My guess is that’s ~90% feature, 10% bug. I think most of the value of an EA Wiki would come from content that’s both EA relevant and notable by Wikipedia’s standards, and that the EA Wiki content most likely to go stale would be that which didn’t meet external notability standards.
More importantly, if you want to get EA ideas into the mainstream, at some point you’re going to have to convince people outside EA that those ideas are notable. Wikipedia seems as good a place to do so as any, since it has established procedures for assessing new content and the payoff for success is getting EA ideas included in the world’s most accessible repository of knowledge.
My guess is that’s ~90% feature, 10% bug. I think most of the value of an EA Wiki would come from content that’s both EA relevant and notable by Wikipedia’s standards, and that the EA Wiki content most likely to go stale would be that which didn’t meet external notability standards.
How familiar are you with Wikipedia? I ask because I’ve been an editor for 17 years (though only active at certain periods) and my sense is that Wikipedia’s notability standards would be a very poor criterion to judge whether the EA Wiki should have an entry on a given topic. Such standards are in line with a “deletionist” editing philosophy for which I don’t see a plausible justification (see Gwern’s In Defense of Inclusionism for discussion) [I now see that Aaron had already linked to this essay]. Furthermore, even if those standards were justified for Wikipedia, I don’t think they would be for a specialized wiki, which is meant to be of interest to a much narrower audience and whose criteria for inclusion should reflect this specialist focus.
More importantly, if you want to get EA ideas into the mainstream, at some point you’re going to have to convince people outside EA that those ideas are notable. Wikipedia seems as good a place to do so as any, since it has established procedures for assessing new content and the payoff for success is getting EA ideas included in the world’s most accessible repository of knowledge.
I’m not sure I’d describe our goals as getting EA ideas into the mainstream; I think there’s some reasonable disagreement within the community concerning how much and how fast we want EA to grow. In any case, I do not agree that the most effective way of convincing outsiders that EA ideas are notable is to focus our energies on writing content directly on Wikipedia rather than on a separate wiki. Before embarking on this project, I tried that approach for a few months and felt pretty disappointed with the outcome. It was in part on the basis of that experience that I concluded this project should be done as a separate wiki.
To be clear: I think contributing to Wikipedia is extremely valuable—indeed, at the current margin I think one of the most impactful things a competent and dedicated EA could do is to work full time on improving the quality and coverage of EA content on Wikipedia, and I encourage anyone who thinks they may be a good fit for this to seriously consider this option (I’d also be happy to share my experience as an editor, so feel free to contact me privately to schedule a chat). My disagreement with you concerns not the value of contributing to Wikipedia, but the claim that Wikipedia is the best place currently to host the project of creating a comprehensive EA encyclopedia.
I’m somewhat sympathetic to the points you make in the first paragraph, though I don’t think they will apply universally. E.g. I would expect that”hinge of history” or “patient philanthropy” are both relatively unlikely to go stale in an EA Wiki and won’t meet Wikipedia’s notability criteria. (Though not sure, I’m not that familiar with these criteria.)
I feel less compelled by your second paragraph. I would guess that most of the actual work to get concepts into the mainstream, establish notability etc., will need to be done outside of Wikipedia: e.g. actually founding a nonprofit, publishing a paper, and getting established media to write about you. So by the time you even have a chance to convince other Wikipedia editors that some topic meets their notability criteria, a lot of work has already been done—and the community doing that work may well be able to make good use of a Wiki that can already support them while doing that work.
Those concepts definitely fail to meet Wikipedia’s notability standards, and I think they are a good example of why those standards are inadequate for the EA Wiki.
As you stated, there are some advantages to running this project through Wikipedia:
Bigger audience
Greater context/longer articles that dig into more topics
Many articles exist in other languages
It has formatting options that the Forum doesn’t (yet)
Contributions from people outside the EA community, including viewpoints that wouldn’t be as likely to come from Forum readers
However, there’s no reason we can’t leverage a lot of this with the Forum’s wiki. In many or even most cases, I’d expect that the “further resources” section of an article will include a link to the topic’s Wikipedia page (or some other detailed resource).
And I’d hope that the people who already work on EA-related Wikipedia pages will keep doing so; I agree with you that this seems really valuable for helping to make EA ideas more mainstream.
However, there are some issues with trying to run everything through Wikipedia // benefits to making a wiki here:
As Max said, there are notability concerns about a lot of potentially good content. And my impression is that over time, Wikipedia has become progressively more strict about what qualifies as “notable” (see this Gwern essay, though perhaps things have gotten much better since 2009).
It hamstrings our ability to pay for the public good of useful EA content. Vipul Naik used to sponsor the creation of EA-related Wikipedia content, but his top editor got banned and Wikipedia’s mods froze the whole thing. If CEA wants to sponsor articles about EA topics that we want people to read, we need something like EA Concepts or the EA Forum wiki (at least, that’s my understanding — can you think of ways around this that aren’t just clear violations of Wikipedia’s rules?).
We could ask volunteers to do this, but it seems really good to have access to both options, and to be able to pay people for really good work.
Wikipedia can be an unwelcoming and intimidating place to make edits, especially for newcomers (I’ve heard this from many people). The Forum has many fewer rules/regulations and (I’d hope) somewhat friendlier mods, who are accountable to the broader EA community (Wikipedia’s editors aren’t accountable in this way).
CEA and LessWrong both have developers available to add features to the Forum’s wiki; we can be more flexible in adapting to things that are useful for our readers than Wikipedia is (on the other hand, Wikipedia has a much bigger team, and may add features we can’t replicate at some point, so this feels like a toss-up).
