Times wikitorial goes dark *

Well, you knew this was coming. The Times has taken down its first experimental wikitorial, explaining:

Unfortunately, we have had to remove this feature, at least temporarily, because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material.

Thanks and apologies to the thousands of people who logged on in the right spirit.

Even before this, it seemed to me that instead of functioning like a true wiki, where facts get refined, the test case had deteriorated into a wholly predictable, no-win argument over the war. Same as you can already find and participate in at numerous well-read blogs. Sean at Blogging.la posts some advice for the LAT: "Welcome to the world that we have to deal with every single day in blog-land. So now they've met Mr. & Mrs Troll, wait until they meet our neighbors the comment spammers!" * Update: Somebody kept posting child porn, I'm told.

Related: In Sunday Opinion, Editor Bob Sipchen ran a little box headlined "The End is Nigh!" promising the section's new design will be rolled out "soon." He plays it cagy about the name, but I'm told that the section being discussed is called Current. The Opinion name is being ditched in part so that reporters can be invited to write for the section without crossing into the realm of, well, opinion. As it is, Foreign Editor Marjorie Miller had a Commentary page piece on Sunday revealing that her kids go to The Oaks School in Hollywood and that she doesn't want her daughter to start down the path of "casting calls, auditions and almost certain rejection."

Women on op-ed: Attention Susan Estrich, today's lineup includes Molly Ivins and Sandra Tsing Loh.