Wiki.lesswrong.com Is Live
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/ is now live, for all our Wiki needs. The previous Wikia wiki has been imported. Knock yourself out on linking there from comments or blog posts (yes, you will have to link manually, there is no CamelCase convention yet on the blog and comments).
See here for proposed wiki usage guidelines—note that these do not yet seem to appear in the Wiki itself, hint hint.
I think that on the margin, many people’s effort would be better directed to the wiki than to making posts and comments on lesswrong. Are there ways we could increase the incentives for wiki contributions? e.g. Make a LW blog post/comment stating, this is what I added to the wiki [link], and then giving people a chance to give them karma.
Why?
There’s a healthy amount of posts here on LW for new users to read, but the wiki is desperately lacking; it’s almost all stubs.
I wouldn’t want to substitute the best LW posts and comments for equally time consuming wiki contributions. But many of us are incapable of writing the best posts and comments, but I would guess, could do a decent job of making wiki contributions.
And like SoullessAutomaton said:
One other hueristic I was using—commenting on LW is more fun because it is social, and yeah, the karma helps too. In this context I think this is (weak) evidence that the wiki will be more subject to a collective action problem. Then again, Wikipedia exists.
One possible reason for favoring the wiki, at least in the long run: a well-structured wiki is more discoverable and accessible. The huge branching tree of your OB posts is daunting enough; the entire past corpus of LW is rapidly going to become even more intimidating for lacking a single author with consistent style and themes. Imagine LW at roughly the same rate of content generation and a slowly expanding user base, three years from now. Where would someone even start?
Distilling the ideas into a manageable synthesis of what’s been discussed in multiple posts, with extensive inter-linking, terms defined, and links to relevant posts would be far more useful for a newcomer than just minimal definitions with links to posts.
To use an academic analogy, if LW posts are journal articles, the wiki ought to be a textbook.
We just need better scholarship in the LW posts themselves, with review articles and tutorial articles, and possibly thematic workshops.
I see that some articles are distinguishing between “Overcoming Bias” and “Less Wrong” articles. Please note that LW is planning to import OB articles authored by me (EY) in the reasonably near future (with redirects), so you should probably just link to both OB and LW posts in the same category and let the redirects take care of it once the port is done.
Why are the OB articles going to be imported, by the way?
What if we imported one per day to encourage the LW community to discuss them?
Then it’ll take 2 years to get them through ;-)
Still, probably a good idea, if not for the importing process itself, then for introducing some systematic procedure to discuss old articles.
Since user pages on the Wiki can be used to create detailed user profiles, the only thing necessary to link that to the user names on the blog is to add a field in the profile on the blog allowing to specify your user page on the wiki, and place that link somewhere visible on the user pages on the blog.
Of note, it appears that you will have to create a separate login. If you had an account at the wikia wiki you will need to recreate your account.
This is funded by Oxford then, right? I don’t see ads. Thanks to James Martin—perhaps you pushed forward the Singularity a bit.