Never mind

The LA times was forced to abandon its so-called wikitorial after readers posted obscene pictures on the site. The plan, which used Wikipedia as its model, invited readers to make online changes to the paper's editorial.

"It sounds nutty," said an introduction to the wikitorial in Friday's paper. "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 be hip. Nevertheless, we proceed. We're calling this a 'public beta,' which is a fancy way of saying we're making something available even though we haven't completely figured it out."

What they had not planned for was hard-core pornography, which the paper's software could not ward off. Its open-source wikitorial software allowed readers to post without vetting from editors, who could take down posts only after they appeared. Any contributor who persisted in bad behavior could be blocked.

It does sound nutty, doesn't it? Steve Outing, who had his doubts about the project:

Wikis are great for factual information, where group intelligence steers the way to accurate content -- but they're lousy for opinion pieces, where I would not be inclined to use the word intelligence alongside the word group.