&
diff=326156263&oldid=326154038