A Crash Course in Chaos 📰
The Los Angeles Times learned the hard way that handing your editorial space to the internet is a bad idea.
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The internet is a vandal’s dream. Vandals can damage and destroy things on the internet easily, way more easily than in real life.
Sometimes those things are at the tippy-top of the food chain. Hence the story of the Wikitorial, a concept created by the Los Angeles Times’ editorial section with volunteer support from the co-creator of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales.
(As I’m sure you know, Wikipedia is a good information source that often gets hit with vandalism.)
The idea, dating to 2005, went like this: The L.A. Times put up an editorial about the Iraq War titled “War and Consequences,” and allowed users to “fork,” or come up with their own variations on the essay that better reflected their point of view or added discussion points that the original essay missed.
This idea was part of then-editor Michael Kinsley’s campaign to reboot what an editorial page was.
It got a lot of attention, and that was a problem: See, when things get attention on the internet, it leads to attempts to disrupt it for reasons of chaos. And, in the case of the Wikitorial, it caught the attention of sites like Slashdot, whose chaos-friendly users responded by repeatedly vandalizing the site with profanities. The deputy editorial page editor tried keeping up with the unwanted edits late into the night, but eventually sleep beckoned.
That was when someone decided to up the ante, moving beyond basic vandalism with a disturbing “shock” image. The newspaper got a call at 4 a.m. informing them of this vandalism, which led the entire site to be taken down at 4:30 a.m. By 5, the Wikitorial had been shut down entirely, never to return.
The Wikitorial, to be clear, was a notable journalistic experiment, coming during an era when the news industry had been heavily experimenting with user-generated content. But the internet is chaos, and the great lesson is that you have to plan for chaos.
» Wanna learn more? Check out our piece on the Wikitorial, “Wiki-Fail,” from 2019.
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