Wikipedia’s articles are often going to be longer/more unfocused than would be ideal for someone trying to get up to speed with EA ideas. For example, an article about “Russia” on our wiki is likely to end up being more relevant to our community members than any article about Russia I can imagine Wikipedia allowing.
This doesn’t mean people should only read about Russia on the Forum — certainly not! — but I think there’s value in having a “Russia through an EA lens” page for people to look at alongside the Internet’s many other sources of information about Russia. Same goes for lots of other topics.
If the Forum wiki project goes well and we end up with a lot of good, well-sourced articles, that makes it easier for volunteers to edit relevant Wikipedia pages.
Thanks Aaron! Consolidating my replies to a few different comments here.
I think the notability concerns are real, and greater than I’d originally thought. Pablo has lots of experience as a Wikipedia editor and I don’t, so I’ll defer to him. And it does seem quite telling that Pablo originally tried the Wikipedia approach for a “few months and felt pretty disappointed with the outcome.”
That said, I’m still pretty sure there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of content that’s notable, EA relevant, and not on Wikipedia. “Longtermism” is a good example. I also suspect (though more experienced Wikipedia people should weigh in) that if we made good progress on the low hanging fruit, terms like “hinge of history” and “patient philanthropy” would be perceived as considerably more notable than they are now. (FWIW, I also think that having tags for things like “hinge of history” is a perfectly reasonable Minimum Viable Product alternative to a dedicated Wiki.)
To clarify my position, I do think a dedicated EA Wiki would be extremely valuable. But I think there’s a significant chance that a dedicated EA Wiki won’t be completed and/or maintained. That’s what’s happened to multiple previous efforts to build an EA Wiki, so that’s my baseline assumption unless I see a plan that’s obviously thought very long and hard about sustainability. I certainly don’t get that impression about this plan given Aaron’s comment about what it would take to keep the site running:
I don’t have a great estimate for how much volunteer time we’d need to keep things running, but I’d expect the bare minimum to be less time than Pablo and I are putting in, such that further volunteer contributions are a nice addition rather than an existential necessity. If we were volunteer-only… maybe 15-20 hours per month? That’s enough time for a few dozen minor edits plus a couple of substantive new articles.
I’m very confident that estimate is well short of the time required to upkeep a dedicated Wiki. While I don’t have experience as a Wikipedia editor, I have quite a bit of experience with a previous employer’s internal Wiki. It was immensely valuable. It was also immensely difficult to develop and maintain. There were countless emails and meetings on the theme “we need to clean up the Wiki (and this time we really mean it!)”, and in my experience it takes a combination of that and making the Wiki part of peoples job responsibilities/evaluations to maintain something useful. It’s amazing how quickly information gets stale, and it gets harder to keep things updated the as you get more entries in your Wiki. If you build an EA Wiki that gets to the level of having a page for “Russia” (to use Aaron’s example), you’re going to need a lot more volunteer (and/or paid staff) time than a few days of someone’s time a month.
I also get the sense that you’re underestimating the financial and opportunity costs of having CEA and LW developers responsible for maintaining/adding functionality, based on this comment:
CEA and LessWrong both have developers available to add features to the Forum’s Wiki; we can be more flexible in adapting to things that are useful for our readers than Wikipedia is (on the other hand, Wikipedia has a much bigger team, and may add features we can’t replicate at some point, so this feels like a toss-up).
Wikipedia already has more features (including features that would be valuable for an EA Wiki like translation) and a much bigger team (that doesn’t have competing priorities and doesn’t cost CEA anything), so it seems to me like CEA/LW will be constantly playing catchup. And any time they spend adding new features or even just maintaining a dedicated Wiki is time they won’t be able to work on other valuable projects.
My overarching concern is that you’re seriously underestimating the ongoing costs of this project, which will basically continue in perpetuity and increase over time. This has been the issue that sank previous attempts at an EA Wiki, and honestly it’s a pretty big red flag that you “don’t have a great estimate for how much volunteer time we’d need to keep things running.”
I’d urge you to do some more research into what the costs will look like over time (i.e. talk to people involved in previous EA Wiki attempts and people who have lots of experience with dedicated Wikis) and to think about “all in” costs as much as possible (for example, you’ll want to include the ongoing cost of finding, training, and overseeing volunteers and account for volunteer turnover). I would really love to see a dedicated EA Wiki get built and maintained, I just think that if you undertake this project you need to have a realistic picture of the ongoing costs you’ll be committing to.
Thank you for your thoughtful and extended feedback. I appreciate the time you have taken to raise a number of valid concerns. I will just respond to a few of your points, since much of what you say is in reply to Aaron’s previous comment, and I don’t want to interfere with that conversation.
I think the worry that the Wiki may fail due to insufficient contributions is very real. As you note, none of the previous attempts to build something like what we are trying to accomplish here have succeeded. And it appears that this is a common phenomenon with general efforts to create specialist wikis. Forecasting is one of my hobbies, and I’m well aware that the base rates aren’t in our favor.
This was is fact my primary concern back when I was considering this project for a grant application. The reason I eventually decided to go ahead—besides feeling that I had a somewhat higher shot at success than my predecessors based on my experience editing Wikipedia and the insight this experience gave me about my capacity to feel motivated long-term by a project of this nature—was that I thought I could gain more information by just trying things out for a few months. The money costs for EA Grants were relatively modest, as were the time costs for me: at the time I didn’t have any other project I felt excited about, and I don’t think I would have spent those months very productively otherwise.
