A thing that I’ve been thinking about for a while has been to somehow make LessWrong into something that could give rise to more personal-wikis and wiki-like content. Gwern’s writing has a very different structure and quality to it than the posts on LW, with the key components being that they get updated regularly and serve as more stable references for some concept, as opposed to a post which is usually anchored in a specific point in time.
We have a pretty good wiki system for our tags, but never really allowed people to just make their personal wiki pages, mostly because there isn’t really any place to find them. We could list the wiki pages you created on your profile, but that doesn’t really seem like it would allocate attention to them successfully.
I was thinking about this more recently as Arbital is going through another round of slowly rotting away (its search currently being broken and this being very hard to fix due to annoying Google Apps Engine restrictions) and thinking about importing all the Arbital content into LessWrong. That might be a natural time to do a final push to enable people to write more wiki-like content on the site.
somehow make LessWrong into something that could give rise to more personal-wikis and wiki-like content. Gwern’s writing has a very different structure and quality to it than the posts on LW...We have a pretty good wiki system for our tags, but never really allowed people to just make their personal wiki pages, mostly because there isn’t really any place to find them. We could list the wiki pages you created on your profile, but that doesn’t really seem like it would allocate attention
Multi-version wikis are a hard design problem.
It’s something that people kept trying, when they soured on a regular Wikipedia: “the need for consensus makes it impossible for minority views to get a fair hearing! I’ll go make my own Wikipedia where everyone can have their own version of an entry, so people can see every side! with blackjack & hookers & booze!” And then it becomes a ghost town, just like every other attempt to replace Wikipedia. (And that’s if you’re lucky: if you’re unlucky you turn into Conservapedia or Rational Wiki.) I’m not aware of any cases of ‘non-consensus’ wikis that really succeed—it seems that usually, there’s so little editor activity to go around that having parallel versions winds up producing a whole lotta nothing, and the sub-versions are useless and soon abandoned by the original editor, and then the wiki as a whole fails. (See also: Arbital.) Successful wikis all generally seem to follow the Wikipedia approach of a centralized consensus wiki curated & largely edited by a oligarchy; for example, Wikia fandom wikis will be dominated by a few super-fans, or the Reddit wikis attached to each subreddit will be edited by the subreddit moderators.
(There is also an older model like the original Ward’s Wiki* or the Emacs Wiki where pages might be carefully written & curated, but might also just be dumps of any text anyone felt like including, include editors chatting back and forth, comments appended to excerpts, and ad hoc separators like horizontal rules to denote a change of topic; this sorta worked, but all of them seem to be extremely obscure/small and the approach has faded out almost completely.)
And for LW2, a lot of contributions are intrinsically personally-motivated in a way which seems hard to reconcile with the anonymous-laboring-masses-building-Egyptian-pyramids/Wikipedias. Laboring to create an anonymous consensus account of some idea or concept is not too rewarding. (Recall how few people seriously edit even a titanic success like Wikipedia!) So you have a needle to thread: somehow individualized and personalized, but also somehow community-like...?
Is there any site online which manages to hybridize wikis with forums? Not that I know of. (StackOverflow? EN World has “wiki threads” but I dunno how well they work.)
It can’t be easy!
Going from ‘fast’ to ‘slow’ is one of, I think, the biggest challenges and dividing lines of Internet community design.
* saturn2 notes a 2010 appenwar essay describing the transition from the original exuberant freewheeling almost-4chan-esque wiki culture, and how one of his companies made heavy use of an internal wiki for everything (where the more comprehensive it got, the more useful it got), to the ‘Wikipedia deletionist’ culture now assumed to be the default for all wikis; and also the failure mode of an ‘internal’ wiki starving the ‘external’ wiki due to friction.
Still, if one wanted to try, I think a better perspective might be ‘personal gardens’ and hypertext transclusions (as now used heavily on Gwern.net).
The goal would be to, in essence, try to piggyback a sort of Roam/Notion/PMwiki personal wiki system onto user comments & a site-wide wiki.
One of the rewarding things about a ‘personal garden’ is being able to easily interconnect things and expand them and see it grow; this is something you don’t really get with either LW2 posts or comments—sure, you can hyperlink them, and you can keep editing them and adding to them, but this is not the way they are most easily done (which is ‘fire and forget’).
Each one is ultimately trapped in its original context, date-bound.
You don’t get that with the standard wiki either, unless you either operate the entire wiki and it’s a personal wiki, or you have de facto control over the set of articles you care about.
You can’t write a really personalized wiki article because someone else could always come by and delete it.
(One of the reasons I stopped editing English Wikipedia is my sadness at seeing interesting blockquotes, humorous captions, and amusing details constantly being stripped out by humorless narrow-minded deletionists who apparently feel that about every topic, the less said the better.)
So to hybridize this, I would suggest a multi-version wiki model where on each page, there is a ‘consensus’ entry, which acts exactly like the current wiki does and like one expects a normal wiki to act. Anyone can edit it, edits can be reverted by other editors, statements in it are expected to be ‘consensus’ and not simply push minority POVs without qualification, and so on and so forth.
But below the consensus entry (if it exists), there are $USER entries.
All $USER entries are transcluded one by one below the main consensus entry. (This will look familiar to any Gwern.net reader.)
They are clearly titled & presented as by that user.
(They may be sorted by length, most recently modified, or possibly karma; I think I would avoid showing anyone the karma, however, and solely use it for ranking.)
