Eliezer, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the CIA’s Intellipedia, but you seem to have hit the nail on the head.
The CIA have had huge success doing exactly what you describe here. You can read more about it in the paper here. The basic idea is that the intelligence community should harness the synergy of the blog/wiki combo.
From the paper:
The Wiki and the Blog are complimentary companion technologies that together form the core workspace that will allow intelligence officers to share, innovate, adapt, respond, and be—on occasion—brilliant. Blogs will cite Wiki entries. The occasional brilliant blog comment will shape the Wiki. The Blog will be vibrant, and make many sea changes in real-time. The Wiki, as it matures, will serve as corporate knowledge and will not be as fickle as the Blog. The Wiki will be authoritative in nature, while the Blog will be highly agile. The Blog is personal and opinionated. The Wiki is agreed-upon and corporate.
Thanks for this reference. This concept is what I was going at at the IRC meetup. The main disagreement with Eliezer’s model seems to be that he thinks that the blog posts still have to hold the majority of content, with wiki only referencing them with very short introductions, whereas I think that the wiki should grow into a thing in itself over time, converting the content of blog posts into wiki articles. Naturally, articles should be organized in a zoom-in manner, with few-sentences summary, then couple-paragraphs introduction, and only then full-length article. Each of the levels of detail are self-sufficient, and this is also a model implemented in Wikipedia.
The difference between Wikipedia and this CIA model you describe is that for Wikipedia, the original research is done anywhere, by the rest of the world, while for a thematic wiki, the original research is communicated and discussed on the associated blog. I’d like LW to embrace this model.
Eliezer, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the CIA’s Intellipedia, but you seem to have hit the nail on the head.
The CIA have had huge success doing exactly what you describe here. You can read more about it in the paper here. The basic idea is that the intelligence community should harness the synergy of the blog/wiki combo.
From the paper:
Thanks for this reference. This concept is what I was going at at the IRC meetup. The main disagreement with Eliezer’s model seems to be that he thinks that the blog posts still have to hold the majority of content, with wiki only referencing them with very short introductions, whereas I think that the wiki should grow into a thing in itself over time, converting the content of blog posts into wiki articles. Naturally, articles should be organized in a zoom-in manner, with few-sentences summary, then couple-paragraphs introduction, and only then full-length article. Each of the levels of detail are self-sufficient, and this is also a model implemented in Wikipedia.
The difference between Wikipedia and this CIA model you describe is that for Wikipedia, the original research is done anywhere, by the rest of the world, while for a thematic wiki, the original research is communicated and discussed on the associated blog. I’d like LW to embrace this model.
That penultimate line should say
Shouldn’t it?
Unambiguously. See also this follow-up comment.