Got an e-mail from a friend earlier today, pointing me to a curious little glitch on Thesaurus.com.

Seems if you type in “weaker,” you get two batches of synonyms: one grouped around the word “female,” one grouped around “lady.” Get it?

Yeah, not funny.

But sometimes the bar is set awfully low with these memes, and while the Roget’s hack was but a misogynistic ripple in the vast ocean of Internet phenomena on Tuesday alone, it proved “Hey, have you seen this?” enough to be linked by a major women’s media blog, Digged here and there, cross-blogged, and otherwise entered into the digital echo chamber by afternoon’s end.

And, of course, we’ve seen this type of thing before. Hackers get into a big, honking search engine or reference site and plant some seeds of mischief. Perhaps most infamously, for a long while hitting Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button when searching for “miserable failure” brought up the Web page for the White House. Google bombs and link pranks are just a fact of life on these here InterWebs. They go with the territory. Sometimes amusing. Sometimes harmless. Sometimes distasteful. But while people chuckle and pass along the prank, they’re unlikely to believe that there’s anything at all credible about the joke.

(All real-life correlations between the current Presidency and failure notwithstanding.)

But . . . maybe we should start caring. Just a little. Not that people will actually believe that “female” is synonymous with “weaker” because Roget’s site says so. But because it signals a basic problem with the Net as we burn the last public libraries to the ground

and move all information online: How wiki will we be? Not just in terms of deliberate open source, but also our toleration of breached closed sources? It stands to reason that one day there will be regulation of the Web unimaginable in its current wild west-frontier

incarnation. The hackers will always be a step ahead, though, or at least always capable of being steps ahead. And if not outright hackers, than those meddlers who trick the search algorithms. It’s obvious that we can tolerate one or two Google bombs, one or two jokey thesaurus entries, a handful of graffitied corporate sites. But where do we draw the line? When do we start seeing them not as flies in the ointment, but as toxins poisoning the entire information pool? When the blatant misogyny of a joke Roget’s entry gives way to more subtle, less noticeable, and more assimilated prejudices on “educational” portals? When MSNBC.com is compromised once a month? Once a week?  Every day?

It’s a nightmare/worst case scenario, of course. The good and correct will always outweigh the bad and circumspect, at least with regards to ahem “trusted sources.” And there will always be watchdogs. And, just as the fun of a harmless prank like today’s is made possible by rapid response, so too is the Internet largely protected by the wisdom of fast seeing, fast-acting masses.

But as we put more and more faith into systems over which we have less and less oversight, some weird gamesmanship is in the offing. Ten years ago, if you cracked open the hardback Thesaurus and saw some lines crossed out and replaced with a joke, there was no disguising the act.

Today, as you use that hardback as a mouse pad and click around for answers online, the line between fact and fiction is still rarely crossed and mostly obvious. But ten years from now, when no one’s heard of a hardback and we stare through our Inter-goggles into a layered, niched-out-the-wazoo information landscape with infinite opportunities for sabotage, how will we ever know for sure? How?