Christiano Moreschi wrote:
Except it's not all ignorant ranting. He may have edited himself, and the stuff about "It is quite as conceivable that an early version of an entry in Wikipedia will be written by someone who knows the subject, and later editors will dissipate whatever value is there" rings very, very true - witness that massive wrangling and constant editing/reverting and addition of outright junk when [[Islam]] got on the Main Page, as does "and like an interminable political meeting the end result will be dominated by the loudest and most persistent voices."
God, yes. Anyone who's ever tried to deal with obnoxious nationalist cranks can testify to the fact that they never bloody well shut up until you block them, and quite frequently the trolls win simply by making the most noise.
It's easy to pick anecdotes either way, though. I personally more often encounter the opposite---the original version is improved substantially by later editing. It's interesting you mentioned nationalists, because I find it in those cases fairly often. Nationalists seem very prolific in creating biased articles about things or events in the countries they care about, and then later those articles usually eventually get improved. I also notice it in my own articles a lot, though hopefully they don't start out nearly as badly: I write lots of moderately decent articles on subjects in which I have no expertise but have done a little research, and it's not that uncommon that some expert in the area will later come by and correct or add a few things.
-Mark