I have been wondering whether the time was ripe to (say) tweet or blog about how wonderful the LessWrong wiki is. “If you’re interested in improving your thinking, the LessWrong wiki is getting to be a great resource”. The audience I’m likely to reach is mostly software professionals.
So I attempted to take as unbiased a look at the wiki as I could, putting myself into the shoes of someone motivated by the above lead.
Roadblock the first: the home page says “This wiki exists to support the community blog”. This seems to undermine the implicit promise that people I send to the wiki will find the wiki itself a worthwhile investment of their time and attention.
The home page directs the wiki-only reader to the “topic tree”. This purports to be “a list of all topics discussed on this wiki”. It is in fact a list of all pages, a significant difference. Biases and fallacies together comprise one large LW topic, for instance, with Techniques another substantial chapter, and Positions, Problems, and Theorems forming a separate heading of “supporting material”.
Roadblock the second: the “featured articles” include Complexity of Value (getting the point of which requires IMO the bridging of a substantial inferential distance), and Paperclip Maximizer (ditto, this is an FAI trope), only Ev Psych has some relevance to the topic “thinking better”.
My options as I see them: a) abandon the idea of driving outside traffic to the wiki and direct people to the blog instead, b) formulate a different promise and lead, c) improve the wiki.
Most of these issues can be handled by small modification to the Wiki, better organization especially, and clear marking of what articles require which background articles.
I have been wondering whether the time was ripe to (say) tweet or blog about how wonderful the LessWrong wiki is. “If you’re interested in improving your thinking, the LessWrong wiki is getting to be a great resource”. The audience I’m likely to reach is mostly software professionals.
So I attempted to take as unbiased a look at the wiki as I could, putting myself into the shoes of someone motivated by the above lead.
Roadblock the first: the home page says “This wiki exists to support the community blog”. This seems to undermine the implicit promise that people I send to the wiki will find the wiki itself a worthwhile investment of their time and attention.
The home page directs the wiki-only reader to the “topic tree”. This purports to be “a list of all topics discussed on this wiki”. It is in fact a list of all pages, a significant difference. Biases and fallacies together comprise one large LW topic, for instance, with Techniques another substantial chapter, and Positions, Problems, and Theorems forming a separate heading of “supporting material”.
Roadblock the second: the “featured articles” include Complexity of Value (getting the point of which requires IMO the bridging of a substantial inferential distance), and Paperclip Maximizer (ditto, this is an FAI trope), only Ev Psych has some relevance to the topic “thinking better”.
My options as I see them: a) abandon the idea of driving outside traffic to the wiki and direct people to the blog instead, b) formulate a different promise and lead, c) improve the wiki.
Discuss. ;)
Most of these issues can be handled by small modification to the Wiki, better organization especially, and clear marking of what articles require which background articles.