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

Slashdot giveth, and slashdot taketh away

[Junior J. Junior III]

It's funny, because /. itself went through much the same thing. But by careful filtering and moderation, it's been kept reasonably useful. You still have all kinds of morons posting here, but you don't ever have to see them if you don't want to. And we don't even have editors, really.

Re:Great attitude

[forkazoo]

Sure, it may have been a useful service if it was well implimented. It wasn't well implimented. You make a place for the public to post anything they want on tEh Intarweb, and you will get crap. Period. Email/Usenet has SPAM, Slashdot has trolls. Email servers can see when the same message is sent to many users. Slashdot has moderators.

The only protection they had in place for dealing with the masses of the Internet was, "gee, I hope we don't get popular." Slashdot has a readership of about a half million. What if they were featured prominently in the NY Times, and on CNN, and a few million people realised that they could say "Bob wuz here." Slashdot wasn't the problem. You don't have to be tech savvy to edit a wiki.

They could have made a system of moderation like slashdot has. They could have allowed a trusted community of editors. They could have done something more than expect that a few official editors could keep track of a public space in the Internet, and keep it clean. Bad web developers, no twinkie. Imagine if Commander taco had to remove every troll post from slashdot by himself!

Stupid LA Times

[spiritraveller]

Not foreseeing that this would happen proves that the LA Times knows nothing about the internet. The opportunity to post pornography on the website of one of the biggest newspapers in the country would certainly never be overlooked by the Beavis and Buttheads of the world.

Blaming Slashdotters for it is even stupider.

Talk about a failure to accept responsibility!

Re:Can't say I disagree

[dr_dank]

When I get mod points, I often find that quite a few ACs are capable of being insightful and mod them accordingly. Discounting ideas simply because of anonymity is intellectually lazy.

Re:I can finally say...

[Basje]

To make this work you need to have a majority of readers that are sympathetic to your site and a certain critical mass of readers.

Needless to say, a politician has neither.

Well, to their credit

[Sycraft-fu]

There really are a lot of assholes online. People say and do things they never would in person. Some delight in trying to be as big a jerk as they can and causing as much trouble as they can. If you aren't used to that environment, it can really shock you. The RvB PSA on teh topic is particularly appropriate, but I can't find a link to it right now.

At any rate, while they shouldn't be scapegoating Slashdot, I don't blame them for being supprised and angry. It is amazing the amount of crap some people online will spew and how far they'll go to wreck things for everyone else.

Re:Well, to their credit

[James_Aguilar]

Words are just words. They don't hurt like a stick or a stone. People should feel that they can say anything they want to, at any time.

This is wrong. First of all, words do hurt (as clearly shown in the example of the NY times, which was "hurt" or damaged by the words of internet users to the extent that they had to take down a product that they had spent a lot of time developing and now will likely have to scrap).

Second, it seems like everyone assumes that social constraints are generally bad things. That is wrong thinking. Social constraints exist so that we can live with each other as humans in a fashion where the amount of pain that people have to go through is lessened. Almost all situations in which these constraints are removed tend toward decay.

You need to think further through your ideas about society. People are afraid to say things in person because they know those are wrong things to say and they know they could be held accountable in person, but not online.

Re:Well, to their credit

[James_Aguilar]

Don't think I don't sympathize with you; I do, because I also have at times been unconfident in the way I speak, have been afraid of being hurt. I was an unpopular guy in elementary, middle, and high school, and at a lot of times, it was not a good experience.

On the other hand, I learned that the person to blame for my problems was not the nebulous society that was oppressing me, but me myself. I am still in the process of learning this, but I feel like I have come a long way already. Looking to things outside myself to find a target for blame would not have helped me.

What I'm trying to say is that it's not good to go online and look for ways to vent, but rather to eliminate that which makes you want to vent. Getting rid of social constraints, though, is not the solution (Nor will it ever happen anyhow, even if it is the solution, so it's kind of pointless to talk about it.).

PS: Physical hurt is not the only kind of hurt that exists, nor is the assertion that NY Times was not physically damaged sufficient argument to back up the idea that it is fine for them to be damaged in the way they were. They tried to do something that, in my opinion, would have added value to the world, and it was destroyed by a bunch of idots who wanted to "express themslves." That kind of expression is worthless. As to the real life question: are you saying it's OK, then, for people to be dicks to each other in real life? Of course not: it's wrong in real life, and it's wrong online.

Re:Well, to their credit

[Just Some Guy]

I don't blame them for being supprised and angry.

I do. If they put up an unprotected database, or IRC server, or open mail relay, or unsecured HTTP proxy, then people would use it to do bad stuff. When you design an Internet-facing application of any kind, you have to assume people will try to break it. Always. There are no exceptions.

Slashdot goes through great pains to keep idjits from gumming up the works. Wikipedia has people who monitor it 24/7 to fix mischief as quickly as possible. I have to watch my own little TWiki site like a hawk to keep link farmers off of it. What hopelessly naive sysadmin at the Times thought "it couldn't happen here"?

I'm not saying that it's right or OK for people to try to ruin the digital commons, but I have little sympathy for people who run such a public resource and expect it to take care of itself. That's not the real world, and I don't know why the Times thought it would be different for them.