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.
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.