Today’s L. A. Times Editorial Page has a note to the readers about some changes that are in the works over there that people might be interested in. For the most part it’s a lot of “more of this, less of that” kind of thing but this bit really jumped out:

“Watch next week for the introduction of “wikitorials” — an online feature that will empower you to rewrite Los Angeles Times editorials.”

Wow! They are using wikis! What is a Wiki? It’s basically “a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser.” They aren’t really new to the web and as Wikipedia will demonstrate they can be incredibly cool. The problem is not a lot of people use them. I have a personal wiki that I use mostly for keeping track of travel info and a few people occasionally add to it. Metroblogging has a public public wiki that almost no one uses. LA Blogs had a shortlived sister called LA Wiki that no really used – guide.lablogs.com is the grown up version of that which seems to be off to a good start, and for very specific things that can prove quite useful. Maybe allowing people to chime in on Editorials is a good way to get more people involved, and for a big newspaper to do this is pretty forward thinking. I could be wrong but I don’t know of any other major papers doing something like this. I guess we’ll see how it works, but color me interested.

Related posts:

1. More “love” for the L.A. Times
2. ATTENTION LA TIMES READERS:
3. Get with the Times
4. L.A. Times Festival of Books
5. LA Times on Blogging and SixApart