Clustered wikitorials: L.A. Times reader’s brainstorm
Ernie Miller’s blog has pointed me to the L.A. Times’ wikitorial experiment–now actually started. One reader suggests clusters of wikis with the views of similarly opinionated people–you could even track the clusters, accumulate page-view stats and the rest, and get a grand picture.
I like that, and not just for newspapers. As a second Times reader weighs in, this could help mitigate the problem of having one big unwieldy wiki on a topic that just rewarded the people with the most time on their hands. Ernie, is this grand experiment becoming at least a little more promising now–given all the possibilities of coping with the happy chaos? Meanwhile, via the “continued” page, I’ll reproduce most of the cluster proposal from a reader nicknamed “Mahlon.”
…reasonable people will disagree. So an incendiary topic like the Iraq war, or any other topic worth arguing about, is likely to devolve into a battle of the fringe elements where passions are hotter.
So a wiki probably isn’t the best vehicle to track the ebb and flow as the fringe elements battle it out over opinion. It will be next to impossible to get the community to coalesce around one coherent body of content and then polish the rough edges. The content will never fuse or unite. Nuance will be bulldozed by extremism.
A possible solution would be to allow the content to branch into multiple revisions, each revision being maintained by a cluster of readers with similar opinions. Each branch off the original would allow a point of view to be debated and merged. If that cluster couldn’t agree on a significant point, that branch could subdivide so that distinct opinions could be refined and elucidated.
A single wiki is a powerful tool that allows the community to agree. When the community is divided, we need to spawn branches until we can achieve an equilibrium of opinion.
And by providing a forum where one could view all the branches and sub-branches, one could better understand the diversity of opinion. Imagine ranking each branch according to page views, Amazon-style community feedback, or Google-style Page Rank to show which branches have more interest than others. What an innovative and powerful tool for community discussion and insight that would be!
This might be a little long for a quote, but I want to be fair, and I think I’m doing the L.A. Time a service in reproducing the above–as an indication of the benefits of wikitorials as a form of interactivity for newspapers. For once, the dinos are getting something right or at least trying very hard.
Detail: Like some others, I hope the L.A. Times will experiment with only partly written editorials and let readers fill in the rest.
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