Write the news yourself

CSM reports Back in the old days - pre-2005 - community activist Amy Gahran had three ways to reach readers of the Daily Camera in Boulder, Colo.: She could persuade a reporter to quote her, write a letter to the editor, or buy an ad. Now, the Internet has provided a fourth option, and Ms. Gahran wants to take advantage of it. She plans to recruit a "citizen journalism reporting team" to cover a controversial housing development - and post its work on the Daily Camera's website. Her unpaid volunteers won't have reporting experience, but she's not worried. "The skills involved in creating journalism are underappreciated, but they aren't particularly rocket science," says Gahran, a freelance writer. Ordinarily, a planned infiltration like this one would send editors rushing to barricade the door. But the Daily Camera's online chief says he welcomes Gahran's efforts, and he has plenty of company. In several communities across the United States, newspapers are encouraging amateur writers to fill their websites with content ranging from diatribes to serious reporting. On Friday, the venerable Los Angeles Times joined the parade, allowing Web denizens to rewrite its daily editorials en masse.

That Los Angeles Times experiment did not last long: Where is the Wikitorial? reports 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.

Kevin Roderick blogged Even before this, it seemed to me that instead of functioning like a true wiki, where facts get refined, the test case had deteriorated into a wholly predictable, no-win argument over the war. Same as you can already find and participate in at numerous well-read blogs. Sean at Blogging.la posts some advice for the LAT: "Welcome to the world that we have to deal with every single day in blog-land. So now they've met Mr. & Mrs Troll, wait until they meet our neighbors the comment spammers!"

Michelle Malkin blogged The Los Angeles Times wikitorial experiment has been shut down "because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material." I can relate.

Dave Lucas blogged Bloggers from time to time have to do things they don't want to do in order to maintain control of their blogs. Reason? A few "electronic bad apples" with nothing better to do started posting spam or flaming or otherwise causing trouble. Result: free speech and the exchange of ideas in the spirit of debate suffers. Nations every now and then have to shift policies and procedures. Reason? In a recent example, 19 hijackers with an agenda changed the airline industry and the world economy forever. Result: fear, wars, inconveniences and insults, higher gas prices and an increased awareness of both vulnerability and security.

Jeff Jarvis blogged The LA Times wikitorial says it is "closed" now and I see no way to get in to see the latest version or the history. No explanation: Just closed. Hope I didn't help break it. I said that having both sides of an issue fight it out over the same text just wouldn't work in a wiki. Wikis are about collaboration; you may disagree with your fellows but the mutual goal is clear. A wikitorial is bound to turn into a tug-of-war. So I suggested in a listserv discussion of it that there should be two wiki versions of the editorial: one for proponents of the editorial's stand, one for opponents; let them put their best stuff forward and may the best side win. It seemed to be that this would be like an Oxford debate, brought to software. Wikigod Jimbo Wales replied in the listserv on Friday: "I changed it to this earlier today. I'm not sure the LA Times wants me setting policy for their site, but it is a wiki after all, and what was there made no sense." I went today to see what was happening and find it closed. Drat.

tim Windsor commented Judging from the screenshots on the Slashdot discussion of this, it's hard to blame them for pulling it down, at least temporarily.

Chris Anderson blogged Since I wrote admiringly of the LA Times experiment with a blogish revamp of their editorial page, I am compelled to note that one of the most interesting parts, the "wikitorials", has failed, at least for now. Jeff Jarvis describes some of the reasons, but at the root it appears that they simply got one of the architecture of participation calculations wrong. (Note: I just created that Wikipedia entry myself. How ironic is it that Wikipedia didn't have an entry for the architecture of participation, when it itself is the best example?) The question in all open participation projects is how to deal with dissent. Should you seek rough consensus or should you "fork", letting each group go their own way? Wikipedia deals with this pretty gracefully by letting a million entries bloom. If you don't agree with an entry and the normal process of collective editing is diverging into acrimony rather than converging on a compromise, then the policy is this: at the point of disagreement note that there is a controversy and take each argument to its own sub-entry, curated by those who care. This works great where multiple views can coexist without diminishing the overall goals of the project. If you don't like this post, you can write your own and the collective wisdom of the blogosphere will probably be better for it. But in other projects, such as Linux and similar open source software, there is often real benefit to having one commonly accepted version or standard around which others can build. Which is why Linux has chosen the rough consensus model to minimize the problems of forking (at least in the kernel) and has thus largely avoided the balkanization that plagued Unix. As best as I can tell (and it's hard to reconstruct now, because they've disappeared the wikitorial entirely) the mistake the LA Times made was to try to apply a rough consensus model to the wikitorials, when a forking model would have been more appropriate. Which is odd, because one of its other innovations was to encourage dissenting views and open debates between opposing sides of its editorial board and other official contributors. Surely what's good for the board is even better for the public? Anyway, I'm glad to hear that Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia founder, is advising them on how to revamp this. It may be that wikitorials are simply a dumb idea, but we won't know until they at least try to architect them better. Ross Mayfield has a great roundup on how, indeed, the wikitorials did eventually fork; Jimmy Wales set up a "counterpoint" version on the LA Times site. Sadly, it's gone now, too. Based on these unfortunate samples found in the Slashdot discussion of this experiment, they probably made the right call shutting it all down until they could think it through a bit more.

K. J. Lopez: blogged The LATimes Wiki-editorial experiment is in shut-down mode already. I wish I had put money on that one.

It is unfortunate that people can't carry on a respectful disagreement when they are using someone else's system. After all, they can easily start up their own blogs, and be as extreme as they want there, and they can probably attract others that feel as they do, to bolster their extreme positions.