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.)
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.)