Answering Wikipedia's call to fill in the blanks

Tom Parmenter doesn't work for Newton, the local Chamber of Commerce, a travel book publisher, or the news media. But the soft-spoken retiree is helping to shape the way people across the world look at his city.

Parmenter is one of the authors of the Newton entry that appears on Wikipedia, a collaborative online encyclopedia, adding his contributions over the last three years as a hobby.

Wikipedia is free to use and allows anyone to tinker with the information in its articles, which cover a vast array of subjects (including every city and town in Boston's western suburbs).

``What happened to me, and what happens to everyone who contributes, is you do some kind of Google search on a subject you're interested in and the Wikipedia article comes up," Parmenter said. ``You look at the article and say, `What moron put this in here?' and try to fix it. The next thing you know, you get sucked into it."

The theory is that the wide-open editing process produces up-to-date, constantly evolving articles maintained by the people who know the subject matter best.

Wikipedia pages, produced in dozens of languages, get roughly 2.5 million unique visitors a day, making it the largest reference site on the Internet, said Wayne Saewyc , a volunteer spokesman for the non profit foundation that runs the website, www.wikipedia.org.

While Wikipedia's entries are getting a growing perception of authority, especially among young people, errors in Wikipedia articles, or misinformation placed in them as a prank, have also caused national uproars . Last year, a prankster modified the entry on John Seigenthaler Sr. to suggest that the noted author and journalist may have had a role in the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. The entry stood uncorrected for four months.

Comedian Stephen Colbert got some laughs at Wikipedia's expense recently when he edited his own profile during a segment on his Comedy Central television show.

Some entries for local communities have their critics .

Framingham officials, for example, rejected as flat-out wrong a paragraph in the town's entry that chalked up last year's Town Meeting defeat of a planned library branch to simmering tensions between north and south Framingham.

``There were a lot of people who just sincerely felt this might add to their property taxes, which they already felt were on the high side," said Donna Howland, chairwoman of Framingham's Board of Library Trustees.

Town Manager Julian Suso described the Wikipedia explanation as ``someone's pure flight of fancy."

A Wikipedia user going by the screen name Tempest VIII observed in April on the discussion page of Medfield's article that ``Medfield is a great town, but this article is filled with biased and unimportant information."

As for his entries, Parmenter said he takes great pains to be accurate.

Retired from a career in high technology, Parmenter said he enjoys writing, and estimated he has edited several thousand articles on myriad topics over the last four years. He has his Wikipedia profile set up to alert him when any changes are made to the Newton entry or any of the other articles to which he has made significant contributions.

``I'll go and check it out and say, `Oh, that's fine, and that's fine,' " he said. ``Every once in a while, somebody will stick in `Debby loves Johnny ' and you have to take it out."

In general, the less controversial the topic, the more dependable the Wikipedia article, Parmenter said. ``Over a day or a week, I'd say, it's not reliable, but after a year or two, it's pretty reliable."

The Newton article was created in October 2002 and has been edited hundreds of times over the past four years, mainly to update the names on its list of notable people.

Wikipedia user Brian Corr was reading the Newton article when he discovered an erroneous reference to the Four Corners neighborhood as one of the city's villages.

``I deleted it and left a note," explained Corr, an organizer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts who lived for years in Brighton, just over the Newton line.

Corr, who now lives in Cambridge, said he got swept up in Wikipedia about three years ago in much the same way as Parmenter.

``It does tend to suck you in a bit," he said. ``I think overall it does work very well. Like any encyclopedia, there are things in error here and there. Most errors get corrected relatively quickly, though."

The Newton-Needham Chamber of Commerce president, Tom O'Rourke , whose job it is to promote Newton as a place to live and do business, said he is uncomfortable with the idea that anybody with a computer can edit an article that is available throughout the world.

``Our hope is that if anyone is really interested in learning about the area, they'll dig a little deeper and go to the chamber web site or to the city web site," O'Rourke said.

Parmenter said one of the endearing qualities of Wikipedia is its quirkiness. Its article on Newton, for example, proudly proclaims that the Fig Newton cookie was named after the city.

The article on Medfield notes that every season but fall and every direction but east have streets named after them in town. The entry also informs the reader that ``a man by the name of `Bubblegum Bob' roams the `Uptown' area of Medfield where he gives away gum to children for free."

Framingham's article states that one of the town's claims to fame is a passing mention in an animated television series, ``Family Guy."

``You would never see something like that in an encyclopedia. I bet a `Family Guy' fan felt compelled to add that," posted a critical Wikipedia contributor who goes by the screen name Deadcorpse.

Fred Wallace , a staff researcher for the Framingham Historical Society who answers inquiries from all over the world, said he doesn't expect Wikipedia to put him out of business anytime soon. ``I would be a little nervous of using it because I know information can be put on there by anyone, and they don't have to vouch for their source," Wallace said. ``I would tell people to be very cautious of anything they take from there."

Even so, Wallace said, he saw no glaring inaccuracies or omissions in the 112-word historical sketch of Framingham in the town's Wikipedia entry. ``It covers the high points."

The format for the city and town articles were set up in 2002 as part of a major Wikipedia project to develop entries for every American municipality recognized by the Census Bureau. An automated program created bare-bones municipal sketches by pulling population and demographic data from census databases. The rest was fleshed out by unpaid Wikipedia users such as Parmenter, Saewyc said. Most of the local community entries have been fleshed out by users.

Parmenter noted a sentence he wrote three years ago that has survived hundreds of cyber editors: ``Newton is best known as a bedroom community for commuters to Boston, in spite of considerable commercial and manufacturing activity of its own."

``It's fun for me," he said. ``It's an opportunity to continue to do a little bit of writing not constrained by anything but my mood."