Wiki Clean-up project
I’m a fairly new LW user, as evidenced by my so-far low karma. However, I’ve previously been familiar with a lot of the ideas talked about here and I’ve been reading the site for a few weeks. I think that the material here is amazing and often unparalleled on the rest of the web.
However, there’s is one...weak point: the wiki. The sequences are a little bit formidable to beginners because of the massive tangle of hyperlinks which connect them together. When I started reading them, I routinely had 10-15 LW tabs open at once. My friends said a similar thing. Thus, I think that it would be helpful to have a reliable source of information where the recursion can sort of “bottom out,” if you know what I mean. That should be the wiki.
But it’s in a pretty sorry state right now. A lot of the articles are titles-only, a couple sentences long, or just a bunch of links which invariably lead to more links. Maybe I’m blowing this out of proportion, but I think that the wiki is something that could definitely be brought up to par with the (high) quality of the site.
So maybe several members should choose something they know about (or perhaps don’t) and then research and write a good entry on it.
Thoughts?
I think the problem is a matter of incentives: articles and comments are rewarded with karma and attention, but wiki posts receive no karma and, even if people do read them, there’s no feedback.
Maybe we need some kind of norm where people can post about it in the discussion section when they make a significant change to the wiki?
I think that in general, and here in particular, we need places for smaller chunk sizes of posting than “create a discussion post”. A comment on this post should be good for moderate-sized wiki edits; for the general case, maybe we should bring back open threads.
There are some articles in bad shape marked with cleanup tag. These need untangling. The system of categories is also currently unhelpful and a bit insane.
For some of the other pages, more detailed summaries might be helpful, but the goal is to keep most of the content in posts, and only summarize them and refer to them from the wiki. The summaries should perhaps primarily explain the relation of a given page to other wiki pages, so that instead of a list of unannotated links you are given some motivation.