The party’s over for Wikipedia. Following the revelation of a particularly libelous — and false — biography of former Robert F. Kennedy assistant John Seigenthaler Sr. on the website, Wikipedia chief Jimmy Wales announced the institution of a registration requirement for posting new articles.

The website hopes that the registration requirement will limit the number of stories being created, Wales said.

“What we’re hopeful to see is that by slowing that down to 1,500 a day from several thousand, the people who are monitoring this will have more ability to improve the quality,” Wales said Monday. “In many cases the types of things we see going on are impulse vandalism.”

Wikipedia visitors will still be able to edit content already posted without registering. It takes 15 to 20 seconds to create an account on the website, and an e-mail address is not required.

It’s the customary spin, but it doesn’t mask the reality of the situation. Regardless of how painless registration will be, it’s fundamentally a barrier to entry — which is counter to the very nature of a wiki. I’m not sure Wikipedia can truly claim to be the free-for-all knowledgebase it’s been anymore.

In a way, Wikipedia is evolving in as predictable a way as any media outlet. When an organ like that is rolled out, the aim is to open participation as widely as possible to spur growth as quickly as possible. But once it’s matured, the wide-open rules that served it well during start-up become a liability. To achieve credibility, a retrenchment is not only expected, but necessary for management purposes. (The Web itself is undergoing this dynamic as well.)

This move shouldn’t be too surprising, as Wales hinted at this development more than a year ago:

But as to the overall accuracy of Wikipedia, Wales said he is at work on a plan to create what he calls a “stable version” of the encyclopedia. Some version or versions would continue to exist that allow the free-form editing and rewriting. Another version, the stable one, would go through an extra level of review before it could be changed.

I’m not sure this two-tiered model is still in the plans, given what’s happened since.

All of this, of course, only confirms my disdain for the whole notion of validating a public chalkboard as a credible information source:

Frankly, it’s not the blatantly obvious nonsense, like the “John Kerry dies from Botox injections” example, that concerns me. It’s the more subtle possibilities for mischief, like adding or subtracting an extra zero or two in population or other statistical figures, that concern me enough to reject Wikipedia as a consistently reliable source. Again, even if errors like this are caught quickly, who’s to say that they’ve been caught and corrected prior to my use of it?

As an editor, I’d automatically reject anything submitted to me that references a Wikipedia article as a source, for the reasons stated above. I’d give it right back to the writer and insist on a fact check through a rock-solid source, and ask for what exactly that is when the story is re-submitted to me. I’m not going to chance it on research that’s been done on the equivalent of online graffitti.

Ultimately, the blame’s not so much with Wikipedia as it is with how the Internet has led to a loss of discipline in research methods. Wikipedia draws its legitimacy from a rather flimsy source: Its consistently high placement in Google seach results. Which is to say, it has no real legitimacy at all, since Google’s “relevance” rankings are all-too-easily manipulable, intentionally or not.

Because searching via the Web is so effortless, the average researcher is loathe to scroll past the first few results that a search engine spits back at them. People have ceded their own discretion of what’s credible and what’s not to Google — and are a lot less well-informed as a result. Wikipedia is but a symptom of that problem, and despite the attempts at justifying it as the wave of the future, it requires a collective reassessment of what’s reliable and what’s not.