Investigators would not tell parents at the meeting last week whether the arrested student was planning to attack the school, or what they found during a search of the student's home. They said the "A" student, an only child with cousins at the high school, had never been arrested before, cooperated with them and made a full confession.
Messages posted from the same e-mail address defended the writing as free speech.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday, May 03, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 61 words Type of Material: Correction
High school threats: An article in Tuesday's California section said threats posted on Glen A. Wilson High School's Wikipedia page came from an anonymous e-mail address. The threats were posted by a user who had not registered with Wikipedia. He posted to the site using an Internet Protocol (IP) address, a number generated by the computer or device he was using.
"I write what I write on Wikipedia because it's open to all people to contribute," read a May 2007 posting. "Don't read what you don't want to see. You could have stopped reading this long ago but yet, you still continue to read."
Some parents thought the school should have detected the threats earlier; others blamed Wikipedia for not reporting or taking them down sooner.
"Places like Wikipedia that are public have some responsibility, whether they were joking around or not -- there's a responsibility for public safety," said Cindy Greenup, the mother of a Wilson freshman.
Parents and students cannot be expected to police the sites alone, said Los Angeles County Sheriff's Det. Dan Jackson.
"How do you make them accountable for policing it? It's pretty much impossible," he said. "Somebody with authority, like the administrator, should be monitoring it" and reporting threats to police, because "we certainly can't cruise the Internet on thousands of sites."
But some Internet experts say volunteers like those at Wikipedia can't be expected to be that hyper-vigilant.
"The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were not written with the idea of Wikipedia in mind, and so we have to make this stuff up as we go along," said Peter Lunenfeld, a professor in the media design program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
Lunenfeld said parents needed to be the ultimate online watchdogs.
A quick response to school Internet threats often depends on getting parents, students and site administrators to immediately report them to authorities, said Michael Bowman, Los Angeles school police deputy chief, who is called to investigate such threats about every other month.
Online records show that for more than a year Wikipedia administrators and at least one student were removing messages from the Wilson High page that had been posted by the same e-mail address as the recent threats. But the student who removed the messages never notified school officials.
"At first I thought it was just some hate letter, but as much of them surfaced, I started to question the motives of the poster," the student, a senior who plans to become a computer science major, wrote in an e-mail last week.
On Monday, he and others who have been monitoring the page were still debating in the "discussion" area whether the page history should include references to the shooting threats.
Wikipedia staff members said they did their best to respond to potential threats, but that it was difficult to separate them from pranks.
"If someone came to us and told us we think there are threats here, we think there's a risk, we would go to the authorities," said Jay Walsh, a Wikimedia spokesman. But we're "not hugely equipped to trace people and see what they're doing."
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molly.hennessy-fiske@ latimes.com
