[UPDATE: They've taken down the Wikitorial and posted the following explanation:
Where is the wikitorial?
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.
Ernest Miller has more.]
The LA Times launched its first user-editable editorial today. Here's the original, unedited: War and Consequences, and edited: Wikitorial - LATWiki.
I'm sure others will offer lots of analysis of the experiment, but here are a few quick observations for what it's worth.
The first edit was a thoughtful one from the founder of Wikipedia himself, Jimbo Wales ("Yes, it's really me," he wrote, so I'll take his word for it). He started a second, counterpoint editorial for opposing views. It's a pretty good idea: give both sides a place to work on their arguments in order to head off wholesale deleting and vandalism from each side. His rationale, from the history page:
It seems impossible for someone who disagrees with the central thrust of the original editorial to both respect the intentions of the authors, and also to have a voice. So 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. -- Jimbo Wales
It didn't work. The anti-Bush side just went and deleted the counterpoint and did so repeatedly, despite pleas from Jimbo and others to be courteous. (I'm calling the two sides pro-Bush and anti-Bush just for simplicity.)
So far there have been about 30-40 edits to each of the two documents, much of it vandalism and typical political blog shouting, but there are some sincere efforts at rewriting and introducing more detail... lots more detail. The current version is about three times the length of the original (not including the counterpoint, which is pretty short anyway, probably because people keep deleting it, and there's not much pro-Bush presence apparent). Many terms are now links that take you to their own wiki pages, so it's got that whole hypertext-ADD look about it now. It looks like it's evolving into a pamphlet of everyone's favorite lefty anti-war screeds rather than a concise editorial. (Most of which screeds I agree with, just for the record.)
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