Fortunately, the experiment was a success: by the time the grant was over, I had not only produced more content than I had promised, but had discovered that I found writing these articles a more enjoyable experience than I had anticipated. Since then, I have continued to work on the project, and all the direct evidence indicates that lack of motivation will not be a serious impediment. This may still be insufficient to warrant an update from the naive prior to the point that I feel super confident that I will either continue to work on this project full-time for at least the next five years or find a suitable replacement, but if I had to guess, I’d estimate the chances of this happening at something like 65%.
How sensitive are your worries to scenarios in which the main paid content-writer fails to stay motivated, relative to scenarios in which the project fails because of insufficient volunteer effort? I’m inclined to believe that as long as there is someone whose full-time job is to write content for the Wiki (whether it’s me or someone else), in combination with all the additional work that Aaron and the technical team are devoting to it, enough progress will probably occur to sustain growth over time and attract volunteer contributors. I’m modestly confident in this, but I’m much more confident in that it makes sense to (again) test the hypothesis experimentally, by trying to make the Wiki happen and see how excited people feel about it after a period of a year or so.
Thanks Pablo… I appreciate your thoughtful engagement with my comments, and all the hard work you’ve put into this project.
How sensitive are your worries to scenarios in which the main paid content-writer fails to stay motivated, relative to scenarios in which the project fails because of insufficient volunteer effort? I’m inclined to believe that as long as there is someone whose full-time job is to write content for the Wiki (whether it’s me or someone else), in combination with all the additional work that Aaron and the technical team are devoting to it, enough progress will probably occur to sustain growth over time and attract volunteer contributors.
I’m not at all concerned that “the main paid content-writer fails to stay motivated” since that can easily be solved by finding a suitable replacement. I worry a bit about “insufficient volunteer effort”, but mostly see that as a symptom of my main concern: whether organizational commitment can be sustained.
If CEA has a good understanding of what it will cost to create and maintain the necessary content, technical platform, and volunteer structure and commits to (indefinitely) paying those costs, I’d feel pretty optimistic about the project. I’ve expressed some concerns that CEA is underestimating those costs, but would like to let Aaron respond to those concerns as I may be underestimating the paid staff time CEA is planning or otherwise missing something.
Note on this response: I really appreciate your engagement on this! My goal for this comment is to clarify some things I didn’t go into much detail on before, and better represent the way we’re currently thinking about the project (as something CEA cares about a lot and will continue to care about).
That said, I’m still pretty sure there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of content that’s notable, EA relevant, and not on Wikipedia. “Longtermism” is a good example. I also suspect (though more experienced Wikipedia people should weigh in) that if we made good progress on the low hanging fruit, terms like “hinge of history” and “patient philanthropy” would be perceived as considerably more notable than they are now.
I agree with all of this. However, I think CEA would have to tread carefully to support this work without violating Wikipedia’s rules about paid editing. I may think about this more in future months (right now, I’m juggling a lot of projects). If you have suggestions for what CEA could do in this area, I’d be happy to hear them.
Meanwhile, I’ll declare this as clearly as I can, using bold text in lieu of cash: I am very happy to see work done on EA-relevant Wikipedia pages, and I think that such work ought to be appreciated by the community at large (and, where appropriate, considered in grant applications, job applications, etc.)
While I don’t have experience as a Wikipedia editor, I have quite a bit of experience with a previous employer’s internal Wiki. It was immensely valuable. It was also immensely difficult to develop and maintain. There were countless emails and meetings on the theme “we need to clean up the Wiki (and this time we really mean it!)”, and in my experience it takes a combination of that and making the Wiki part of peoples job responsibilities/evaluations to maintain something useful. It’s amazing how quickly information gets stale, and it gets harder to keep things updated the as you get more entries in your Wiki.
I also have experience with an employer’s (valuable) internal wiki, and I appreciate this point. However, I’d expect that keeping information extremely up-to-date (e.g. making weekly updates to a large range of entries) is going to be more important for a corporate wiki than a conceptual wiki.
My employer’s internal wiki had lots of articles that were constantly becoming wrong, in ways that would impede our work if the wrongness wasn’t corrected (“this is no longer the password you need”, “this menu item has been renamed”, etc.). On the other hand, articles like “Longtermism” or “Wild Animal Suffering”, may be expanded from time to time, but it’s rare that text in such an article will suddenly become wrong.
This doesn’t mean that decay isn’t a concern — just that it’s less of a crisis than it would be if e.g. a company were to stop making it anyone’s responsibility to edit their own wiki.
If you build an EA Wiki that gets to the level of having a page for “Russia” (to use Aaron’s example), you’re going to need a lot more volunteer (and/or paid staff) time than a few days of someone’s time a month.
I think I wasn’t clear enough in what I meant the “15-20 hours” to represent, and I may have come off as blasé in a way I didn’t intend.
Quoting myself:
I’d expect the bare minimum to be less time than Pablo and I are putting in, such that further volunteer contributions are a nice addition rather than an existential necessity.
To clarify: I think of “bare minimum” as something like “many articles are checked on ~once per year, and the volunteer spends a few minutes thinking about whether they want to add anything; a volunteer looks at each edit made by a Forum user and makes small fixes/reversions as needed”.
With “many”, I’m leaving out articles like “decision theory” and “Abhijit Banerjee”, and focusing on e.g. articles about core EA orgs and active research areas.
And when I think of “volunteer time”, I’m thinking of people who see themselves as “wiki volunteers”, rather than the general population of the Forum — I’d also expect people on the Forum to put in quite a bit more time, because (unlike those of other EA wikis) the Forum’s wiki articles will be very salient to them.
