The LA Times Wiki Experiment

Back in June, the LA Times tried an experiment. They created a wikitorial, an interactive device allowing readers to contribute to and rewrite its editorial column. "Do you see fatuous reasoning, a selective reading of the facts, a lack of poetry?" asked an introductory article in the paper. "Well, what are you going to do about it? You could send us an e-mail ... But today you have a new option: Rewrite the editorial yourself."

At the end of a 1,000-word editorial about the war in Iraq, online readers were invited to "Click here to Wiki this morning's editorial". An article in Guardian Ulimited, an online newspaper, outlined the events that followed:

>> The wikitorial started with the first users posting modest amendments to the editorial just hours after its publication.

>> By early morning, readers were inserting a tone that was more shrill than the high-minded balance of the original: "The Bush administration should be publicly charged and tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity."

>> At 9am, the editorial was erased by a reader and substituted with another. Bizarrely, the new version echoed the position of the original.

>> By mid-morning, the editorial had been replaced by the more reductive "F**k USA".

>> By lunchtime, the founder of Wikipedia got in on the act, "forking" the editorial into two pieces, representing opposing viewpoints. "I'm proposing this page as an alternative to what is otherwise inevitable, which is extensive editing of the original to make it neutral ... which would be fine for Wikipedia, but would not be an editorial," wrote Jimbo Wales, who advised the paper on its experiment.

>> At 4am the paper's managing editor got a call from the office. Explicit images known as "goatses" had appeared on the wikitorial page. The experiment was terminated.

While this story created a lot of bad press for wikis, don't count them out. Organizations will continue to find ways to adapt new technologies to their own businesses and will learn from prior mistakes. In his blog, Buzz Machine, Jeff Jarvis offers his own theories on why the wiki experiment failed:

"The LA Times didn't understand what it was doing and made three criticial mistakes:

1. Collaboration vs. argument -- I said this from the start: They didn't get that wikis are a collaborative medium where, even when people disagree, they try to find common ground, knowing there can be only one outcome, or else the wiki will, by its very nature, fail. This is why I suggested having two wikis, instead -- one pro, one con and let the best wiki win -- and Jimbo Wales was starting to do that... but the trolls took over the forest first.

2. Care and feeding -- All communities need attention. The Times should have gone to Jimbo and, he said today, he would have had a few good Wikipedians watch over their foray. You don't build a town without cops. You don't build a community site -- a town online -- without a clean-up crew, either. He also would have explained how to use wikis, since he knows. But the paper thought they knew best and this leads to be biggest mistake:

3. Newspaper ego -- Here is the Times' worst mistake and its most predictable: They think everything is about them. I've sat in meetings with newspaper editors who earnestly think that the best use of internet interactivity is to let the people talk about what they have written, to discuss them, to keep them in the spotlight they built for themselves. There is no bigger institutional ego than a newspaper's. Presidents and popes get humbled more often than editors. Well, at least they used to.

No, guys, the best use of a wiki would have been to have the public create wikis to share their knowledge and viewpoints with you. I don't know what the big issues are in LA, but here in New York, it might work better just to open the gates to watch people create pro and con wikis on the Olympics and a new Manhattan stadium and 10 ways to improve the schools....

But even that is an exhibition of media ego. For the truth is, if people wanted to do that, they could go to any number of places and do it on their own. They don't need newspapers to give them technology. And they certainly do not need newspapers to tell them what to talk about

If newspapers would just listen -- and use this techology to do that -- they'd find that the people don't want to talk about what the editors talk about. And they certainly don't want to talk about the editors."

Jeff goes on to say, "I hope the LA Times gets back on the bike and rides again. I salute them for the effort; the heart is in the right place. But I would hate to see one misstep cancel the race ... for the LA Times and for other newspapers, all of whom need to learn how to listen."

It appears that the LA Times is looking to learn from its mistakes and try again. Managers of the newspaper's editorial and Internet operations, which have undergone a number of changes in recent months, said they might attempt to resurrect online editorials written collectively by readers. "As long as we can hit a high standard and have no risk of vandalism, then it is worth having a try at it again," said Rob Barrett, general manager of Los Angeles Times Interactive...."