Dan Gillmor, arguably the father of the young citizen journalism movement, is arguing the LA Times was wrong to take down its Wikitorial effort this week. "Eventually the good folks would have made the vandalism a pointless exercise," he writes on his blog.

I’d love to agree, but I’m afraid this one doesn’t come down to good manners or the triumph of decency. It’s hard numbers.

Wikipedia, the user-created encyclopedia, worked because it grew organically: a hardcore of editors grew at the same rate as the readers. I don’t know the real figures, but I’d bet that it would be something like this: for every 100 new users, a handful were be type ones, those taken with the project’s aims and origins, who were going to contribute positively. A handful, meanwhile, would be be nasty type twos, and do as they normally do, which is be idiotic. And the vast majority were - and remain - benign type threes. They just pass through.

As more people heard about Wikipedia, those overall numbers would grow - but proportionally remain the same, roughly (unless a magazine called Halfwit Weekly featured the site, I guess - but mostly it was only smart places writing about the site, luckily).

What happens if you’re a mass media outlet trying this out? Well, for a start, you’re mass media, so a lot of the goodwill that surrounds a volunteer effort isn’t there. Right from the start, people are visiting to see what it’s all like, rather than think about how they can use the site, and contribute to it.

Second, you’re mass media, so you’re going to blow your trumpet about this daring new exercise to your already huge audience. And instantly you’re going to place a huge gamble that you’ll recruit as many type ones as type twos. But that won’t happen, because of point one - the essential goodwill isn’t there. It’s all out of balance. In fact, you’ll probably have proportionally more nasty type twos than community owned sites. And, as we know from GU’s blogs, just one troll can ruin a young community.

And then, the last straw: because you’re mainstream media you can’t sit around waiting for a community to build up around your site - if it ever does - and save it from the spam, porn and obscenity that’s filled it like so much silt. You have no option but to close down, for the sake of The Brand.

To summarise, wiki-style editorial is a minefield for mainstream media, and is not going to be they put together large bodies of user-generated content. It’s going to require something a awful lot smarter to crack this nut.

But, as Dan says, credit to the LA Times for trying. And, one might say, thus saving everyone else the heartache.

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