I think that on the margin, many people’s effort would be better directed to the wiki than to making posts and comments on lesswrong. Are there ways we could increase the incentives for wiki contributions? e.g. Make a LW blog post/comment stating, this is what I added to the wiki [link], and then giving people a chance to give them karma.
I wouldn’t want to substitute the best LW posts and comments for equally time consuming wiki contributions. But many of us are incapable of writing the best posts and comments, but I would guess, could do a decent job of making wiki contributions.
And like SoullessAutomaton said:
a well-structured wiki is more discoverable and accessible
One other hueristic I was using—commenting on LW is more fun because it is social, and yeah, the karma helps too. In this context I think this is (weak) evidence that the wiki will be more subject to a collective action problem. Then again, Wikipedia exists.
One possible reason for favoring the wiki, at least in the long run: a well-structured wiki is more discoverable and accessible. The huge branching tree of your OB posts is daunting enough; the entire past corpus of LW is rapidly going to become even more intimidating for lacking a single author with consistent style and themes. Imagine LW at roughly the same rate of content generation and a slowly expanding user base, three years from now. Where would someone even start?
Distilling the ideas into a manageable synthesis of what’s been discussed in multiple posts, with extensive inter-linking, terms defined, and links to relevant posts would be far more useful for a newcomer than just minimal definitions with links to posts.
To use an academic analogy, if LW posts are journal articles, the wiki ought to be a textbook.
I think that on the margin, many people’s effort would be better directed to the wiki than to making posts and comments on lesswrong. Are there ways we could increase the incentives for wiki contributions? e.g. Make a LW blog post/comment stating, this is what I added to the wiki [link], and then giving people a chance to give them karma.
Why?
There’s a healthy amount of posts here on LW for new users to read, but the wiki is desperately lacking; it’s almost all stubs.
I wouldn’t want to substitute the best LW posts and comments for equally time consuming wiki contributions. But many of us are incapable of writing the best posts and comments, but I would guess, could do a decent job of making wiki contributions.
And like SoullessAutomaton said:
One other hueristic I was using—commenting on LW is more fun because it is social, and yeah, the karma helps too. In this context I think this is (weak) evidence that the wiki will be more subject to a collective action problem. Then again, Wikipedia exists.
One possible reason for favoring the wiki, at least in the long run: a well-structured wiki is more discoverable and accessible. The huge branching tree of your OB posts is daunting enough; the entire past corpus of LW is rapidly going to become even more intimidating for lacking a single author with consistent style and themes. Imagine LW at roughly the same rate of content generation and a slowly expanding user base, three years from now. Where would someone even start?
Distilling the ideas into a manageable synthesis of what’s been discussed in multiple posts, with extensive inter-linking, terms defined, and links to relevant posts would be far more useful for a newcomer than just minimal definitions with links to posts.
To use an academic analogy, if LW posts are journal articles, the wiki ought to be a textbook.
We just need better scholarship in the LW posts themselves, with review articles and tutorial articles, and possibly thematic workshops.