Our tag pages got over 2000 views in each of January and February, even before most of the content uploading happened. By the time we’ve put in months of additional paid work and added new features to improve the wiki and make it more visible, I expect that number to increase by a lot. Only a tiny fraction of those views will turn into edits, whatever UI we employ to encourage them, but that’s still a lot of additional hours.
Still, I wouldn’t think of a user who makes one five-minute edit every six months as a “volunteer”. So my 15-20 hour estimate didn’t include this kind of activity.
The result I’d expect from a “bare minimum” outcome, combining dedicated volunteer work and other user edits: the wiki continues to be a useful resource which people refer to often, especially for its articles on evergreen concepts that don’t change often. It does decay somewhat, and few new articles are written, but it remains substantial enough that a few dedicated people could jump in and resurrect it more easily than they could start a new wiki.
It’s possible that 15-20 hours/month is too low even to expect this level of maintenance; as I note below, I didn’t spend much time coming up with the estimate (as I don’t think it will be relevant for a long time).
*****
That said, I would be very disappointed in the “bare minimum” outcome, and would go to considerable lengths to bring in more volunteer support. I mostly set my own priorities at CEA; even if I came to believe that doing a lot of dedicated wiki work wasn’t a good use of my time, and we decided to stop paying for work from Pablo or others like him, I can’t imagine not wanting to spend some of my time coordinating other people to do this work.
A number I’d be happy with, where I’d expect to see the wiki grow and flourish? At 500 articles, with three hours/article/year, that’s 125 hours/month — not a very confident estimate, but one that seems plausible for a good outcome. That would take a lot of coordination (if we want to have a couple dozen people putting in an hour per week*), but I’d expect to be on the front lines of that effort.
*I’d expect the actual structure of editing to look a bit different than this, because so many members of the community are going to be invested in specific articles; I’d guess that e.g. someone from 80K would make substantial edits to 80K’s article every so often, and that the same would be true for many other editor/topic combinations.
My overarching concern is that you’re seriously underestimating the ongoing costs of this project, which will basically continue in perpetuity and increase over time. This has been the issue that sank previous attempts at an EA Wiki, and honestly it’s a pretty big red flag that you “don’t have a great estimate for how much volunteer time we’d need to keep things running.”
The reason I haven’t spent much time thinking about the “volunteer-only” version of the wiki is that Pablo has a grant to work on this project for many months to come, and the project is also one of my highest current priorities at CEA. If it starts to seem like one or both of those things will stop being true in the foreseeable future, I expect to put a lot more time into preparing for the “volunteer-only” era.
A comparison: If you asked me “Aaron, who would take over the EA Newsletter if you got hit by a bus?”, I wouldn’t have a good answer on hand. That doesn’t mean I think the EA Newsletter isn’t important, or that it doesn’t take much time to produce; I just don’t expect to stop running it anytime soon, or to be hit by a bus.
Wikipedia already has more features (including features that would be valuable for an EA Wiki like translation) and a much bigger team (that doesn’t have competing priorities and doesn’t cost CEA anything), so it seems to me like CEA/LW will be constantly playing catchup. And any time they spend adding new features or even just maintaining a dedicated Wiki is time they won’t be able to work on other valuable projects.
As I’ve said, I really want to see people contribute to the real Wikipedia in addition to our dedicated wiki.
But given that LessWrong already has their own wiki, which ours is a copy of, I expect them to keep adding new features to theirs which ours will adopt (this is already how the EA Forum gets most of its new features). This is how they’d be spending their time with or without us.
I’ll retract my “toss-up” comment; I don’t really know what I meant by it, having written that comment quickly and without editing. I do think Wikipedia will always have a better overall feature set than our Wiki — thanks for making that point clearly.
But I expect us to occasionally implement things that are a bit better than Wikipedia’s version of the thing, and I also think there’s a lot of value in having something that is almost as good as Wikipedia in most basic respects that we also control (rather than being at the mercy of notoriously hard-headed admins).
I think CEA would have to tread carefully to support this work without violating Wikipedia’s rules about paid editing. I may think about this more in future months (right now, I’m juggling a lot of projects). If you have suggestions for what CEA could do in this area, I’d be happy to hear them.
The paid editing restrictions are a bigger issue than I’d originally realized. But I do think it would be helpful for an experienced Wikipedia editor like Pablo to write up some brief advice on how volunteers can add EA content to Wikipedia while adhering to all their rules. Sounds like Pablo has some other experiences to share as well. That plus a list of EA content that would be good to get on Wikipedia (which I believe already exists) would probably be enough to make some good progress.
But I do think it would be helpful for an experienced Wikipedia editor like Pablo to write up some brief advice on how volunteers can add EA content to Wikipedia while adhering to all their rules.
Darius Meissner and I are in the process of writing exactly such a document.
I feel like another thing that might help with causing more EAs to actually do this (as opposed to helping them do it better) is finding a way to make the impact of editing important Wikipedia articles more legible to other EAs and more likely to benefit one’s status. Maybe it could be as simple as someone high-status in EA emphasising how valuable this is in a salient way (like a new top-level post, rather than a comment or an old post) and encouraging other EAs to link to their Wikipedia user profile from their EA Forum bio.
Sounds like we’re agreed that Wikipedia editing would be beneficial, and that working on Wikipedia vs. a dedicated wiki isn’t necessarily in direct conflict.
