Hereās a related thing I wrote recently, with a slightly different framing and some additional details, in case this is useful to someone. Though Habrykaās comment makes me think perhaps LessWrong already have this mostly covered, so I guess a first step would be to check that out.
āMesa-project* idea: Centralised & scalable proofreading, copyediting, and formatting assistance for EA-aligned people
Maybe someone should find decent/āgood copyeditors/āproofreaders/āformatters and advertise their services to EA community members who are willing & able to pay, either for their Forum posts or for other things theyāre working on? (By āformattersā, I personally just have in mind people who can take a Google Doc with lots of tables and footnotes and format it for the EA Forum, but maybe thereād be other use cases as well, such as LaTeX.)
Ofc people can also sort this out themselves, but then thereās the search and vetting and set-up costs. Seems more efficient for some actor to set it up in a centralised/āscalable way. E.g., Rethink Priorities has a person to do this for our work, and that seems much better than us each finding a person ourselves. Iād like various other orgs and individuals to also have this.
Potential benefits:
Save authors a small/āmoderate amount of time
Save other community members a small/āmoderate amount of time helping with copyediting, proofreading, etc.
Somewhat/ānotably improve the clarity of posts
Somewhat/ānotably increase how many things are posted, if there are some people feeling blocked by time constraints or by worries about clarity or whatever
(But maybe a Fermi estimate would suggest that the benefits are actually really small and not worth thinking about? Seems worth at least checking, though?)
Potential downsides:
Takes some attention and time from whoever sets it up
Costs a little money
Maybe gives the vibe that things should only be posted if they meet a certain writing quality standard? Probably not though?ā
*Not quite a megaproject, but more than a microproject :Dā
Iām willing to do this work for $15-35 per page (depending on the authorās ability to pay); Iām very detail-oriented and like this kind of stuff. I can only really copyedit/āproofread posts written in American English, but I can do formatting for any text. I could probably do one or two copyediting or formatting jobs per weekend.
Thanks for this post!
Hereās a related thing I wrote recently, with a slightly different framing and some additional details, in case this is useful to someone. Though Habrykaās comment makes me think perhaps LessWrong already have this mostly covered, so I guess a first step would be to check that out.
āMesa-project* idea: Centralised & scalable proofreading, copyediting, and formatting assistance for EA-aligned people
Maybe someone should find decent/āgood copyeditors/āproofreaders/āformatters and advertise their services to EA community members who are willing & able to pay, either for their Forum posts or for other things theyāre working on? (By āformattersā, I personally just have in mind people who can take a Google Doc with lots of tables and footnotes and format it for the EA Forum, but maybe thereād be other use cases as well, such as LaTeX.)
Ofc people can also sort this out themselves, but then thereās the search and vetting and set-up costs. Seems more efficient for some actor to set it up in a centralised/āscalable way. E.g., Rethink Priorities has a person to do this for our work, and that seems much better than us each finding a person ourselves. Iād like various other orgs and individuals to also have this.
Potential benefits:
Save authors a small/āmoderate amount of time
Save other community members a small/āmoderate amount of time helping with copyediting, proofreading, etc.
Somewhat/ānotably improve the clarity of posts
Somewhat/ānotably increase how many things are posted, if there are some people feeling blocked by time constraints or by worries about clarity or whatever
(But maybe a Fermi estimate would suggest that the benefits are actually really small and not worth thinking about? Seems worth at least checking, though?)
Potential downsides:
Takes some attention and time from whoever sets it up
Costs a little money
Maybe gives the vibe that things should only be posted if they meet a certain writing quality standard? Probably not though?ā
*Not quite a megaproject, but more than a microproject :Dā
Iām willing to do this work for $15-35 per page (depending on the authorās ability to pay); Iām very detail-oriented and like this kind of stuff. I can only really copyedit/āproofread posts written in American English, but I can do formatting for any text. I could probably do one or two copyediting or formatting jobs per weekend.