Wiki Quote Attributions
After an interesting discussion the last time this topic came up, I wanted people’s input on the best way to attribute a quote to the LessWrong Wiki. The passage is obviously based on Eliezer’s work, but he himself didn’t write the summary. From the quote logs, it was Z. M. Davis who originally wrote the passage. Below is the attribution as I currently have it. The issues with this are fairly obvious: The wiki can change. There’s a legitimate argument that Eliezer really deserves the intellectual credit for this, even though they’re not exactly his words. And is it more appropriate for the link to go to the wiki, which doesn’t justify the words as Davis’s, or to the quote logs, which do?
“The point of all this discussion of rationality is to actually achieve truer beliefs and more effective actions. It’s not some arbitrary social fashion; there are actual criteria of success. It is for this reason that it is written that rationalists should win. If some particular ritual of cognition—even one that you have long cherished as “rational”—systematically gives poorer results relative to some alternative, it is not rational to cling to it. The rational algorithm is to do what works, to get the actual answer—in short, to win, whatever the method, whatever the means. If you can detect a systematic mistake in your thinking, then fix it; if you can see a better method, then adopt it.” – Z. M. Davis, “Rationalists Should Win”, on the LessWrong Wiki
I would just attribute it to the Less Wrong Wiki. Wiki pages are inherently collaborative documents; there should be no obligation to dig through the edit history to see who contributed what sentence. (Certainly not for my sake.)
Can’t you link directly to the page as it was at the time of the quote’s creation, as with wikipedia?
Well one of the problems is that I’ll likely copy it to my Facebook page where there aren’t hyperlinks.
Ahh. I can see putting a long URL in as plaintext might look a bit off, and URL-shorteners are subject to link-rot and look ‘iffy’ since you can’t read where they’re going to… Even if FB allows you to put URLs in as plaintext. (I don’t use FB much)