Bored at home? Contribute to the EA Wiki!
EDITED: Seems like the EA Forum is becoming the place where wiki-style information on EA is being curated, so I’m phasing out the EA Wiki in favour of the EA Forum Wiki.
Isolation got you stuck at home? Help out with the new EA Wiki!
This is a new project. I copied some of the content from the old EA Wiki and pruned a lot of it (as much of it was out of date). The Forum is great for getting the latest updates but not so good for finding out the consensus on a particular subject; wikis are better for driving this.
I’d love for the EA Wiki to become the go-to source for EA knowledge. Sign up now!
I am skeptical if making an EA Wiki is better than uploading EA-relevant articles on Wikipedia (https://www.wikipedia.org/).
There are many other arguments for why it wouldn’t be a good idea, but I want to focus on the target group.
Case 1: The target group is EAs. In this case, the EA Wiki would probably host in-depth/comprehensive knowledge that is not available on places EA’s normally visit like 80000hours.org or effectivealtruism.org. It would serve for questions like “Has anyone in EA ever talked about __?”. As of now, most of this “in-depth” knowledge is present in the form of EA Forum posts and comments. Most of the content on the EA Wiki would be copy-pasted from the EA Forum. The EA Forum is well-searchable, and it already fulfills this purpose. For long-run things like “how should the EA content be organized in the long run (e.g. 5 years later)”, an EA Wiki may be more promising. But, for the reasons written above, it is difficult to see any real use of it in the short term (e.g. 1-2 years).
Case 2: The target group is non-EAs. The EA Wiki wouldn’t show up in search engines. Period. Wikipedia articles appear much more easily on search engines and are linked to by other Wikipedia articles. A much better idea would be to upload EA-relevant articles on Wikipedia. Also, there is more scope for extending EA to other languages since Wikipedia supports articles in a 5-10 other languages.
There’s been a bunch of past discussion concerning an EA Wiki, and it took me a few hours to find it all. I’m writing the links to past discussion below so that it saves someone time if they choose to go down this rabbit hole!
Possible candidates/sources for EA Wiki:
https://eawiki.org/
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17njnrWd-YQcXNkRJjA6aRmtLkoxyeMeldW6xXB3mEkk/
https://causeprioritization.org/
http://priority.wiki/
https://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Main_Page
Dead URLs:
http://effective-altruism.wikia.com/wiki/
https://wiki.eahub.org/wiki/Effective_Altruism_Wiki
http://effective-altruism.com (this just redirects to the EA Forum)
Relevant Forum articles:
[Feb 2020] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R4O4WEKdbuZ63ZvfyGSLAGvtRr8vaRg2BmMz3B6TG8o/edit#
[Dec 2019] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EDJRwoG9f852ehKEv/should-we-use-wiki-to-improve-knowledge-management-within
[June 2018] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/gFxgPhn3myvjo7NSo/announcing-prioritywiki-a-cause-prioritization-wiki
[July 2016] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7Jf4oJP2mBszAhYEe/ea-database-reading-list-why-it-might-be-useful
[Oct 2015] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/j7uN8MHiqNt2gY8Sc/announcing-the-new-ea-wiki
I love the idea of wikis for EA knowledge, but is there an attempt underway yet to consolidate all the existing wikis, beyond the Wikia one? Maybe you can coordinate some data import with the other people who are running EA wikis.
When the Priority Wiki was launched, (I but much more so) John Maxwell compiled some of the existing wikis here.
I think for one of these wikis to take off, it’ll probably need to become the clear Schelling point for wiki activity – maybe an integration with the concepts platform or the forum and a consolidation of all the other wikis as a basis.
I imagine there’d also need to be a way for active wiki authors to gain reputation points, e.g., in this forum, so wiki editing can have added benefits for CV building. Less Wrong also has forum and wiki, and the forum is a very similar software, so maybe they already have plans for such a system.
I’ve not attempted to consolidate other wikis—I think the LessWrong and Cause Prioritisation wikis are best kept separate. Concepts also hasn’t been touched in a long time as far as I can see. My hope is that simply by not going offline or being unavailable this wiki will be the default Schelling point!
I also think the fact that this is run on MediaWiki (the same platform as Wikipedia) makes it more familiar/easier to get started, but I could be wrong.
Your point about reputation is very right—need to think more about ways I can surface people’s contributions.
I just submitted a new wiki article, and it says it’s under review. How long does that usually take? Let me know if you’d like to have more reviewers to help with that.
Thanks for flagging—that’s now approved. Still need to do some fiddling with the MediaWiki setup I think, both to ward off spam and to get email alerts for pending approvals.