Last week, the university decided against supporting Penn State Wiki, a proposed Web site that would serve as a forum for students to post information about Penn State.

The site, which would be similar to the format of www.wikipedia.com, would allow students to post and edit information about organizations, faculty, courses and other pertinent information about the university.

In this case, the decision not to support the proposed project or link it to the Penn State Web site is the correct one because monitoring such a large wealth of information would probably be difficult to say the least.

While a wiki could provide a forum for disseminating information among students, the information posted is subject to the individual posting it.

Sites like www.ratemyprofessors.com might contain information similar to what would be posted on the wiki, but they are not university supported, nor do they fall under the domain of the university's responsibility for accuracy.

If the wiki were associated with the university, it would fall under the purview of the university to insure any information included within it was correct, and this burden would be far too time consuming for officials. The prospect of monitoring the site, which would grow with additional entries, would be a logistical nightmare, with professors and professional staffing having to monitor the information to insure it's accuracy.

The utopian idea behind such a wiki is noble, of course, but people are naturally fallible and mistakes while unintentional, will be misleading, nonetheless. The impracticality of the wiki originates from the conflicting spheres of responsibility of the university and the broad, open scope of the wiki itself.

If students truly desire the information available from the wiki project, they should take it upon themselves to establish such a site that is not affiliated with the university, however such a project would be less regulated, and would be more prone to errors, which student readers would have to take into account.

However, the idea holds merit, because such a clearinghouse of information would no doubt prove useful to many students, particularly those who are scheduling classes or those who are interested in joining student organizations.