Explain what the point of the wiki is. Right now it seems like a bunch of links to LW posts with short descriptions, which is neither worthwhile nor interesting to edit.
In programming, there’s this thing called language reference (manuals or sites or whatever). You use them to look up the details of a concept that isn’t clear in memory, or that you haven’t seen before, and you also use it to point other people at the specific technical details of a functionality.
I say this because that’s essentially the usage I make of the LW wiki at present. They condense topic-specific or concept-specific information and then give branching paths to primary sources of information with more details and explanations, most of the time.
ETA: Also, when possible and the article is of decent quality, I prefer to link to the Wiki rather than the blog posts linked in that wiki article. The summary is usually sufficient to jog the memory of people familiar with the LW concepts, people not familiar with the concept but interested will click the links and read the blog posts on their own anyway, and people not familiar but not interested will read only the summary, but wouldn’t have read the blog posts if linked directly to them.
My understanding is that it was once meant to be almost tvtropes-like with a sort of back-and forth linking between pages about concepts on the wiki and posts which refer to those concepts on the main site (in the same way that tvtropes gains a lot of its addictiveness from the back-and-forth between pages for tropes and pages for shows/books/etc).
There is that, but it’s also possible to link directly to the LW post (or comment) that defines the jargon. Is there any real reason to use the wiki instead?
Explain what the point of the wiki is. Right now it seems like a bunch of links to LW posts with short descriptions, which is neither worthwhile nor interesting to edit.
In programming, there’s this thing called language reference (manuals or sites or whatever). You use them to look up the details of a concept that isn’t clear in memory, or that you haven’t seen before, and you also use it to point other people at the specific technical details of a functionality.
I say this because that’s essentially the usage I make of the LW wiki at present. They condense topic-specific or concept-specific information and then give branching paths to primary sources of information with more details and explanations, most of the time.
ETA: Also, when possible and the article is of decent quality, I prefer to link to the Wiki rather than the blog posts linked in that wiki article. The summary is usually sufficient to jog the memory of people familiar with the LW concepts, people not familiar with the concept but interested will click the links and read the blog posts on their own anyway, and people not familiar but not interested will read only the summary, but wouldn’t have read the blog posts if linked directly to them.
This is a plausible purpose of the wiki. Announcement that this was the actual purpose might be helpful in getting more folks involved.
Agreed.
It doesn’t seem to be quite the exact intended (and especially not stated) purpose at present.
My understanding is that it was once meant to be almost tvtropes-like with a sort of back-and forth linking between pages about concepts on the wiki and posts which refer to those concepts on the main site (in the same way that tvtropes gains a lot of its addictiveness from the back-and-forth between pages for tropes and pages for shows/books/etc).
I use it as a kind of glossary, linking to it when I want to use LW-specific jargon which may be unfamiliar to newcomers.
There is that, but it’s also possible to link directly to the LW post (or comment) that defines the jargon. Is there any real reason to use the wiki instead?
Wiki entries are shorter.