Wikipedia, like the Los Angeles Times "Open Ed", New York Review of Books "User Notes", and other "open" editorial forums meant for peer editing and corrections, is now a frequent victim of vandals. The end result of this is a move to end, close, or limit user interactions.

This same thing is happening with some Open Source projects, after some "contributions" turned out to include intentional buffer errors or other security issues. In any open society...

From Reuters, 5-Aug-2005:

Wikipedia plans to impose stricter editorial rules to prevent vandalism of its content, founder Jimmy Wales was quoted as saying Friday.

In an interview with German daily Suddeutsche Zeitung, Wales, who launched Wikipedia with partner Larry Sanger in 2001, said it needed to find a balance between protecting information from abuse and providing open access to improve entries.

Citing a recent example of vandalism, Wales recalled how following the election of the new Pope Benedict in April, a user substituted the pontiff's photo on the Wikipedia site with that of the evil emperor from the "Star Wars" film series.

"The picture was only on the page for a minute. But whoever opens the article at this moment will get annoyed--and therefore doubt our credibility," he told the paper.

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