Thanks for sharing this post! It’s given me a good opportunity to clear up some things about an ongoing Forum project.
I may add another comment later, but a few quick points:
The duplicate tags you’ve noticed are the result of an ongoing project to add an “EA Wiki” to our tag system, described in a bit more detail here (though a full post is forthcoming). They are being hidden from the tag page by mods once every few days as they are added, and will eventually be merged with the other tags of the same name. I last hid a set of outstanding tags on Thursday and will hide the current batch today.
The same also goes for the “null” tags you see (there may be one or two cases where someone proposed a new tag without any attached posts and it wasn’t part of the Wiki project, but we always remove those tags).
There are hundreds of tags being added as part of this merger, so it’s had to happen over time rather than all at once.
Some of the other things you propose (more emphasis on tag descriptions, a tagging FAQ) will happen soon as part of the Wiki project (which is also something of a “get all the tags in order now that they’ve expanded a lot” project).
Once all the content has been imported and the appropriate tags have been merged, we’ll have a massive tagging event where people will be strongly encouraged to edit Pablo Stafforini’s initial Wiki content, add more content to tags without much, add new tags to posts, etc. There may be prizes and/or a leaderboard for strong contributors. LessWrong did something similar last year.
I think there are some real upsides to having tags for individuals.
If someone wants to read posts about a certain notable person, or posts written by that person, I don’t want to assume this is “hero worship” or “psychoanalysis”—maybe they’re just interested in the way that person thinks.
“Linking a post to someone’s page” in the way you propose would imply it was written by them—but not all things written about Peter Singer, or about Singer’s work, were written by Peter Singer.
And of course, not all notable figures related to EA will have accounts on the Forum, now or in the future. Imagine an academic whose career spans decades and who works on many different topics of relevance to EA (e.g. Yew-Kwang Ng). It seems reasonable to have a way to link various posts about that person’s work together.
That said, tags about individuals may end up not appearing on the central “tags” page when all’s said and done—we’re likely to have one page that covers the most common conceptual tags and one page that includes links to every Wiki page, including those of individuals and organizations.
Please let me know what further questions you have; all of that will be helpful as we prepare for the public launch of the project. And I’m sorry that the “under construction” bits of it have led to some clutter on the tag page—it should be much cleaner once all of this is done!
Oh wow, that’s fantastic! I now feel like the tone of this post seems way too harsh. Seeing that most of my points are already being addressed by the mod-team makes me think I should have reached out to you before posting this. I’ll make it up to you by winning that upcoming tagging event :) Thank you mod-team, for your continuing work on this amazing site!
I don’t think the post was too harsh. Much better for people to have a low barrier to suggesting improvements to the Forum, in any case.
Anyone with suggestions for the Forum is always welcome to run them by me before posting. In cases where something seems obviously wrong/sub-optimal, there’s at least some chance that a technical fix is coming soon or that we’re implementing a solution. But again, please feel free to post about these things, too. We should be accountable to our users.
The points of yours I didn’t address will generally be handled by the tagging event or are technical suggestions that the LW/Forum tech teams might implement later. I’ve made a note to discuss your “tag activity” page idea with the programmers this coming week.
Thanks for sharing this post! It’s given me a good opportunity to clear up some things about an ongoing Forum project.
I may add another comment later, but a few quick points:
The duplicate tags you’ve noticed are the result of an ongoing project to add an “EA Wiki” to our tag system, described in a bit more detail here (though a full post is forthcoming). They are being hidden from the tag page by mods once every few days as they are added, and will eventually be merged with the other tags of the same name. I last hid a set of outstanding tags on Thursday and will hide the current batch today.
The same also goes for the “null” tags you see (there may be one or two cases where someone proposed a new tag without any attached posts and it wasn’t part of the Wiki project, but we always remove those tags).
There are hundreds of tags being added as part of this merger, so it’s had to happen over time rather than all at once.
Some of the other things you propose (more emphasis on tag descriptions, a tagging FAQ) will happen soon as part of the Wiki project (which is also something of a “get all the tags in order now that they’ve expanded a lot” project).
Once all the content has been imported and the appropriate tags have been merged, we’ll have a massive tagging event where people will be strongly encouraged to edit Pablo Stafforini’s initial Wiki content, add more content to tags without much, add new tags to posts, etc. There may be prizes and/or a leaderboard for strong contributors. LessWrong did something similar last year.
I think there are some real upsides to having tags for individuals.
If someone wants to read posts about a certain notable person, or posts written by that person, I don’t want to assume this is “hero worship” or “psychoanalysis”—maybe they’re just interested in the way that person thinks.
“Linking a post to someone’s page” in the way you propose would imply it was written by them—but not all things written about Peter Singer, or about Singer’s work, were written by Peter Singer.
And of course, not all notable figures related to EA will have accounts on the Forum, now or in the future. Imagine an academic whose career spans decades and who works on many different topics of relevance to EA (e.g. Yew-Kwang Ng). It seems reasonable to have a way to link various posts about that person’s work together.
That said, tags about individuals may end up not appearing on the central “tags” page when all’s said and done—we’re likely to have one page that covers the most common conceptual tags and one page that includes links to every Wiki page, including those of individuals and organizations.
Please let me know what further questions you have; all of that will be helpful as we prepare for the public launch of the project. And I’m sorry that the “under construction” bits of it have led to some clutter on the tag page—it should be much cleaner once all of this is done!
Oh wow, that’s fantastic! I now feel like the tone of this post seems way too harsh. Seeing that most of my points are already being addressed by the mod-team makes me think I should have reached out to you before posting this. I’ll make it up to you by winning that upcoming tagging event :)
Thank you mod-team, for your continuing work on this amazing site!
I don’t think the post was too harsh. Much better for people to have a low barrier to suggesting improvements to the Forum, in any case.
Anyone with suggestions for the Forum is always welcome to run them by me before posting. In cases where something seems obviously wrong/sub-optimal, there’s at least some chance that a technical fix is coming soon or that we’re implementing a solution. But again, please feel free to post about these things, too. We should be accountable to our users.
The points of yours I didn’t address will generally be handled by the tagging event or are technical suggestions that the LW/Forum tech teams might implement later. I’ve made a note to discuss your “tag activity” page idea with the programmers this coming week.