I mostly set my own priorities at CEA; even if I came to believe that doing a lot of dedicated wiki work wasn’t a good use of my time, and we decided to stop paying for work from Pablo or others like him, I can’t imagine not wanting to spend some of my time coordinating other people to do this work…
The reason I haven’t spent much time thinking about the “volunteer-only” version of the wiki is that Pablo has a grant to work on this project for many months to come, and the project is also one of my highest current priorities at CEA. If it starts to seem like one or both of those things will stop being true in the foreseeable future, I expect to put a lot more time into preparing for the “volunteer-only” era.
As I wrote to Pablo, my biggest concern about this project is that CEA won’t sustain a commitment to it. Pablo has a grant “for many months to come”, but what happens after that? How likely do you think it is that CEA/EA Funds will pay for Pablo or someone else to work full time on content creation for years to come? If you think that’s unlikely, then you need a realistic “volunteer-only” plan that accounts for the necessary staff, incentives, etc. to implement (and if there’s not a realistic version of the “volunteer-only” plan, that’s a good thing to learn ahead of time. ) In the same vein, I’d suggest giving serious thought as to the likelihood that an EA Wiki will remain “one of your highest priorities” (and/or a top priority for one of your colleagues) over a timeframe of years not months.
Honestly, a significant part of the reason I’m concerned is because I feel like accurately estimating the cost of projects (and especially the costs to keep them up and running after an initial push, including the opportunity costs of not being able to pursue new projects) has been a historical weakness of CEA’s and likely the root cause of CEA’s historical “underlying problem” of “running too many projects.”
These are all reasonable concerns, and I agree that there are cases where CEA hasn’t done this well in past years.
As soon as the wiki is up and running, and we have a sense for what “maintenance” looks like for Pablo and I (plus the level of volunteer activity we end up with after the festival), I think we’ll be in a much better place to make contingency plans, and I picture us doing much of the research/planning you called for in April. (I work in a series of monthly sprints; this month’s sprint is launching the wiki, and future months will involve more thinking on sustainability.)
My guess is that’s ~90% feature, 10% bug. I think most of the value of an EA Wiki would come from content that’s both EA relevant and notable by Wikipedia’s standards, and that the EA Wiki content most likely to go stale would be that which didn’t meet external notability standards.
More importantly, if you want to get EA ideas into the mainstream, at some point you’re going to have to convince people outside EA that those ideas are notable. Wikipedia seems as good a place to do so as any, since it has established procedures for assessing new content and the payoff for success is getting EA ideas included in the world’s most accessible repository of knowledge.
How familiar are you with Wikipedia? I ask because I’ve been an editor for 17 years (though only active at certain periods) and my sense is that Wikipedia’s notability standards would be a very poor criterion to judge whether the EA Wiki should have an entry on a given topic. Such standards are in line with a “deletionist” editing philosophy for which I don’t see a plausible justification (see Gwern’s In Defense of Inclusionism for discussion) [I now see that Aaron had already linked to this essay]. Furthermore, even if those standards were justified for Wikipedia, I don’t think they would be for a specialized wiki, which is meant to be of interest to a much narrower audience and whose criteria for inclusion should reflect this specialist focus.
I’m not sure I’d describe our goals as getting EA ideas into the mainstream; I think there’s some reasonable disagreement within the community concerning how much and how fast we want EA to grow. In any case, I do not agree that the most effective way of convincing outsiders that EA ideas are notable is to focus our energies on writing content directly on Wikipedia rather than on a separate wiki. Before embarking on this project, I tried that approach for a few months and felt pretty disappointed with the outcome. It was in part on the basis of that experience that I concluded this project should be done as a separate wiki.
To be clear: I think contributing to Wikipedia is extremely valuable—indeed, at the current margin I think one of the most impactful things a competent and dedicated EA could do is to work full time on improving the quality and coverage of EA content on Wikipedia, and I encourage anyone who thinks they may be a good fit for this to seriously consider this option (I’d also be happy to share my experience as an editor, so feel free to contact me privately to schedule a chat). My disagreement with you concerns not the value of contributing to Wikipedia, but the claim that Wikipedia is the best place currently to host the project of creating a comprehensive EA encyclopedia.
Thanks for this thoughtful and informative response Pablo! I’ve consolidate my responses to a few comments including yours here.
Thanks! Responded there.
I’m somewhat sympathetic to the points you make in the first paragraph, though I don’t think they will apply universally. E.g. I would expect that”hinge of history” or “patient philanthropy” are both relatively unlikely to go stale in an EA Wiki and won’t meet Wikipedia’s notability criteria. (Though not sure, I’m not that familiar with these criteria.)
I feel less compelled by your second paragraph. I would guess that most of the actual work to get concepts into the mainstream, establish notability etc., will need to be done outside of Wikipedia: e.g. actually founding a nonprofit, publishing a paper, and getting established media to write about you. So by the time you even have a chance to convince other Wikipedia editors that some topic meets their notability criteria, a lot of work has already been done—and the community doing that work may well be able to make good use of a Wiki that can already support them while doing that work.
Those concepts definitely fail to meet Wikipedia’s notability standards, and I think they are a good example of why those standards are inadequate for the EA Wiki.
Thanks for raising these issues Max! I’ve consolidate my responses to a few comments including yours here.
As you stated, there are some advantages to running this project through Wikipedia:
Bigger audience
Greater context/longer articles that dig into more topics
Many articles exist in other languages
It has formatting options that the Forum doesn’t (yet)
Contributions from people outside the EA community, including viewpoints that wouldn’t be as likely to come from Forum readers
However, there’s no reason we can’t leverage a lot of this with the Forum’s wiki. In many or even most cases, I’d expect that the “further resources” section of an article will include a link to the topic’s Wikipedia page (or some other detailed resource).
