It was a partisan crowd in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and they gave their local hero, Floyd Landis, a standing ovation that went on and on. The cyclist came home in March to raise money for his campaign to clear his name. Landis shot to fame in July 2006 as only the third American to win the Tour de France, but became infamous just four days later when it emerged that a urine sample he gave during the race had shown a testosterone ratio outside the allowed range.

To date, the campaign has involved hefty legal fees, a series of public fund-raisers such as that one, the first-ever public hearing of a doping arbitration (scheduled to take place in May), and an unprecedented Internet strategy known as the “Wiki Defense” that is forcing journalists to question the global antidoping operation that they too often treated as foolproof.

When the news of Landis’s test results first broke, the headlines screamed “Doping Scandal.” The next day the sprinter Justin Gatlin announced that he, too, had registered abnormal testosterone ratios in a test in April 2006. Both Landis and Gatlin denied doping. An army of columnists wondered if the public could ever trust sporting achievement again.

But recently Landis has begun generating more nuanced press coverage. The change is largely the result of his Wiki Defense, in which he posted 370 pages of his test documents online in the hope of unearthing experts and explanations for the suspicious result. “Wiki” refers to the open editing systems best embodied by Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that relies on a wisdom-of-crowds approach to verifying the accuracy of its entries. Landis is the first athlete to use the Internet in this way, and the move sparked a series of debates on blogs and in chat...

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