I completely take that point.

Mudcat is a wondrous resource and so is Wikipedia. On both there are hawks who will pounce on errors and that's all to the good. The greater anonymity of Wikipedia authorship is a potential problem that makes cheating easier. In the media there are are good and bad journalists and commentators. Quite often there's a relationship between the potential emotional load of a topic and the likelihood of information about it being subverted. More "mundane" stuff that can't contribute much to hidden agendas is more likely to remain untampered with. The last hundred years' history of the Bude canal is pretty well settled because no-one is ever really going to fall out with someone else who finds a mistake in the narrative. Compare that with the last hundred years' history of the Middle East...

The usual prosaic advice is still the best: use lots of different sources and use your brain and don't buy used cars off people you don't know.