Admittedly, we’re a little late in commenting on the Los Angeles Times’ Wikitorial experiment. Our excuse is that we never quite understood the thing in the first place. Best we could tell, the Times would write an editorial and post it online, and then anyone who wanted to was invited to take a crack at their own edit, no matter what their relative level of insight, their political leanings, their proclivity for profanity — or their mental health.
That couldn’t be it, we figured. Could it?
Well yes, it turns out, apparently it could. And now, in a not-particularly-shocking development, the experiment is temporarily on hold, just two days after it started. The problem? “We have had to remove this feature, at least temporarily, because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material,” according to a message posted yesterday on the Times’ Wikitorial page.
There’s something about the Times’ willingness to experiment with its editorial page that’s admirable — it reflects the paper’s desire to shake the staid conventions of the newspaper business in a rapidly-changing media environment. (Full disclosure: the writer of this item has written an op-ed for the Times.) But though the occasional failure is inevitable in the quest for innovation, we can’t figure out why, exactly, anyone thought the Wikitorial even had a chance at success. It’s one of those concepts that seems like it came from folks seeking to find a new way to capitalize on the Internet without thinking about the nuts and bolts of how the idea might play out.
We’re not saying the Times’ editorial and opinion page editor, Michael Kinsley, is out of touch with Internet culture — he did found and edit Slate, after all. And he’s one of the most erudite and accomplished journalists around. But how could you put together a high-profile project that’s wide-open to the public and not expect it to be flooded with “inappropriate material” almost immediately? On the Internet, a medium that allows people all over the world to target you with little more than the click of a button, inviting people in the door willy-nilly has its pitfalls. It works for Wikipedia largely because the sheer volume of entries in the interactive cyber-encyclopedia means that there’s not much temptation for public mischief — after all, there’s just not a lot of fun in defacing an encyclopedia’s definition of rainbow trout. But the Wikitorial, standing as it does alone and proud, is an irresistible target for cyber-vandals of all stripes. We’re not sure why the Times thought it would attract only high-minded individuals interested in mining their collective intelligence to produce a better product. One need only look at the comments board of just about any blog — and, in some cases, the blog itself — to understand that civil discourse is not the sought-after result of many members of the online community.
And that aside, why would anyone want to read an editorial that’s updated by dozens of people who likely know less about the topic at hand than the person who drafted the editorial in the first place?
One of the articles of faith of the blogosphere is that, no matter who you are, or what you’re writing about, there’s someone out there somewhere who knows more about the topic than you do — and could thus improve, or correct, your work. Trouble is, for every one qualified person there are 100 unqualified ones just looking for a chance to sound off. According to comments on The Washington Monthly‘s blog, the Wiki version of the first editorial opened up by the Times included lines like “Bush’s obtaining pleasure over what he calls progress in Iraq is not a crime, either. One person’s pleasure is another person’s child abuse, we suppose.” At one point, there was a reference to a “bong dream.” Heady stuff.
Editorial writers have the benefit of their familiarity with a topic, an editing process to save them from themselves, and, ideally, a facility with language that got them their position in the first place. It makes little sense to cede all of those advantages to whoever wanders in and decides to put her two cents in.
A modified version of the Wikitorial might work — one in which, say, writers submit suggested changes to a central editor, who incorporates the good stuff and leaves out the bong references. The end result would be far superior to the present system, with its reliance on whichever underqualified or up-to-no-good cook was last in the kitchen. (And going through a central editor would also make it far easier to keep “inappropriate material” from shutting down the site.)
Yes, such a change would probably violate the democratic ideals behind the Wikitorial project. But there is something to the idea of having qualified outsiders weigh in on the Times’ attempt to make a definitive comment on a given topic. We don’t want to see the idea go to waste. In its initial attempt, the Times took inclusiveness to an extreme. And now it has literally nothing to show for it. It’s time to go back to the drawing board.
–Brian Montopoli
Brian Montopoli is a writer at CJR Daily.