The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia is considering a radical revision to the way it can be edited by anyone after two US senators were "killed off" in its pages.

Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales has proposed a controversial new system under which any changes to pages about living people would have to be approved by one of the site's editors or trusted users before they could be read by the general public.

The online encyclopaedia has struggled with vandalism and accusations of inaccuracy in its vast number of entries. But the new system would be radical step back from the "wiki" philosophy that anyone can make changes to the entries on Wikipedia.

The proposal comes after edits of the pages of Senators Robert Byrd and Edward Kennedy gave the false impression both had died.

Senator Kennedy was taken ill during a lunch in the Capitol for Barack Obama and members of Congress. However, before hospital sources confirmed he was OK, a false entry appeared on Wikipedia.

It read: "Kennedy suffered a seizure at a luncheon following the Barack Obama Presidential inauguration on January 20, 2009. He was removed in a wheelchair, and died shortly after." The error was quickly spotted and amended.

Wikipedia's has a system of protecting pages that are subject to vandalism by blocking all edits except those by trusted Wikipedia editors. But the system of "flagged revisions" proposed by Mr Wales would mean that once edits to biographies of living people were made, they would not go "live" to be seen by readers until checked.

In his blog, Mr Wales said the "nonsense" of the false reports would have been "100% prevented by Flagged Revision" and said he wanted the changes to be implemented as soon as possible.

"It [the error] could also have been prevented by protection or semi-protection, but this is a prime example of why we don't want to protect or semi-protect articles - this was a breaking news story and we want people to be able to participate (so protection is out) and even to participate in good faith for the first time ever (so semi-protection is out)," he wrote.

However, this posting caused a storm of comments, with many editors saying the proposal was against the spirit of Wikipedia and would introduce long delays to the editing process.

One user posted: "It is not in the interests of the community to trample on the views of large and passionate minority who wish to maintain the principle that all editors have an equal right to edit and equal responsibility for what they produce. It cannot be in anyone's interests for this to go ahead and doing so will show contempt for a whole layer of people who have devoted their time and energy in good faith, believing that what WP told them: 'this is an encyclopaedia that anyone can edit,' was true."

But a Wikipedia administrator posted: "In the vast majority of cases, a Wikipedia article on an individual will be the very highest-ranking search engine result when a search is conducted on the name of that person. This affects the lives of the people we write about on a daily basis.

"To suggest that Wikipedia does not have profound obligations to do its best to keep these articles free of defamatory, gossipy and privacy-invading material is to suggest that we are without obligation to consider the real-world impacts of our actions and the work we are doing."

Another user posted: "Enabling Flagged Revisions will undoubtedly create backlogs that we will be unable to manage."

A system of flagged revisions for all entries has been used by the German Wikipedia site for almost a year. However critics say that the process is labour intensive. Mr Wales accepted that there was an approval delay of three weeks for German Wikipedia entries which was "unacceptable". He pointed out that the system he was proposing was only for biographies of living people.

"Our version should show very minimal delays (less than 1 week, hopefully a lot less) because we will only be using it on a subset of articles, the boundaries of which can be adjusted over time to manage the backlog," he posted.

Mr Wales has now offered a compromise, asking those who were opposed to the changes to make "an alternative proposal within the next 7 days, to be voted upon for the next 14 days after that".