Suggestion : make it easier to work out which tags to put on your article
It would improve the usefulness of article navigation, if people tended to use the same tag for the same thing.
Currently, if you want to decide whether to tag your article “fai” or “friendly_ai”, your best bet is to manually try:
http://lesswrong.com/tag/fai/
http://lesswrong.com/tag/friendly_ai/
And count how many articles use which variant. But, even then, there might be other similar variants you didn’t think to check.
What would be nice is a tag cloud, listing how many articles there are (possibly weighted by ranking) that use each variant. The list of tags on the wiki isn’t dynamically generated, and is very incomplete.
It wouldn’t need to be something fancy, like:
Just an alphabetical list, with a number by each entry, would be an improvement over the current situation.
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Until six months ago there was a tag cloud in the sidebar, but it was dominated by a few tags. In particular, in discussion “sequence rerun” was maximal size and everything else was minimal. This was discussed and it was probably removed for this reason. Or maybe it was remove to make room for other stuff in the sidebar, in which case it could be brought back just in the editor.
In general, I think tags are only viable with a class of sub-administrators who fix them. Admins on LW do fix them when asked, but doing so systematically may be too much work for the few admins.
Added months later: Here are archives of the old tag clouds for main and discussion.
Having all users have the ability to edit tags, at least all users over a certain karma threshold, sounds to me like a good way to have this get done without subadmins. So what am I missing?
Sure, a karma threshold works great for stack overflow (though it has lots of other details to encourage the OP to get it right). But I don’t think eliminating the ability to pick the subadmins saves you much programming effort. (It might be worth it to save administration effort.) Also, you need a change log to detect abuse of tags. SO does this by putting tag edits on the main change log.
Thanks. I thought I remembered something like that, but I couldn’t find it.
Pity they didn’t just move it to a sub-page. (Maybe link to it from the edit article view, next to the line that lets you add tags, at the bottom.)
Are you willing to do the programming work to make it happen? Otherwise why do you think that this is a valuable project on which MIRI or CFAR should spend resoruces?
Downvoted for a tone which discourages people from making suggestions; while the message of “if you want to get it done, the best way is to do itself” is a good one in general, an aggresive-ish tone would be better off avoided. Suggestions are useful even by themselves, since they may encourage someone else to implement the suggestion.
I do intend to discourage suggestions that come without justification for why the suggestion is good. I don’t think that you should only be allowed to make suggestions if you implement them yourself.
I think if you want to argue that someone else should implement a suggestion, you should provide a reason as to why the suggestion has importance. Especially since this is a dicussion level post, I would an argument that describes why the suggestion is important.
I don’t think there’s anything inherently aggressive about asking someone who failed to make an argument as to why something is important to state his reasons.
This looks like a justification to me:
Your original comment has a plausible interpretation of “do you have quality X, if not, why are you even bringing this up”, which questions the other person’s status and challenges them to prove that they are worthy of even speaking (even if this wasn’t the interpretation that you were intending, it is likely to be read as such by many). A wording such as “that would be useful, but there’s only a limited budget to use on improving the site, and I’m not sure that this is the most useful improvement—of course, if you could put in the programming work to make it happen, that would be great and avoid the budget issue” wouldn’t allow for such an interpretation.
Such a wording would completely remove the appeal to provide a argued reason as to why implementing this proposal has utility.
I don’t see anything wrong with asking a person who proposed something to argue why implenting his proposal has value.
I don’t argue that Douglas Reay isn’t worthy of speaking but encourage him to speak more.
Disagree. It establishes your opinion that this proposal wouldn’t be of high value, and thereby appeals the other person to state their reasons for disagreeing, if they have any.
I’m not objecting to what you said, just to the way you said it. After reading your follow-up comments, I acknowledge that you did not intend your comment as a status move for silencing him, but this was non-obvious to me from just the initial comment.
A suggestion is a statement that a possible course of action should be considered. It is a solicitation of arguments both for and against. If one does not merely assert that a course of action should be considered, but that it should be followed, that is not a suggestion, but a recommendation (or, depending on the tone, an order or demand).
Looking at the issue database, it sounds like there is already a tag cloud, or someone working on one:
http://code.google.com/p/lesswrong/issues/detail?id=45&q=Contributions%3AWelcome&sort=milestone%20priority
If I ever collect sufficient Round Tuits, I might well have a look at installing VirtualBox, and working through the the howto.
However, is there a downside to making the suggestion (I did search to see if anyone had suggested it before), and leaving it to others to decide if the suggestion is worthwhile?
Would it have been better to add it straight to the issues list ?
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