A grown-up Internet?

Saturday, Aug. 29, 2009 | 2:05 a.m.

Wikipedia has become a widely used online reference, which is amazing because it is written and edited by volunteers.

That alone has made it a darling of the Internet world. It is one of the top 10 sites in the world and contains 3 million articles in English, not to mention thousands of articles in other languages. It attracts about 60 million Americans a month.

People around the world contribute to Wikipedia, discussing and debating entries, and the site has become a model of the egalitarian online ethos. Even though there are mistakes, the thinking goes, eventually they will be corrected as volunteers come across them.

That works well in theory, but it can be a major problem in practice. For example, a Wikipedia entry in 2005 included the “fact” that retired newspaper editor and First Amendment scholar John Seigenthaler Sr. had been a suspect in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy.

It and several other statements weren’t true. An anonymous “editor” had posted the lies as a prank. Even though Seigenthaler complained, the entry was on the site for four months. In the meantime, the lies were spread by other sites that mirror Wikipedia’s entries.

As The New York Times reported Tuesday, Wikipedia is adding controls to try to curb pranks and character assassinations. Information added to a living person’s entry will be flagged for review by the site’s volunteers.

It is a start toward addressing the problem, but Wikipedia still leaves itself open to trouble. For example, any online source — scurrilous or not — can be used as a “factual” reference to validate an entry.

Still, this is a big step for Wikipedia and the anything-goes world of the Internet. It comes too late for Seigenthaler and the unknown number of others like him who have been defamed by the site, but perhaps this is a sign that the Internet is growing up.