And I’d hope that the people who already work on EA-related Wikipedia pages will keep doing so; I agree with you that this seems really valuable for helping to make EA ideas more mainstream.
However, there are some issues with trying to run everything through Wikipedia // benefits to making a wiki here:
As Max said, there are notability concerns about a lot of potentially good content. And my impression is that over time, Wikipedia has become progressively more strict about what qualifies as “notable” (see this Gwern essay, though perhaps things have gotten much better since 2009).
It hamstrings our ability to pay for the public good of useful EA content. Vipul Naik used to sponsor the creation of EA-related Wikipedia content, but his top editor got banned and Wikipedia’s mods froze the whole thing. If CEA wants to sponsor articles about EA topics that we want people to read, we need something like EA Concepts or the EA Forum wiki (at least, that’s my understanding — can you think of ways around this that aren’t just clear violations of Wikipedia’s rules?).
We could ask volunteers to do this, but it seems really good to have access to both options, and to be able to pay people for really good work.
Wikipedia can be an unwelcoming and intimidating place to make edits, especially for newcomers (I’ve heard this from many people). The Forum has many fewer rules/regulations and (I’d hope) somewhat friendlier mods, who are accountable to the broader EA community (Wikipedia’s editors aren’t accountable in this way).
CEA and LessWrong both have developers available to add features to the Forum’s wiki; we can be more flexible in adapting to things that are useful for our readers than Wikipedia is (on the other hand, Wikipedia has a much bigger team, and may add features we can’t replicate at some point, so this feels like a toss-up).
Wikipedia’s articles are often going to be longer/more unfocused than would be ideal for someone trying to get up to speed with EA ideas. For example, an article about “Russia” on our wiki is likely to end up being more relevant to our community members than any article about Russia I can imagine Wikipedia allowing.
This doesn’t mean people should only read about Russia on the Forum — certainly not! — but I think there’s value in having a “Russia through an EA lens” page for people to look at alongside the Internet’s many other sources of information about Russia. Same goes for lots of other topics.
If the Forum wiki project goes well and we end up with a lot of good, well-sourced articles, that makes it easier for volunteers to edit relevant Wikipedia pages.
Thanks Aaron! Consolidating my replies to a few different comments here.
I think the notability concerns are real, and greater than I’d originally thought. Pablo has lots of experience as a Wikipedia editor and I don’t, so I’ll defer to him. And it does seem quite telling that Pablo originally tried the Wikipedia approach for a “few months and felt pretty disappointed with the outcome.”
That said, I’m still pretty sure there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of content that’s notable, EA relevant, and not on Wikipedia. “Longtermism” is a good example. I also suspect (though more experienced Wikipedia people should weigh in) that if we made good progress on the low hanging fruit, terms like “hinge of history” and “patient philanthropy” would be perceived as considerably more notable than they are now. (FWIW, I also think that having tags for things like “hinge of history” is a perfectly reasonable Minimum Viable Product alternative to a dedicated Wiki.)
To clarify my position, I do think a dedicated EA Wiki would be extremely valuable. But I think there’s a significant chance that a dedicated EA Wiki won’t be completed and/or maintained. That’s what’s happened to multiple previous efforts to build an EA Wiki, so that’s my baseline assumption unless I see a plan that’s obviously thought very long and hard about sustainability. I certainly don’t get that impression about this plan given Aaron’s comment about what it would take to keep the site running:
I’m very confident that estimate is well short of the time required to upkeep a dedicated Wiki. While I don’t have experience as a Wikipedia editor, I have quite a bit of experience with a previous employer’s internal Wiki. It was immensely valuable. It was also immensely difficult to develop and maintain. There were countless emails and meetings on the theme “we need to clean up the Wiki (and this time we really mean it!)”, and in my experience it takes a combination of that and making the Wiki part of peoples job responsibilities/evaluations to maintain something useful. It’s amazing how quickly information gets stale, and it gets harder to keep things updated the as you get more entries in your Wiki. If you build an EA Wiki that gets to the level of having a page for “Russia” (to use Aaron’s example), you’re going to need a lot more volunteer (and/or paid staff) time than a few days of someone’s time a month.
I also get the sense that you’re underestimating the financial and opportunity costs of having CEA and LW developers responsible for maintaining/adding functionality, based on this comment:
Wikipedia already has more features (including features that would be valuable for an EA Wiki like translation) and a much bigger team (that doesn’t have competing priorities and doesn’t cost CEA anything), so it seems to me like CEA/LW will be constantly playing catchup. And any time they spend adding new features or even just maintaining a dedicated Wiki is time they won’t be able to work on other valuable projects.
My overarching concern is that you’re seriously underestimating the ongoing costs of this project, which will basically continue in perpetuity and increase over time. This has been the issue that sank previous attempts at an EA Wiki, and honestly it’s a pretty big red flag that you “don’t have a great estimate for how much volunteer time we’d need to keep things running.”
I’d urge you to do some more research into what the costs will look like over time (i.e. talk to people involved in previous EA Wiki attempts and people who have lots of experience with dedicated Wikis) and to think about “all in” costs as much as possible (for example, you’ll want to include the ongoing cost of finding, training, and overseeing volunteers and account for volunteer turnover). I would really love to see a dedicated EA Wiki get built and maintained, I just think that if you undertake this project you need to have a realistic picture of the ongoing costs you’ll be committing to.
Hi Anonymous,
Thank you for your thoughtful and extended feedback. I appreciate the time you have taken to raise a number of valid concerns. I will just respond to a few of your points, since much of what you say is in reply to Aaron’s previous comment, and I don’t want to interfere with that conversation.
