Attributions, Karma and better discoverability for wiki/tag features
LessWrong has an associated wiki, tightly integrated with the tagging system. Today, we have just shipped a set of new features to make the LessWrong wiki better:
1. Voting and karma for wiki edits
You can now vote on wiki-edits on the tag-history page, in the Recent Discussion section, and on the All-Posts page:
This now properly provides karma incentives for improving the wiki.
2. Wiki/tag edits appear on the All Posts page, as do comments on wiki/tag discussion pages
The All-Posts page now also shows wiki edits on the daily page! This now allows you to much more easily keep track of the wiki-editing activity on the site:
You can click on them to expand and see the full diff, as well as vote on any edits.
3. Wiki/tag pages have a table of contents, like post pages.
Wiki and tag pages now have a ToC like post pages. This should make it much easier to navigate long wiki pages, like the Rationality tag:
4. Attributions and contributors on tag pages
I am particularly excited about this one. Just below the ToC on tag pages you can see a list of all contributors to a given tag/wiki page:
The number on the left is the total karma these authors have received for their contributions to this tag page, plus their small-vote strength (this also determines the order of the list of contributors).
But more importantly, when you hover over the author, you get to see which parts of the current tag page where written by them!
The goal is to make it more engaging to produce timeless content, make contributing to the wiki more motivating, and to make it easier to decide which wiki pages are worth reading.
(Looking for some of that wiki-edit karma? Check out the FAQ and the Wiki-Tag Dashboard).
Voting even works on the edits from the old wiki! I find it somewhat amusing to upvote an edit from twelve years ago.
Awesome additions! Now that we have karma voting for the wiki, I want even more to be able to see all the wiki activity of a certain user on a page, so I can go through some of the people that did a lot of work on the wiki and give them all the upvotes they should have gotten while this feature wasn’t on.
Well, I went through the last 2 months of wiki activity and did some voting. I really like this feature, and the feature showing you what each person did on the page is brilliant, makes me want to be able to upvote them right there.
A bit of design feedback: I think I would put the voting “widget” at the start of the line, so it’s always in the same place. Currently it’s places changes significantly based on the person’s name, how much and when they edited. And if they left an explanation of their edit then it’s in the middle between the two and you need to look for it.
I’m really happy to see this. I’ve been impressed that the wiki has worked so well so far. More functionality like this seems very reasonable.
Voting on edits is also possible from the Wiki-Tag dashboard page!
It seems the creation of a page isn’t something that can be Karma voted on. perhaps it should? Especially if someone creates the page already with a description.
See the Pomodoro Technique page for example, it was created by Multicore 2 days ago, already with a long description, but I can’t upvote it.
btw, seems there’s a bug where it says the time of the edit. it says “New tag created by Multicore at” as if it’s going to say a date, but then says “2d” as if it were to say “New tag created by Multicore 2d ago”
What actually happened here is that the Pomodoro Technique tag was created without a description, but the dashboard shows the text as of the latest version. The insertion of the text can be upvoted, as it’s the next edit. This is confusing on the tagging dashboard page, but looks more reasonable on the tag’s history page and on the All Posts page.
Oh, I see. That seems like a confusing way to do it. I’d have it show the text that was there when the page was created (Or just empty, if no text was added).