After a somewhat skeptically covered beginning last Friday, the “wikitorial” experiment at the Lost Angeles Times has been drawn to an abrupt close.

The reason for the shutdown of the experiment? “Unfortunately, we have had to remove this feature, at least temporarily, because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material,” the LA Times’s website editors have posted, in a short message titled “Where is the Wikitorial?” Added the editors: “Thanks and apologies to the thousands of people who logged on in the right spirit.”

You can see why the LA Times thought a “Wikitorial” feature — allowing ordinary readers to contribute to and modify opinion writing on the LA Times editorial-page website — might be a worthwhile experiment. After all, Wikipedia operates under the same rules, and it has turned out, even with its flaws, to be a worthwhile collective resource. So what went wrong with Wikitorial?

Part of the answer has to be that the LA Times is a more tempting target for vandals. Mess with the opinion page at the LA Times website, and your prank is seen by many more people in a given day than a similar prank on Wikipedia would be. (Compare — why do virus writers focus so much more on Windows platforms rather than on Linux or Mac systems? Because that’s where they can make the biggest splash.)

In addition, the LA Times may not yet have had a chance to develop anything like Wikipedia’s cadre of correcting volunteer editors who can be relied upon, generally, to steer an article back to accuracy when it’s been messed up, and to improve the article over time.

Even if Wikitorial hadn’t been vandalized, it’s possible that it would have turned out to be a failure in another sense. Consider: Do we really expect or want a newspaper editorial page to reflect our contributions and refinements? Isn’t our social expectation, at least when it comes to newspapers, to use the letters page, or the comments page on the website, to offer feedback?

In any case, editorial-page editor Michael Kinsley was probably wrong to think the energy of Wikimedia could easily be harnessed to add value to the LA Times editorial page. (He can’t be faulted for being encouraged by the apparent, though seemingly unlikely, success of projects like Wikipedia.) Still, Kinsley deserves credit for engaging in the experiment. I look forward to seeing what his next experiment is.

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