Dumbshit Dept.

The real reason why Wikitorial failed

The LA Times recently tried to launch a Wiki based editorial page, called Wikitorial. Slashdot says:

The LA Times pulled down it's "beta" wikitorial after people began inserting obscene content faster than the editors could remove it. Though there is nothing on the LA Times editorial page or in the general coverage, the NY Times notes (free reg req) the fact that the bulk of the vandalism occurred after a posting about the wikitorial appeared on Slashdot and goes on to quote a member of the LA Times editorial staff as saying, "Slashdot has a tech-savvy audience that, to be kind, is mischievous and to be not so kind, is malicious".

While I find the entire thing funny, I don't think this is Slashdot's fault -- I think Slashdot greatly accelerated Wikitorial's demise, but it was not the cause of it. The folks at the LA Times failed to heed a few important points about wikis and communities:

1. A wiki is an online community: A wiki without users is useless.
2. To build a functioning wiki, you need to carefully and slowly build up a community of users who contribute to the wiki.
3. You can't build a community overnight -- online or in real life.
4. Communities can be resistant to attack, if properly prepared.

The LA Times should've taken time to develop a community of users around the Wikitorial. Just setting it up and inviting the world to come play is the wrong thing to do. You need to seed the community with people who will look out for it and establish some base community rules. I suppose there is a bit of bad luck that Wikitorial got slashdotted so quickly -- getting slashdotted is not always good. If you have a great influx of people overnight, you're going to stress the community and depending on the strength of the community it may resist the onslaught or just fold.

Take Wikipedia for example -- their community is resistant to attack. Last year a study showed that Wikipedia can heal itself from a spammer attack in the space of 5 minutes. But, even that is limited -- if the onslaught is too much for the editors to handle, they too will eventually fold.

Posted by Mayhem at June 21, 2005 03:40 PM