I think the worry that the Wiki may fail due to insufficient contributions is very real. As you note, none of the previous attempts to build something like what we are trying to accomplish here have succeeded. And it appears that this is a common phenomenon with general efforts to create specialist wikis. Forecasting is one of my hobbies, and I’m well aware that the base rates aren’t in our favor.
This was is fact my primary concern back when I was considering this project for a grant application. The reason I eventually decided to go ahead—besides feeling that I had a somewhat higher shot at success than my predecessors based on my experience editing Wikipedia and the insight this experience gave me about my capacity to feel motivated long-term by a project of this nature—was that I thought I could gain more information by just trying things out for a few months. The money costs for EA Grants were relatively modest, as were the time costs for me: at the time I didn’t have any other project I felt excited about, and I don’t think I would have spent those months very productively otherwise.
Fortunately, the experiment was a success: by the time the grant was over, I had not only produced more content than I had promised, but had discovered that I found writing these articles a more enjoyable experience than I had anticipated. Since then, I have continued to work on the project, and all the direct evidence indicates that lack of motivation will not be a serious impediment. This may still be insufficient to warrant an update from the naive prior to the point that I feel super confident that I will either continue to work on this project full-time for at least the next five years or find a suitable replacement, but if I had to guess, I’d estimate the chances of this happening at something like 65%.
How sensitive are your worries to scenarios in which the main paid content-writer fails to stay motivated, relative to scenarios in which the project fails because of insufficient volunteer effort? I’m inclined to believe that as long as there is someone whose full-time job is to write content for the Wiki (whether it’s me or someone else), in combination with all the additional work that Aaron and the technical team are devoting to it, enough progress will probably occur to sustain growth over time and attract volunteer contributors. I’m modestly confident in this, but I’m much more confident in that it makes sense to (again) test the hypothesis experimentally, by trying to make the Wiki happen and see how excited people feel about it after a period of a year or so.
Thanks Pablo… I appreciate your thoughtful engagement with my comments, and all the hard work you’ve put into this project.
I’m not at all concerned that “the main paid content-writer fails to stay motivated” since that can easily be solved by finding a suitable replacement. I worry a bit about “insufficient volunteer effort”, but mostly see that as a symptom of my main concern: whether organizational commitment can be sustained.
If CEA has a good understanding of what it will cost to create and maintain the necessary content, technical platform, and volunteer structure and commits to (indefinitely) paying those costs, I’d feel pretty optimistic about the project. I’ve expressed some concerns that CEA is underestimating those costs, but would like to let Aaron respond to those concerns as I may be underestimating the paid staff time CEA is planning or otherwise missing something.
Note on this response: I really appreciate your engagement on this! My goal for this comment is to clarify some things I didn’t go into much detail on before, and better represent the way we’re currently thinking about the project (as something CEA cares about a lot and will continue to care about).
I agree with all of this. However, I think CEA would have to tread carefully to support this work without violating Wikipedia’s rules about paid editing. I may think about this more in future months (right now, I’m juggling a lot of projects). If you have suggestions for what CEA could do in this area, I’d be happy to hear them.
Meanwhile, I’ll declare this as clearly as I can, using bold text in lieu of cash: I am very happy to see work done on EA-relevant Wikipedia pages, and I think that such work ought to be appreciated by the community at large (and, where appropriate, considered in grant applications, job applications, etc.)
I also have experience with an employer’s (valuable) internal wiki, and I appreciate this point. However, I’d expect that keeping information extremely up-to-date (e.g. making weekly updates to a large range of entries) is going to be more important for a corporate wiki than a conceptual wiki.
My employer’s internal wiki had lots of articles that were constantly becoming wrong, in ways that would impede our work if the wrongness wasn’t corrected (“this is no longer the password you need”, “this menu item has been renamed”, etc.). On the other hand, articles like “Longtermism” or “Wild Animal Suffering”, may be expanded from time to time, but it’s rare that text in such an article will suddenly become wrong.
This doesn’t mean that decay isn’t a concern — just that it’s less of a crisis than it would be if e.g. a company were to stop making it anyone’s responsibility to edit their own wiki.
I think I wasn’t clear enough in what I meant the “15-20 hours” to represent, and I may have come off as blasé in a way I didn’t intend.
Quoting myself:
To clarify: I think of “bare minimum” as something like “many articles are checked on ~once per year, and the volunteer spends a few minutes thinking about whether they want to add anything; a volunteer looks at each edit made by a Forum user and makes small fixes/reversions as needed”.
With “many”, I’m leaving out articles like “decision theory” and “Abhijit Banerjee”, and focusing on e.g. articles about core EA orgs and active research areas.
And when I think of “volunteer time”, I’m thinking of people who see themselves as “wiki volunteers”, rather than the general population of the Forum — I’d also expect people on the Forum to put in quite a bit more time, because (unlike those of other EA wikis) the Forum’s wiki articles will be very salient to them.
Our tag pages got over 2000 views in each of January and February, even before most of the content uploading happened. By the time we’ve put in months of additional paid work and added new features to improve the wiki and make it more visible, I expect that number to increase by a lot. Only a tiny fraction of those views will turn into edits, whatever UI we employ to encourage them, but that’s still a lot of additional hours.
Still, I wouldn’t think of a user who makes one five-minute edit every six months as a “volunteer”. So my 15-20 hour estimate didn’t include this kind of activity.
The result I’d expect from a “bare minimum” outcome, combining dedicated volunteer work and other user edits: the wiki continues to be a useful resource which people refer to often, especially for its articles on evergreen concepts that don’t change often. It does decay somewhat, and few new articles are written, but it remains substantial enough that a few dedicated people could jump in and resurrect it more easily than they could start a new wiki.
