The Los Angeles Times wants to shake up its editorial page and op-ed functions. One part of the plan was to allow for wikitorials.
Wiki software makes content creation open-source -- anybody can go into any story and change it.
While wikis might be the bee's knees for certain applications, group-written opinions on controversial subjects might not be one of them.
If you go to the LAT's wikitorial page, here is what you see:
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.
The editorial was called War and Consequences, and it was about the Iraq war.
On the online-news listserv, this was the response of Simon Willison to the question of whether anyone was surprised:
Not at all - it was doomed the moment it was posted to Slashdot:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/18/2143212See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_trolling_phenomena for background.