LA Times Pulls Wikitorial, Blames Slashdot

ubermiester writes "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". " Apparently Michael Newman thinks that all half a million daily Slashdot readers are malicious, although I personally would guess more like a 60:40 split myself *grin*.

Comments

It never even got to tuesday

[squiggleslash]

Impressive work by Slashdotters there, especially as I'd have expected them to wait until tuesday to be this mean.

On a more serious note, it'd be nice to know why the LA Times had these problems but services like Wikipedia have generally avoided it. I'm going to make a guess that Wikipedia et al have had to put up with it but over time have (a) become boring as targets for defacers and (b) have grown to add procedures that discourage simple defacing in this way.

Unlike Slashdot, whose moderation and IP restriction systems seem to consistantly avoid doing anything about the problems while causing the rest of us no end of grief.