I have been away and offline, and so I missed the excitement around the LA Times wikitorial experiment imploding. I’m sorry to see it; I think newspapers need to be bolder about figuring out how the Web works, and good for Michael Kinsley for giving this a try. It’s too bad that a little bout of inevitable pranking (someone apparently incorporated an indecent image on the page) persuaded the Times to pull the plug. Sheesh, you’d think it would’ve taken a software developer (the LA Times must have a few, right?) just a little bit of work to block image tags in whichever open-source wiki software the paper had adopted.
I didn’t get to see the editorial in either its pre- or post-defacement state, so I can’t really comment on how the project evolved in its brief life. But I think that Kinsley & co. may have picked the wrong tool for the job. I’ve had the pleasure of exploring the origins of the wiki phenomenon as part of my book research; one of the things made clear by Ward Cunningham, who invented the wiki a decade ago (with the Portland Pattern Repository) because he wanted to help programmers share experiences and tell stories, is that wikis work best when they present contributors with a half-finished canvas and an open invitation to fill in the blanks by adding new pages. So putting up a finished piece of writing in the form of a single editorial and then asking readers to edit it is a stiflingly constricted application of the format.
The other point is that wikis work by forming communities that care about what’s in them, and that serve as stewards or gardeners of the content. You can’t go from zero to 60 in a day; building such a community takes time, care and love. You can’t just throw up a text and expect it to stand on its own — if you want to tap into the collective ideas and energy of an online crowd, you’d better have built some personal relationships with some of its members. Otherwise, that crowd will turn into a mob before you know it.
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