In the past couple of weeks, a transportation plan for Pittsburgh has been rewritten more than 200 times by more than five dozen people.

With any luck, it will be rewritten a couple of thousand more times by legions of critics before Thanksgiving.

More Pittsburghers just have to learn how to get down with a wiki.

A wiki is not that critter from "Star Wars," but a collaborative undertaking that counts upon the wisdom of crowds. The Pittsburgh CityWiki Project was launched a couple of weeks ago (www.pghwiki.org).

This first venture bears an overlong and off-putting name -- "The Pittsburgh Regional Integrated Transportation Plan" -- but anyone with access to a computer can sign up and fiddle with it.

I just did, throwing down some thoughts about Amtrak. Anyone can now take what I said and either build on it or try to tear it down. If that ain't democratic, I'm all out of suggestions.

Chip Walter started this project because he grew frustrated with big meetings filled with big ideas that amounted to very little. After attending a forum on immigration on the North Side last year, Mr. Walter came out of it thinking, "We ought to be capturing all this and trying to move it forward."

Otherwise, ideas just die.

So Mr. Walter did something about it. He's a writer of science books who has one of those titles at Carnegie Mellon University that weighs down a business card ("senior manager of education and strategy at the Institute for Green Science") but this is the first time he's taken the helm of a wiki.

It launched Aug. 28 and has had more than 6,500 hits since. The Pop City Web site alone (www.popcitymedia.com) has sent more than 500 people to the site. Obviously, many more people are reading the work than adding to it, but at least 65 people have chipped in something.

Some of the verbiage is pretty wonkish. (Note to the person who seeks to "encourage a new transportation paradigm that provides residents cost effective choices that decrease our reliance on carbon consumption": If you want that, don't put it that way. Bus drivers could read that and fall asleep at the wheel.)

A little more homework might be helpful before suggesting we "open HOV lanes to buses," because buses already run the Parkway North HOV lane.

There has been a tendency for writers to go off-subject and talk about city schools and such. Mr. Walter seems to have a let-'em-play philosophy so far, giving wide latitude, but he also notes that anyone is welcome to edit the copy.

"It's human nature to get off track. We want to make sure that a clear mission gets stated but we can shape it over time."

The project is ambitious, embracing commuter rail, light rail, buses, bicycles and taxis. Remarkably little time has been spent dealing with getting around by car, either because we already know how to do that or because, in the age of expensive gasoline, we know we'll need to do less of that.

It may be too much to expect a polished report in 90 days, Mr. Walter said, and there is no firm deadline for completion.

It's certainly a timely subject. We've spent more than a half-century designing this country on the premise of cheap gasoline, and both major parties are now busily trying to con us into believing they know how to bring the good times back, whether it's with alternative fuels or new oil wells.

That won't happen. Just because we can find more fuel doesn't mean that fuel will be cheap. We will need to move ourselves more efficiently or we'll all go broke. And it's odd that some of the same people who had no trouble investing billions to secure American air travel after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center are dead set against investing a fraction of that in rail, even though trains move more people with less energy.

Yeah, I know. Tell it to the wiki, right?