The LA Times this morning debuted its first wikitorial, "War and Consequences." Er, make that "War & Consequences," as the "and" in the original has been edited to an ampersand -- at least for now.
As feared, the Times is using the typical wiki format, limiting though it does limit the editing only to registered users. It's hard to imagine this process producing any added value on an opinion piece, but I'm certainly willing to watch this wikitorial experiment evolve before passing final judgment.
Even the Times notes, in A Wiki for Your Thoughts, that this model may have problems:
To be sure, encyclopedias and newspaper editorials are very different literary forms. Contributors to Wikipedia share in some general way a commitment to accuracy. By contrast, strong disagreement is built into the concept of an editorial. Plenty of skeptics are predicting embarrassment; like an arthritic old lady who takes to the dance floor, they say, the Los Angeles Times is more likely to break a hip than to be hip. We acknowledge that possibility.
I've got to think that the suggestions of Robert Niles, editor of Online Journalism Review, would have made for a better wiki as applied to an editorial.
Word count: The original Times editorial was 1,064 words (according to MS Word's word count). The current edited version is at 1,767.
UPDATE: Editor&Publisher interviews Michael Kinsley about the launch.
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