By Murdo MacLeod THEY are the Wikipedia timewasters, anonymous cyber-vandals who use one of the internet's greatest resources to abuse rivals, spread gossip and cause widespread confusion.

By Brian Bergstein Following revelations that a high-ranking member of Wikipedia's bureaucracy used his cloak of anonymity to lie about being a professor of religion, the free Internet encyclopedia plans to ask contributors who claim such credentials to identify themselves.

By Berinstein, Paula Many Searcher readers, especially those of us who went to library school, remember the hushed reverence with which the 1 lth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the last published in the U.K., was spoken.