Weekly Wiki Workshop and suggested articles
Now 12 days old, LWiki is still growing. Most of the articles are stubs, but progress is being made. Eliezer confirmed that an official wiki hosted on LW is eventually coming, so be careful about linking to the wiki, but don’t let that deter you from adding content.
Standards and conventions are still being hashed out, so jump in now if you want to contribute. There is broad consensus that articles should primarily defer to existing work, either on OB/LW or Wikipedia. However, even quick summaries and links to blog posts can look very different depending on the subject. For example, contrast Rationality as Martial Art and Bias. The former is short and to the point, whereas the latter annotates each link. The latter also makes for much more interesting reading, in my opinion.
Ok, then where do we go from here? The two main avenues of development are creating stubs and then fleshing them out with content. For the first, please suggest any topics, concepts, established phrases, acronyms, techniques, or jargon in this thread that you can think of, and I will be happy to add them as new articles. Or, better yet, feel free to add them yourself.
For the second, I suggest we have a weekly thread that designates one topic for our community to throw its collective intelligence at. That way, we can get all the relevant discussion about the content of an article out at once. For this inaugural Weekly Wiki Workshop, I’m going to suggest the Rationality article.
So, what articles could the wiki use? What should the Rationality article look like?
I advocated in the chat (to widespread but not universal agreement) that the Wiki should define concepts, preferably briefly, and that except in special cases there should be no original content on the Wiki—rather, any original content should be a blog post, which the Wiki can then summarize and link to.
In the long run we want articles that ubiquitously link to the Wiki to define concepts, and Wiki pages that define concepts briefly and then link to a list of discussant articles. Or so I propose. Done right, this could make as addictive reading as TV Tropes, maybe more so.
An exception could be made for pages that strongly require collaborate editing and cannot get done by posting many individual comments—for example, Rob Zahra’s one-sentence summaries of OB posts seems like it would be a good candidate for wikifying.
I say link away and when we shift content put a redirect on Wikia with a note saying to flag the link that needs to be changed. Perhaps just alert an editor or something like that? Of course, that may get annoying...