It’s possible that 15-20 hours/month is too low even to expect this level of maintenance; as I note below, I didn’t spend much time coming up with the estimate (as I don’t think it will be relevant for a long time).
*****
That said, I would be very disappointed in the “bare minimum” outcome, and would go to considerable lengths to bring in more volunteer support. I mostly set my own priorities at CEA; even if I came to believe that doing a lot of dedicated wiki work wasn’t a good use of my time, and we decided to stop paying for work from Pablo or others like him, I can’t imagine not wanting to spend some of my time coordinating other people to do this work.
A number I’d be happy with, where I’d expect to see the wiki grow and flourish? At 500 articles, with three hours/article/year, that’s 125 hours/month — not a very confident estimate, but one that seems plausible for a good outcome. That would take a lot of coordination (if we want to have a couple dozen people putting in an hour per week*), but I’d expect to be on the front lines of that effort.
*I’d expect the actual structure of editing to look a bit different than this, because so many members of the community are going to be invested in specific articles; I’d guess that e.g. someone from 80K would make substantial edits to 80K’s article every so often, and that the same would be true for many other editor/topic combinations.
The reason I haven’t spent much time thinking about the “volunteer-only” version of the wiki is that Pablo has a grant to work on this project for many months to come, and the project is also one of my highest current priorities at CEA. If it starts to seem like one or both of those things will stop being true in the foreseeable future, I expect to put a lot more time into preparing for the “volunteer-only” era.
A comparison: If you asked me “Aaron, who would take over the EA Newsletter if you got hit by a bus?”, I wouldn’t have a good answer on hand. That doesn’t mean I think the EA Newsletter isn’t important, or that it doesn’t take much time to produce; I just don’t expect to stop running it anytime soon, or to be hit by a bus.
As I’ve said, I really want to see people contribute to the real Wikipedia in addition to our dedicated wiki.
But given that LessWrong already has their own wiki, which ours is a copy of, I expect them to keep adding new features to theirs which ours will adopt (this is already how the EA Forum gets most of its new features). This is how they’d be spending their time with or without us.
I’ll retract my “toss-up” comment; I don’t really know what I meant by it, having written that comment quickly and without editing. I do think Wikipedia will always have a better overall feature set than our Wiki — thanks for making that point clearly.
But I expect us to occasionally implement things that are a bit better than Wikipedia’s version of the thing, and I also think there’s a lot of value in having something that is almost as good as Wikipedia in most basic respects that we also control (rather than being at the mercy of notoriously hard-headed admins).
The paid editing restrictions are a bigger issue than I’d originally realized. But I do think it would be helpful for an experienced Wikipedia editor like Pablo to write up some brief advice on how volunteers can add EA content to Wikipedia while adhering to all their rules. Sounds like Pablo has some other experiences to share as well. That plus a list of EA content that would be good to get on Wikipedia (which I believe already exists) would probably be enough to make some good progress.
Darius Meissner and I are in the process of writing exactly such a document.
Great!
I feel like another thing that might help with causing more EAs to actually do this (as opposed to helping them do it better) is finding a way to make the impact of editing important Wikipedia articles more legible to other EAs and more likely to benefit one’s status. Maybe it could be as simple as someone high-status in EA emphasising how valuable this is in a salient way (like a new top-level post, rather than a comment or an old post) and encouraging other EAs to link to their Wikipedia user profile from their EA Forum bio.
Nice!
In the meantime or in addition, some readers of this thread might be interested in some related things Brian Tomasik wrote:
The Value of Wikipedia Contributions in Social Sciences
Tomasik’s ideas for pages to create or improve
(I think I’ve only skimmed these myself.)
Out of interest, do you mean all normal tag pages that can be used for tagging, or all “wiki-only tag pages”, or both types of tag pages put together?
(Also, I’ve appreciated everyone’s contributions to this discussion here.)
Thank you Aaron for this detailed engagement!
Sounds like we’re agreed that Wikipedia editing would be beneficial, and that working on Wikipedia vs. a dedicated wiki isn’t necessarily in direct conflict.
As I wrote to Pablo, my biggest concern about this project is that CEA won’t sustain a commitment to it. Pablo has a grant “for many months to come”, but what happens after that? How likely do you think it is that CEA/EA Funds will pay for Pablo or someone else to work full time on content creation for years to come? If you think that’s unlikely, then you need a realistic “volunteer-only” plan that accounts for the necessary staff, incentives, etc. to implement (and if there’s not a realistic version of the “volunteer-only” plan, that’s a good thing to learn ahead of time. ) In the same vein, I’d suggest giving serious thought as to the likelihood that an EA Wiki will remain “one of your highest priorities” (and/or a top priority for one of your colleagues) over a timeframe of years not months.
Honestly, a significant part of the reason I’m concerned is because I feel like accurately estimating the cost of projects (and especially the costs to keep them up and running after an initial push, including the opportunity costs of not being able to pursue new projects) has been a historical weakness of CEA’s and likely the root cause of CEA’s historical “underlying problem” of “running too many projects.”
These are all reasonable concerns, and I agree that there are cases where CEA hasn’t done this well in past years.
As soon as the wiki is up and running, and we have a sense for what “maintenance” looks like for Pablo and I (plus the level of volunteer activity we end up with after the festival), I think we’ll be in a much better place to make contingency plans, and I picture us doing much of the research/planning you called for in April. (I work in a series of monthly sprints; this month’s sprint is launching the wiki, and future months will involve more thinking on sustainability.)