This is a very interesting -- amusing, even! --  NYT story about wikis, one part of the broader picture we could call participatory journalism. You're supposed to play by the rules and be neutral, but as we can see, not everyone does.

It's a rocky road from news to history. If you don't think so, just take a look at the entry for George W. Bush on Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia founded in 2001 by Larry Sanger, a philosophy lecturer at Ohio State University, and Jimmy Wales, an Internet entrepreneur.

Wikipedia, maintained by users all over the world who write and edit the entries pretty much as they wish, is visited by hundreds of thousands of people daily and has an estimated 400,000 entries on everything from manga (Japanese comics) to strathspeys (Scottish dance tunes). There are no user fees and no advertising: the site is supported by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, based in Florida, which maintains and develops free resources, including a dictionary and a collection of quotations.

To keep it all under control, contributors to the Wikipedia (Wiki is the software that allows for collaborative writing) are instructed to adopt a neutral point of view. Not everyone obeys, though. So certain trusted, regular contributors and editors become administrators who oversee what is going on. But each one has a different view of that job. And that is where the fun begins.

Collaborative history is a wild ride, as the recent presidential election demonstrated. In October readers were editing and re-editing the entries for President Bush and Senator John Kerry at breakneck speed. And some of it wasn't exactly editing. If you clicked on a picture of Bush in his National Guard uniform to get an enlarged version, you would see a picture of Hitler.