Red-team—“Examine the magnitude of impact that can be made from contributing to EA-relevant Wikipedia pages. Might it be a good idea for many more EA members to be making edits on Wikipedia?”
Rough answer - “I suspect it’s the case that only a small proportion of total EA members make edits to the EAF-wiki. Perhaps the intersection of EA members and people who edit Wikipedia is about the same size, but my intuition is that this group is even smaller than the EAF wiki editors. Given that Wikipedia seems to receive a decent amount of Internet traffic (I assume this probably also applies to EA-relevant pages on Wikipedia), it is very likely the case that contributing to Wikipedia is a neglected activity within EA; should an effort be made by EA members to contribute more to Wikipedia, the EA community might grow or might become more epistemically accessible, which seem like good outcomes.”
I helped start WikiProject Effective Altruism a few months ago, but I think that the items on our WikiProject’s to-do list are not as valuable as, say, organizing a local EA group at a top university, or writing a useful post on the EA Forum. One tricky thing about Wikipedia is that you have to be objective, so while someone might read an article on effective altruism and be like “wow, this is a cool idea”, you can’t engage them further. I also think that the articles are already pretty decent.
Red-team—“Examine the magnitude of impact that can be made from contributing to EA-relevant Wikipedia pages. Might it be a good idea for many more EA members to be making edits on Wikipedia?”
Rough answer - “I suspect it’s the case that only a small proportion of total EA members make edits to the EAF-wiki. Perhaps the intersection of EA members and people who edit Wikipedia is about the same size, but my intuition is that this group is even smaller than the EAF wiki editors. Given that Wikipedia seems to receive a decent amount of Internet traffic (I assume this probably also applies to EA-relevant pages on Wikipedia), it is very likely the case that contributing to Wikipedia is a neglected activity within EA; should an effort be made by EA members to contribute more to Wikipedia, the EA community might grow or might become more epistemically accessible, which seem like good outcomes.”
I helped start WikiProject Effective Altruism a few months ago, but I think that the items on our WikiProject’s to-do list are not as valuable as, say, organizing a local EA group at a top university, or writing a useful post on the EA Forum. One tricky thing about Wikipedia is that you have to be objective, so while someone might read an article on effective altruism and be like “wow, this is a cool idea”, you can’t engage them further. I also think that the articles are already pretty decent.