Character assassination USA Today had an interesting op-ed piece this week by a retired journalist who wrote about the experience of being libeled on Wikipedia and being unable to do anything about it. John Siegenthaler, Sr. said his bio (which no longer appears to be listed on Wikipedia) was spurious and riddled with factual errors. It said he spent 13 years in the Soviet Union, started one of the country's largest PR firms and - hold on to your hat - was once suspected of involvement in both Kennedy assissinations. All not true.

Siegenthaler tells of the tortuous process he endured to have the biography taken down and his frustration at being unable to identify the author of the spurious information, an ordeal made more difficult by the protections of the Communications Decency Act. The Wikipedia information was also picked up and reprinted without question by Reference.com and Answers.com.

Siegenthaler's experience is an anomaly, I'm sure, and the vast majority of information on Wikipedia is no doubt correct. But it is a stark reminder of the vulnerability of the Internet to misinformation. Wikipedia has gotten a lot of justifiable praise for creating a workable structure for community information gathering. The fact that the service works at all would have been fairly mind-boggling five years ago.

But the Siegenthaler story is a reminder of the vulnerability of the open-content model to manipulation. The Wikipedia disclaimer page includes a stark warning that "None of the authors, contributors, sponsors, administrators, sysops, or anyone else connected with Wikipedia in any way whatsoever can be responsible for the appearance of any inaccurate or libelous information or for your use of the information contained in or linked from these web pages." Kinda scary, huh?

We're entering what could be called the Age of Search, where information is freely available and, increasingly, freely editable. Google and other search engines will provide you with a rich list of facts but they do little to distinguish between the credible and the suspicious. In the Age of Search, critical thinking becomes a more vital skill than fact-finding. There's an interesting podcast interview with Vinod Khosla, venture capitalist and co-founder of Sun, that makes a case for this. Khosla observes that his children have come to regard information as a commodity that's easily available and freely shareable. The challenge for this new generation, though, is to exercise the critical thinking skills to separate good information from bad.

Google's technology doesn't do all that good a job of that. For example, a search on the phrase "How high is Mt. Everest?" turns up at least five different answers (it's generally recognized to be 29,035 ft.) . It's the searcher's job to figure out which response to believe.

The profusion of search technology only makes this more important. I think we're going to see an explosion of search options in the next few years. Perhaps there's an opportunity for someone to invent a critical search engine that contains an algorithm for evaluating the reliability of information.

Thanks for Peggy Rouse, editor of the reference site whatis.com, for alerting me to this story.  ¶ 8:02 AM