L.A. Times "now we wiki, now we don't"

Media The best commentary on the L.A. Times "now you wiki now you don't" episode comes from Jeff Jarvis' "buzzmachine."

"All communities need attention. The Times should have gone to Jimbo and, he said today, he would have had a few good Wikipedians watch over their foray. You don't build a town without cops. You don't build a community site -- a town online -- without a clean-up crew, either. He also would have explained how to use wikis, since he knows. But the paper thought they knew best and this leads to be biggest mistake:"

From the L.A. Times itself

But Dan Gillmor, previously a technology writer for the San Jose Mercury News, said in his Internet blog that The Times deserved "credit for trying." He blamed the "bottom feeders" for polluting the experiment and said the newspaper should try again because "in the end, there are more good people than bad — and eventually the good folks would have made the vandalism a pointless exercise."

Future of the Book site comments on LA Times brief foray into Wiki land. I think the essential issue here is control and command. Wikis work from the ground up. LA Times is hierarchical and needs to keep control. The idea of taking LA Times content and dropping it into a Wiki that isn't on their site is a good one. New York Times weighs in

"We were taking stuff down as soon as it went up and staving them off. Finally we had to go to bed. Someone called the newsroom a little bit before 4 a.m. and said there's something bad on your Web site, and so we just took the whole site down."