Reaction, however, has been mixed:

Tech Dirt wrote: While you have to think it's nice that a newspaper recognizes what a wiki is, you have to wonder if the folks at the LA Times recognize that this isn't actually what a wiki is useful for. Wikis work in collaborative environments for brainstorming in building up an idea or a concept -- not in taking a fully formed opinion piece and then letting everyone mess around with it.

Ross Mayfield said: Generally, wikis can work best when something is slightly unfinished, when room for contribution is left clear. Finished text leads people to drop in links or short comments. Quite different from wikitechture that involves people in the process of production and encourages development of shared practices.

Citizen Paine (great name) was likewise skeptical but added: I'd rather see a news site experimenting than doing nothing. Even if this effort fails, the LA Times will have learned some tricks that it can use in its next experiment.

Chris Anderson wrote in The Long Tail: It remains to be seen if this will actually work, bringing life to a dull page in a declining medium. But if anyone can pull it off, it's Kinsley, the founding editor of Slate and a refreshingly independent thinker. I suspect I'll never see that page in its paper form again, but it would be great to see more of the paid pundits of this world duking it out online.

But why not extend the wiki beyond the editorial page? Here’s how it could work. In The New York Times story reporting on Kinsley’s new ventures, for example, an LA Times writer throws a gratuitous punch at General Motors.

"Mike's coming in and selling a new model," [editorial writer Jacob] Heilbrunn said. "He's an innovative free market guy who's basically saying, 'You may have won all these prizes but you're the General Motors of journalism, trying to sell outdated gas-guzzlers while everyone else is moving on to hybrids. Let's slash the workforce, get creative, and start outsourcing.'

If the news story were wiki-enabled, any GM employee, stockholder, or paid blogger could substitute "Volkwagen" for General Motors. Just a little collaboration among friends.