CORRECTION

A chronology on the development of Internet information tools in Sunday's Q section gave an incorrect year for when the World Wide Web became operational. The Web became operational in 1990.

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Is Barack Obama a Muslim? The answer is no. But according to some Web sites, the man who could be the next president of the United States not only practices Islam but is practically a terrorist.

Obama's campaign has fought back, launching a Web site -- fightthesmears.com -- to correct the misinformation about the candidate, including false claims that his campaign contributions have come largely from wealthy supporters in the Middle East.

Obama isn't alone, of course, when it comes to inaccurate information on the Internet.

As millions of people and organizations around the world post information on the Internet, factual mistakes are alarmingly easy to find, and they don't just come from hate groups or "shady, anonymous, Internet authors posing as reliable art historians," according to historians at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. Indeed, misinformation often comes from highly reputable institutions.

Wikipedia, the phenomenally popular user-generated online encyclopedia, has come to symbolize the controversy over Internet accuracy. Supporters say that Wikipedia entries provide vast amounts of information and that factual errors are quickly corrected by readers. Critics say the site is prone to manipulation, uncorrected errors and poor writing because of frequent, uncoordinated changes.

In the past, a countable number of sources produced most of the world's information, and most readers and viewers took the names of top newspapers, magazines and television networks as a modest guarantee that they would be accurate.

But as information migrates onto the Internet, and newspapers and network TV news outlets see their audiences splintering, all that is changing. Today, the Web is a user-driven medium, where teenage videographers and political activists of all stripes can post their messages, often in formats as sophisticated-looking as the sites mounted by television networks and major newspapers. The tidal wave of citizen-generated content has made it much harder to ferret out the most credible sources, which has many people alarmed, including some policymakers.

For example, in May, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, I-Conn., asked Google to remove online YouTube videos that he said al-Qaida and other terrorist groups post to spread false and slanted anti-Western information. The company removed some videos but refused to block all videos from certain groups, as Lieberman requested.

Terrorist propaganda aside, "there are fewer signposts" online to signal reliability, such as newspaper brand names, said Larry Pryor, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communications.

Wikis -- collaborative user-generated online publications -- such as Wikipedia are edited by users only after they've been published online, unlike in traditional media, where editing comes before publication, Pryor said. Furthermore, while some wiki entries are written by experts, others are contributed by people with no expertise in the subject matter, and it's difficult or impossible for unwary readers to tell the difference.

The value of blogs and wikis

Not all so-called new media is inaccurate, said David Perlmutter, a professor at the University of Kansas' William Allen White School of Journalism. Take blogs, for example.

"While some are merely sock puppets" spouting partisan talking points, "those are not very well-respected," while the most popular political blogs are less biased, Perlmutter said.

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