Right—wikis and blogs have different uses. Blogs (or magazines, or letters...) are for hashing things out; wikis (or books, or journals [although journals can do both]...) are for writing things up once they’ve been hashed out. This is useful to avoid the “Facebook search problem”, which IMO hasn’t been getting as much attention as it should, especially given that it was one of the reasons listed for why LW ought to be revived:
>The first bottleneck for our community, and the biggest I think, is the ability to build common knowledge. On facebook, I can read an excellent and insightful discussion, yet one week later I forgot it. Even if I remember it, I don’t link to the facebook post (because linking to facebook posts/comments is hard) and it doesn’t have a title so I don’t casually refer to it in discussion with friends. On facebook, ideas don’t get archived and built upon, they get discussed and forgotten. To put this another way, the reason we cannot build on the best ideas this community had over the last five years, is because we don’t know what they are. There’s only fragments of memories of facebook discussions which maybe some other people remember. We have the sequences, and there’s no way to build on them together as a community, and thus there is stagnation.
One possible solution to the problem that awarding status for wiki edits is hard would be to abandon the wiki model entirely, in favor of a curated encyclopedia model: instead of waiting around for someone to write up X, you’d have curators (status!) who can ask someone who understands X to write (status!) the encyclopedia page on X.
What do you do if their writeup is controversial or could be built upon? Well, that’s an implementation detail. Maybe a comments page? How do actually-existing curated encyclopedias handle that?
Right, but is there any way to use nested bullet points? I usually write outlines as nested ordered lists (makes feedback easier, for one thing: each point is a list item and can be referenced easily like a section ofp a law), and I couldn’t find any way to do that here. Also why does this have any votes? Did I hit publish by accident? I can’t see it from a private window, at least...
One of the points I’d like to see made early on in this thing is the importance of collaboration. But I opened a few LW2 tabs looking for a link to the Github repo and my laptop froze and didn’t recover and that seems more important than far-out feature requests. To be fair, this thing can’t run Thunderbird either, but I assume Mozilla is using some even-worse homebrewed Electron for it because everything else that isn’t a web app works fine.