I have been feeling bored and tetchy for a while now. So for one project I took on the job of volunteer sysadmin at the well-known wretched hive of scum and villainy RationalWiki. It’s been quite fun robustifying a small LAMP server overwhelmed by its Alexa 12,000 rating. MediaWiki is a lardy beast, but a coupla Squids in front and it’s pretty good; ticking along nicely. Of course, now we have to stop the Squids from falling over too …
This obviously didn’t soak up enough energy. So the other thing I’ve been doing is the official unofficial RationalWiki blog—a skeptical blog. It’s not official yet, but aspires to be; so it’s stuff about RW itself mixed with more general skeptical interest. So far it’s getting about 150 hits/day, which is not terrible starting from zero. I’ve also got the keys to @rationalwiki, for further social media delight.
So far, doing the blog feels like NaNoWriMo, or thirty things in thirty days. Thankfully I’ve actually talked other editors into writing a bit.
LW aims to raise the sanity waterline. But to extend the metaphor, sanity’s waterways include quite a few alligator-laden swamps, and toxic waste spills in need of cleanup. I’d like RW to be good at that.
Out of curiosity, is there any sane way to have a debate with RW’s top people about whether it’s actually productive for them to go around systematically heaping scorn on anything that seems-to-them like an easy target (e.g. homeopathy and cryonics), while also scoffing at the nerds who try to talk about it using math? Or is there no probable productive outcome of even trying to have that conversation?
Basically not, because, like Wikipedia, it is literally true that no-one actually runs it and there are no top people. There is no-one who can tell trolls or (worse) the reasoning-incompetent to just fuck off, much as it would be nice sometimes, and some long-standing RW users stand firm against it on principle. (There’s a board, and some of them are having to be beaten about the head with Section 230 - they were elected as charity trustees, not as forum wizards.)
It’s a mob of annoying skeptics, and the qualification to be a skeptic is only slightly narrower than the qualification to be an atheist. So the bottom half of RW has lots of shit from lots of arseholes. I would like the blog to project a much better image by being a lot better, in the hope of inspiring people to better stuff. e.g. I think the homeopathy in India post is actually important.
I actually liked all the snark on Rational Wiki’s LessWrong page… RationalWiki pretty much defines itself as a wiki for making fun of things, after all...
Hey, is there any chance that you could add an automatic site thing like “This page has been heavily (%number changes) edited by a low (%number) number of people for the last %number months. It may not represent an unbiased spread of opinion.” Looking at you, LW site on RW ..
You know, maybe I would like this idea more if the way you put it, in the context you put it, didn’t give me the vibe of “feature implementation with an agenda”. Perhaps there are better considerations for choosing new site features than the light in which it presents the LW article?… I mean, yeah, sure, if considered out of context, your proposal looks like a reasonable attempt to increase accuracy—but if accuracy is really what you set out to maximize, and not LW reputation, then you should agree with the other side of the coin: if the page has been heavily edited by a high number of people, there should be a message telling people to be more confident than average (that is, the average confidence about RW articles) about its reliability. Now imagine a world where this would hold true for the LW article. If that makes you ever so slightly less inclined to agree with this other implication of the policy you just proposed, then perhaps it’s not really increased accuracy that you want.
On a related note: Seriously, people. Someone, somewhere, doesn’t have an all-positive or even mostly-positive idea about us as a group. Which is fine. If you really care so much about reputation, consider the contents of the criticism rather than the fact that there is criticism at all.
You know, maybe I would like this idea more if the way you put it, in the context you put it, didn’t give me the vibe of “feature implementation with an agenda”.
It’s true! I do not deny it.
if the page has been heavily edited by a high number of people, there should be a message telling people to be more confident than average (that is, the average confidence about RW articles) about its reliability. Now imagine a world where this would hold true for the LW article
On one hand, I think in that world I would not come up with this idea. On the other hand, I don’t think in that world the LW page on RW would be such that I would expect to have this agenda.
On a related note: Seriously, people. Someone, somewhere, doesn’t have an all-positive or even mostly-positive idea about us as a group. Which is fine.
I just don’t like that the page looks as if it represents RW consensus while it’s basically edited by one or two people. I don’t know how common this is on RW in general.
I haven’t heard of such a thing, and in any case most RW articles that are actually good fit that statistical description. There’s no de jure ownership of articles, but in practice editors have their favourites and others often don’t bother. (I suspect the same largely applies to Wikipedia, though that’s just my human simulator talking, not numbers.)
