Thanks to Jonathan Walther and Lars Aronsson for their responses.

Jonathan wrote:

You could do what you want by creating two new namespaces; one for organizations or front groups or campaigns, another for individuals. You would have to write your own custom code to make sure that articles in a particular namespace were properly put in the database, or retrieved from the database, etc.

This sounds like a possible solution that might accomplish 70% or more of what I have in mind. Is there a limit on the number of namespaces that I can create? Also, how dicey would it be to customize data entry and retrieval for each different namespace?

Lars wrote:

That was an interesting background about PR Watch and APCO. If APCO were to join the Wikipedia project, this could get exciting. If misinformation is their specialty and they are good at it, they might get away with writing stuff that noone here knows how to question...

In fact, there are a number of PR firms that specialize in monitoring Internet discussions and trying to influence content, sometimes even using false identities to post messages to newsgroups and chat rooms. See, for example, the articles in our 2nd Quarter 2002 issue of "PR Watch": http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2002Q1/index.html

I don't know if any PR firms are currently targeting Wikipedia, but as the project grows in influence, it seems reasonable to expect that this might happen. Here, as elsewhere, your best protection against disinformation is the fact that you have numerous individuals watching out to correct errors.

Once I launch my own project (which I've tentatively termed a "Disinfopedia"), it will be interesting to see how it fares against similar attempts at manipulation.

By the way, yesterday I tried installing the Wikipedia scripts at a temporary location on my own web site so that I could start to experiment with them, and I'm pleased to say that it went remarkably smoothly. For comparison's sake, installing a "plug and play" wireless networking card in my fiance's computer recently took me several days, a $40 charge for technical support, and multiple phone calls to both her ISP and the card manufacturer. My biggest challenge during the installation of Wikipedia was figuring out CVS (which I've never used previously). All totaled I probably spent a couple of hours installing the scripts, creating the database, and tweaking my local settings. I could have installed Wikipedia 20 times over in the time it took me just to get that damn wi-fi card working!