Last week I noted that the LA Times “Wikitorial” experiment would probably be chaos and guess what? It was.
Unfortunately, we have had to remove this feature, at least temporarily, because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material.
Thanks and apologies to the thousands of people who logged on in the right spirit.
Well, that ought to help the wiki movement, don’tcha think? But they should have seen this from the beginning. I mean first of all, the idea of a wiki is to filter out opinion, not create it. A wiki just isn’t space built for competing ideas, even if there are two or three of them set up for the same general topic. (Even 20 or 30 might not make it.) A wiki is the place to collaborate on some semblence of unbiased truth about whatever the topic is. When you’re dealing with topics that have a minimum of right/left or right/wrong, wikis will work. But the idea that people in this country could collectively agree upon a statement about the Iraq war is idiocy. And so, the experiment failed.
Having said that, however, take a look at the discussions taking place at Wikipedia over such controversial topics as abortion and George W. Bush. It’s pretty interesting to watch the process. I had heard at one point that Wikipedia editors were “approving” changes to those pages though I’m not sure if that’s still the case.
Growing pains…
Maybe I’m nitpicking here, but I’d have to disagree with your definition of a wiki being “place to collaborate on some semblence of unbiased truth about whatever the topic is”. Wikis have much broader application than that. I would say a wiki is a place to collaborate on some common intent, and that may not be around unbiased truth! It may be a whole bunch of people who share a common opinion. They can also be used for fiction.
btw – isn’t that “Wikaos”? 🙂