I think (and IIRC people have done a few studies on that) that in the typical good Wikipedia article nearly all the content was contributed to by a couple editors, but there will be dozens of users who’ve made stylistic changes.
Well, if no-one else is going to dive in …
I have been feeling bored and tetchy for a while now. So for one project I took on the job of volunteer sysadmin at the well-known wretched hive of scum and villainy RationalWiki. It’s been quite fun robustifying a small LAMP server overwhelmed by its Alexa 12,000 rating. MediaWiki is a lardy beast, but a coupla Squids in front and it’s pretty good; ticking along nicely. Of course, now we have to stop the Squids from falling over too …
This obviously didn’t soak up enough energy. So the other thing I’ve been doing is the official unofficial RationalWiki blog—a skeptical blog. It’s not official yet, but aspires to be; so it’s stuff about RW itself mixed with more general skeptical interest. So far it’s getting about 150 hits/day, which is not terrible starting from zero. I’ve also got the keys to @rationalwiki, for further social media delight.
So far, doing the blog feels like NaNoWriMo, or thirty things in thirty days. Thankfully I’ve actually talked other editors into writing a bit.
LW aims to raise the sanity waterline. But to extend the metaphor, sanity’s waterways include quite a few alligator-laden swamps, and toxic waste spills in need of cleanup. I’d like RW to be good at that.
Out of curiosity, is there any sane way to have a debate with RW’s top people about whether it’s actually productive for them to go around systematically heaping scorn on anything that seems-to-them like an easy target (e.g. homeopathy and cryonics), while also scoffing at the nerds who try to talk about it using math? Or is there no probable productive outcome of even trying to have that conversation?
Basically not, because, like Wikipedia, it is literally true that no-one actually runs it and there are no top people. There is no-one who can tell trolls or (worse) the reasoning-incompetent to just fuck off, much as it would be nice sometimes, and some long-standing RW users stand firm against it on principle. (There’s a board, and some of them are having to be beaten about the head with Section 230 - they were elected as charity trustees, not as forum wizards.)
It’s a mob of annoying skeptics, and the qualification to be a skeptic is only slightly narrower than the qualification to be an atheist. So the bottom half of RW has lots of shit from lots of arseholes. I would like the blog to project a much better image by being a lot better, in the hope of inspiring people to better stuff. e.g. I think the homeopathy in India post is actually important.
I actually liked all the snark on Rational Wiki’s LessWrong page… RationalWiki pretty much defines itself as a wiki for making fun of things, after all...
Hey, is there any chance that you could add an automatic site thing like “This page has been heavily (%number changes) edited by a low (%number) number of people for the last %number months. It may not represent an unbiased spread of opinion.” Looking at you, LW site on RW ..
You know, maybe I would like this idea more if the way you put it, in the context you put it, didn’t give me the vibe of “feature implementation with an agenda”. Perhaps there are better considerations for choosing new site features than the light in which it presents the LW article?… I mean, yeah, sure, if considered out of context, your proposal looks like a reasonable attempt to increase accuracy—but if accuracy is really what you set out to maximize, and not LW reputation, then you should agree with the other side of the coin: if the page has been heavily edited by a high number of people, there should be a message telling people to be more confident than average (that is, the average confidence about RW articles) about its reliability. Now imagine a world where this would hold true for the LW article. If that makes you ever so slightly less inclined to agree with this other implication of the policy you just proposed, then perhaps it’s not really increased accuracy that you want.
On a related note: Seriously, people. Someone, somewhere, doesn’t have an all-positive or even mostly-positive idea about us as a group. Which is fine. If you really care so much about reputation, consider the contents of the criticism rather than the fact that there is criticism at all.
It’s true! I do not deny it.
On one hand, I think in that world I would not come up with this idea. On the other hand, I don’t think in that world the LW page on RW would be such that I would expect to have this agenda.
I just don’t like that the page looks as if it represents RW consensus while it’s basically edited by one or two people. I don’t know how common this is on RW in general.
Pretty common. (Also common in the long tail of Wikipedia, I think.) The current version is mostly AD’s recent rewrite attempting to make it calmer.
I haven’t heard of such a thing, and in any case most RW articles that are actually good fit that statistical description. There’s no de jure ownership of articles, but in practice editors have their favourites and others often don’t bother. (I suspect the same largely applies to Wikipedia, though that’s just my human simulator talking, not numbers.)
I think (and IIRC people have done a few studies on that) that in the typical good Wikipedia article nearly all the content was contributed to by a couple editors, but there will be dozens of users who’ve made stylistic changes.