I make minor edits to Wikipedia articles occasionally, when I’m reading a Wikipedia article and see an improvement that can be made, but I haven’t made much of a deliberate effort to edit articles that I think are important. Can you provide some examples of articles that you think are especially in need of improvement? Some articles related to effective altruism are much more shallow than they could be (such as Longtermism), while many others look quite strong (such as Wild animal suffering and AI control problem). I’m not sure how I would find pages that are especially in need of improvement, besides randomly stumbling upon them. Longtermism has only received 54 view sin the past 30 days Perhaps starting an EA WikiProject would help with prioritizing articles that need to be improved. That just requires that we find “at least 6 to 12 active Wikipedians” to contribute to the project. If we can’t meet that threshold, we could perhaps coordinate Wikipedia edits in a group chat off Wikipedia.
There is no general rule to decide whether it is more valuable to create new Wikipedia articles or improve existing ones. One advantage of the latter is that you can already see how popular the article is (in terms of pageviews) to inform your judgment of the value of improving that article. In contrast, when deciding whether to create a new article, you will have much less information about the article’s potential popularity.
I would recommend creating a new article for any subject that you notice doesn’t have an existing article and meets Wikipedia’s notability requirements: “A topic is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list when it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject.” Just having a Wikipedia article is valuable for demonstrating to readers that an article’s subject is notable, even if the article itself is relatively light on content. An important next step after creating a new article is to edit relevant articles to link to your new article. That said, I don’t have a strong opinion on whether it’s a better use of your time to create a new article or to improve an existing one.
I make minor edits to Wikipedia articles occasionally, when I’m reading a Wikipedia article and see an improvement that can be made, but I haven’t made much of a deliberate effort to edit articles that I think are important. Can you provide some examples of articles that you think are especially in need of improvement? Some articles related to effective altruism are much more shallow than they could be (such as Longtermism), while many others look quite strong (such as Wild animal suffering and AI control problem). I’m not sure how I would find pages that are especially in need of improvement, besides randomly stumbling upon them. Longtermism has only received 54 view sin the past 30 days Perhaps starting an EA WikiProject would help with prioritizing articles that need to be improved. That just requires that we find “at least 6 to 12 active Wikipedians” to contribute to the project. If we can’t meet that threshold, we could perhaps coordinate Wikipedia edits in a group chat off Wikipedia.
I would recommend creating a new article for any subject that you notice doesn’t have an existing article and meets Wikipedia’s notability requirements: “A topic is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list when it has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject.” Just having a Wikipedia article is valuable for demonstrating to readers that an article’s subject is notable, even if the article itself is relatively light on content. An important next step after creating a new article is to edit relevant articles to link to your new article. That said, I don’t have a strong opinion on whether it’s a better use of your time to create a new article or to improve an existing one.