Has anyone at a news organization tried this yet? It's an intriguing idea.
My Poynter colleague,
Larry Larsen, wonders if it might be an interesting experiment to publish a piece of pending legislation as a
wiki,
inviting the public to edit and improve the bill. At the end of the
process, run the two bills side by side, with a reporter analyzing the
differences.
Of course, Larsen muses, you might run into the same sort of problems that LATimes.com did with its ill-fated "
wikitorial,"
a wiki editorial on Iraq policy which became the target of profane and pornographic additions. Instead
of obscene pranksters, you'd get special-interest groups inserting
their self-centered points of view.
I suspect this might work in a small town with the wiki subject a city
council bill. You'd probably see a LATimes.com-type result if you tried
this with a contentious bill going through the U.S. Congress.
A completely open wiki might work less well than one that's restricted
to a small group of people. For example, post an education bill as a
wiki, but restrict editing access to teachers; the result might show
what that group thinks are the flaws in the proposed legislation.
Larsen's idea is not without its challenges, but maybe he's onto something.
There is a site like this and funny enough it...
