Announcing the new EA Wiki!
The EA Wiki is now hosted on EA Hub, replacing our old Wikia site, which gives us a lot more control over various things and removes annoying ads. Wikis are all about crowdsourcing so if you see anything wrong or which you think you could improve hit edit and change it (or flag it with a notice if you’re busy/don’t feel like doing the full edit). Wikis are designed to be near-impossible to damage (due to all edit histories being saved) despite the fact that you can edit everything so don’t worry about diving in even if you’re new to this :simple_smile:
There’s lots more content which could usefully be created and organizational work to be done, though various people have already made an excellent start. I envisage the core purpose of the wiki as providing a summary of all important EA related topics, causes, and organizations, while linking out to lots of blogs posts, discussions, and other useful pages around the EA community to allow easily findable access to the best resources we have. A hub that everyone can help keep up to date.
It will also be available for EA related projects which could do with a few communally editable pages. If anyone thinks this may be useful for them let me know and I can advise on suitability and help you get set up. I’m guessing a bunch of use cases I’ve not thought of will come up, wikis are pretty handy.
This move was planned for a few months ago when I did most of the setup, but we got blocked on SSO which turned out to be a lot more tricky than hoped due to outdated extensions. Rather than linking to your accounts on any EA sites I’ve just set up logins via Google accounts, which should provide most of the benefits in terms of spam prevention and easy account creation. I’ve added a few other extensions like semantic mediawiki which will allow structured data collected from infoboxes on organizations to generate neat tables with a little in-page query and some which allow you to embed hackpads, google docs, and a few other sites (examples). There are still a handful of bits of improvement and polish on my to-do list (most notably caching which will speed page load times for non-logged in users considerably), but I’ve been encouraged to ship rather than waiting for the wishlist to be complete. There’s probably a few things which need attention, please let me know if anything seems to be not working right. If you want any features in particular ping me and I’ll let you know if it’s plausible to add to MW.
Thanks to Peter Hurford for the initial idea (I think?) and early work on wikia, Tom Ash and Giles Edkins for doing most of the recent work on content, Yanick Steinbeck for creating one of the version of the main page (integrating this with the current one is on the to-do list!) and useful discussions, Ozzie Gooen for setting me up with access and trying to get SSO working, and everyone else who’s helped out or encouraged this to happen.
If you’re interested in joining in the to-do list is a good place to look for open tasks. We have a channel on the .impact slack (#p-eawiki) if you’d like to discuss things in real time, and this page will be used for planning out content areas, policies, and things of that kind (though perhaps we’ll end up using this site for that instead?).
Happy editing!
The wiki is now at https://wiki.eahub.org/wiki/Effective_Altruism_Wiki.
Link is broken. Does the wiki still exist?
Hi Eric, whenever I try to go to the Wiki I get a screen message saying: 403: Forbidden, this page cannot be displayed. I checked the troubleshooting page, but it seems to contain only advice for the person who manages the wiki, not for visitors (file permissions etc.): https://www.hostgator.com/help/article/403-forbidden-or-no-permission-to-access?utm_source=externalerror&utm_medium=hgsuspage&utm_campaign=client403 Do you have any advice? I’m based in Switzerland, both chrome and firefox didn’t work (on a mac).
You want to be going here: https://wiki.eahub.org/wiki/Effective_Altruism_Wiki
Hi. This is not your fault. The EA Hub team had to take down a few sites because of a CPU overuse error. Until they work out what the problem is and an alternative, some sites will have to stay offline. An archive has been retained.
I get the same thing.
What is the ”.impact slack” and how do you join it?
.impact is a volunteer taskforce, and to request an invite to our slack (kind of IRC for the modern web, very handy for communicating and organizing projects) put your email here.
Neat… so anyone can ‘join’ .impact by getting involved in EA work and communicating about it with other EA’s in the .impact slack?
Yup, and they also hold regular workathons and hangout meetings if you feel like joining in with those.
I’ve specifically taken notes on dozens of effective organizations for the purposes for adding to or creating pages for them on the EA Wiki. I’m glad I’ll finally be able to get started. Specifically, I have data which can be used to organize and categorize organizations along the following lines:
Location (e.g., headquarters, or base of operations)
Cause (e.g., factory farming, AI risk, etc.)
Focus Area (e.g., global poverty, animal advocacy, existential risk reduction, etc.)
Role (e.g., fundraising, research, policy reform, charity evaluation, etc.)
Key Figures (e.g., executives or founders)
Additionally, I’m compiling a list of all EA companies, which can be added to the wiki. What I’m hoping is there can be pages hyperlinked from the page of each individual organization which detail the full list of effective organizations working out of San Francisco, or work on policy, or fund other organizations. It would be helpful if I could put all this core data of an organization on the page in one of those little boxes they have like pages for organizations on Wikipedia. Does the new EA wiki enable that?
Anyway, once I’ve completed some full lists of orgaizations, as sorted by category, I’ll put a link up to them on the EA Forum. I think it will be exciting and informative for people to realize just how much work is being done in the EA space! There is more than I think most people anticipate, as there are more than fifty organizations, and perhaps even over one hundred, working in affiliation with the effective altruism movement.
I see there are definitely “infoboxes”, which I asked about. Also, a full list of organizations is being built, but most orgs are lacking pages. I intend to greatly improve upon this.
Are there actually infoboxes? Where? I don’t see them—all I see is manually centered links at the top of e.g. http://wiki.effectivealtruismhub.com/index.php?title=Library/Giving_What_We_Can
Self-promotion: New YouTube video on effective altruism. Please take a look and share if you think it is any good. “The Price of Saving a Life … is $3,340.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tAaO5KmRFQ&index=2&list=PL0FfKwFuQb2T5tGSKh254JleBGyydQDUR