There’s nothing worse than a messy Wiki.

Wikipedia, the Web encyclopaedia written and edited by Internet users from all over the world, plans to impose stricter editorial rules to prevent vandalism of its content, founder Jimmy Wales was quoted as saying on Friday.

Wales, who launched Wikipedia with partner Larry Sanger in 2001, said it needed to find a balance between protecting information from abuse and providing open access to improve entries.

“There may soon be so-called stable contents. In this case, we’d freeze the pages whose quality is undisputed,” he said.

Citing a recent example of vandalism, Wales recalled how following the election of the new Pope Benedict in April, a user substituted the pontiff’s photo on the Wikipedia site with that of the evil emperor from the Star Wars film series.

“The picture was only on the page for a minute. But whoever opens the article at this moment will get annoyed — and therefore doubt our credibility,” he told the paper.

 He said that setting up a form of “commission” might be one way of deciding which entries could be “frozen” in perpetuity.

Hey, I can completely understand his gripe. I have a hard enough time dealing with trackback and comment SPAM on this blog…I can only imagine what it is like for the Wikipedia folks. I’m sure there are plenty of jerks out there whose sole purpose in life is to deface wiki articles. Everything possible should be done to stop that kind of activity.

Hopefully though, their intention is only to deal with the vandals, and not start editing factual content or restricting access.

Deal with the thugs, but keep Wikipedia free and open.