On the Web, Penn leaves text to non-experts

Penn was founded in 1740. Benjamin Franklin founded Penn. Therefore, Benjamin Franklin founded Penn in 1740.

Not quite, according to Wikipedia.

Dan Smith, a 60-year-old software engineer from outside Boston, wrote on the site that a group led by evangelist George Whitefield tried to start the school that would become Penn in 1740, even putting up the first building. But funds came up short, and they failed.

It wasn't until later that Franklin became involved, trumping up support for a school in 1749 and taking over Whitefield's empty building in 1750. Instruction finally began in 1751.

Smith - who has absolutely nothing to do with Penn - is dead on, according to Penn archivist Mark Lloyd, who confirmed the veracity of Smith's history.

One of the highest-traffic Web sites on the Internet, Wikipedia is one of the world's most easily accessible resources for information on the University - and its content is essentially beyond the school's control. Boasting over 1 million articles and many millions of hits per day, the site serves up 300 pages per second, according to Wikipedia spokesman Mark Pelligrini (take that, McDonald's).

Despite Smith pantsing the University on its founding date, administrators say they are unconcerned with the content of the site.

But who exactly is writing Penn's Wikipedia page? Pelligrini said that, in addition to alumni and the odd random person, there seems to be a small clique of Wikipedia editors who have taken a special interest in editing schools' pages.

Smith falls into that category. He said that Wikipedia serves as an outlet for his curiosity and that he spends about an hour a day editing entries on the site. He said he's written about 50 articles from scratch himself and has edited about two dozen college pages. In total, he says he has contributed to "several thousand" pages.

Inflated university claims, he said, are one of his ultimate pet-peeves, adding that he was mortified when he first saw some of the hot air posted on the page of his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Declining to get into the specifics of the claims, he said that "it was a bunch of irritating bragadaccio I didn't care for."

After cleaning up MIT's entry, Smith decided that the only way to wipe out academic boosterism for good on MIT's page was to try to wipe it out everywhere. So he launched a crusade to wipe out the bloated edits of schools' overly proud alumni.

As for Penn, he was particularly vexed, he said, when someone tried to label the school as one of the Ivy League's "Big Four" universities on the site, along with Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Alas, there is no Ivy League Big Four, and Smith quickly expunged the edit, chalking it up as an example of failed Ivy League status climbing.

He says his most memorable "edit war" over Penn's site, though, revolved around the school's founding date.

Somebody - a Princeton grad, Smith suspects - kept changing Penn's founding date on the site from 1740, while others kept changing it back.

So Smith plunged deep into research, corresponding with Lloyd by phone and e-mail to formulate the rather lengthy explanation of the school's origins that appears on the site now.

"It was sort of like working out a puzzle," he said. "I don't know anything about history, I don't know anything about Penn's history, and I found it amusing."

That's fine with University spokeswoman Lori Doyle.

"It's really democracy at its finest," Doyle said, adding that the site looks "very good" overall to her.

As for the fact that Penn's entry, as of last night, devotes about 40 more words to describing last year's high-rise sex scandal than it does the University's undergraduate programs?

"That's just the way the site is," Doyle said. "I would hope that if [anybody] wanted to get the official information about Penn, they would come to the Penn Web site."

Doyle added that, other than small changes, the University does not actively edit its Wikipedia page.

Dean of Admissions Lee Stetson echoed Doyle's sentiments, saying that he doesn't monitor the site and is unconcerned with prospective applicants getting their information from Wikipedia; students get their information from a variety of sources, he says.

Steve Minicola, a staff member in Penn's Communications office, said that every few months he logs on and looks at the page, but says he's never made substantive changes.

On Oct. 9, he added three links to Penn's own Web site, but that's it, according to Wikipedia's logs.

"It wouldn't really be right to interfere from the top down," he said.

They'll leave that to the non-experts.

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