WikiPainting SketchThe term “citizen artist” just sounds ridiculous. But it’s impossible to deny the Internet has leveled the playing field to make and display great art.

Online art communities like Deviant Art, which give people a place to make and share online art, have already been crowdsourced, although the term hadn’t been concocted when I reported on it for Wired News. So the next logical question is if Internet artists can collaborate on a single work ala open source art?

Wikipainting is one of a few attempts at giving artists a chance to collaborate on a never ending sketch.

Traditional artists, I imagine, will be intrigued by the idea. Normally when a work of art is ready for public consumption, alterations stop. The work is “complete.”

“In theory, a painting is supposed to never be finished,” said Eric David, the founder of WikiPainting in an e-mail.

But it seems that’s not exactly how the crowd has taken to his project.

“Actually it doesn’t work this way. When a painting is “nice enough,” few people seem to be interested in adding details or nice effects. I feel that people often prefer to create a painting rather than improving another one.”

The same could be said of reporting: When a journalist turns a story in “for the record,” it’s undoubtedly missing some information. It isn’t from intentional oversight – but rather the approaching deadline that looms over every print journalists head. After a story is printed new information (aside from corrections) is pushed off to future articles or lost to history.

But the flexibility of a Wiki means that Wiki-art or Wiki-reporting, could be picked up at the drop of a brush – or a breaking development.

The problem is vandalism. This is very literal for WikiPainting, which gets about three acts of vandalism for every work, said David. In fact, he often restores the pieces himself, as nobody has volunteered for the job.

Is WikiPainting a flash success? No. And so far neither is wiki-reporting.

“I’m not sure about the future of [WikiPainting]. It doesn’t work as well as I expected,” said David

The Los Angeles Times was brave to try Wikitorials – but the egalitarian experiment in journalism bombed. But this is not the only way to organize open source journalism – a huge misconception (that open source journalism = Wikipedia for news). Scientific American’s experiment in open source reporting was centered on blog comments from readers and seems to have flown by without a hitch (NewAssignment has more coverage of this here).

The openness of a Wiki is its strength, but for art and perhaps journalism too – a finish line and some form of editorial hierarchies might be necessary.