Any user can create their own corresponding user entry for any wiki page, which will be transcluded below the consensus entry, and they are the only ones who can edit it; they can write their own entry, criticize the consensus one, list relevant links, muse about the topic, and so on.
(I think ‘subpages’ are a convenient syntax here: I don’t know how the current syntax operates, but let’s say that a LW2 wiki entry on ‘Acausal cooperation’ lives at the URL /wiki/Acausal_cooperation; then if I wrote a user entry for it, it would live at /wiki/Acausal_cooperation/gwern.)
These entries can be viewed on their own, and given convenient abbreviated shortcuts (why not $USER/article-name as well?); this makes them dead-easy to remember and type. (“Where’s gwern’s wiki-essay on acausal cooperation? oh.”)
and include a list of backlinks by that user and then by other users.
Diffs can be displayed on user-profiles similar to comments.
User-entries can be displayed in a compact table/block on a user-profile: eg Foo · Bar · Baz · ... line-wrapping for a few lines ought to cover even highly-prolific users for a long time. They could also be unified with Shortform/Quick Takes: each user entry is just a comment there. (Which might help with implementing comments, if a user entry is just a transcluded comment tree. This means that if you want to add to or criticize some part of a user entry, well, you just reply to it right then and there!)
Users might, for the most part, just edit the consensus entry.
If they have something spicy to say or they think there’s something wrong with it (like arguing over the definition), they’ll choose to add it to their respective user entry to avoid another editor screwing with it or reverting them.
In the best-case scenario, this seduces users into regularly updating and expanding consensus wiki entries as they realize some additional piece doesn’t need to go into their personal entry.
Or they might want to make a point of periodically ‘promoting’ their personal entries into the consensus entries, if no one objects.
Users are motivated to create user entries as a way of organizing their own comments and articles across long time periods: every time you link a wiki article (whether consensus or user), you create a backlink which makes re-finding it easier.
The implicit tags will be used much more than explicit ones.
There is no way to ‘tag’ a comment right now; it’s not that easy to add a tag to your own post; it’s not even that easy to navigate the tags; but it would be easy to look up a wiki article and look at the backlinks.
So one could imagine a regular cycle of writing comments which link to key wiki pages, sometimes accumulating into a regular LW2 post, followed by summarization into a wiki page, refactoring into multiple wiki pages as the issue becomes clearer, and starting over with a better understanding and vocabulary as reflected in the new set of pages which can be linked in comments on each topic...
At no point is the user committed to some of Big Deal website or Essay, like they think they’re a big shot who’s earned some sort of hero license to write online—“creating your own public wiki? my, that’s quite some self-esteem there; remind me again what your degree was in and where you have tenure?” Like tweeting, it all just happens one little step at a time: link a wiki entry in one comment, another elsewhere, leave a quick little clarification or neat tangent in your user entry in an obscure page, get a little more argumentative with another consensus entry you think is mistaken, go so far as to create a new page on a technical term you think would be useful...
Technically-wise, I think this shouldn’t require too much violence to the existing codebase as a wiki is already implemented & running, LW2 already supports some degree of transclusion (both server & client-side), sub-pages are usually feasible in wikis and just requires access controls added on to match user==page-name, and backlinks should already be provided by the wiki and automatic for sub-pages as well. The difficulty is making it seamless and friction-free and intuitive.
So, the key difficulty this feels to me like its eliding is the ontology problem. One thing that feels cool about personal wikis is that people come up with their own factorization and ontology for the things they are thinking about. Like, we probably won’t have a consensus article on the exact ways L in Death Note made mistakes, but Gwern.net would be sadder without that kind of content.
So I think in addition to the above there needs to be a way for users to easily and without friction add a personal article for some concept they care about, and to have a consistent link to it, in a way that doesn’t destroy any of the benefits of the collaborative editing.
My sense is that collaboratively edited wikis tend to thrive heavily around places where there is a clear ontology and decay when the ontology is unclear or the domain permits many orthogonal carvings. This makes video game wikis so common and usually successful, as via the nature of their programming they will almost always have a clear structure to them (the developer probably coded an abstraction for “enemies” and “attack patterns” and “levels” and so the wiki can easily mirror them and document them).
It feels to me that anything that wants to somehow build a unification of personal wikis and consensus wikis needs to figure out how to gracefully handle the ontology problem.
One thing that feels cool about personal wikis is that people come up with their own factorization and ontology for the things they are thinking about...So I think in addition to the above there needs to be a way for users to easily and without friction add a personal article for some concept they care about, and to have a consistent link to it, in a way that doesn’t destroy any of the benefits of the collaborative editing.
My proposal already provides a way to easily add a personal article with a consistent link, while preserving the ability to do collaborative editing on ‘public’ articles. Strictly speaking, it’s fine for people to add wiki entries for their own factorization and ontology.
There is no requirement for those to all be ‘official’: there doesn’t have to be a ‘consensus’ entry. Nothing about a /wiki/Acausal_cooperation/gwern user entry requires the /wiki/Acausal_cooperation consensus entry to exist. (Computers are flexible like that.) That just means there’s nothing there at that exact URL, or probably better, it falls back to displaying all sub-pages of user entries like usual. (User entries presumably get some sort of visual styling, in the same way that comments on a post look different from a post, which in addition to the title/author metadata displayed, avoids confusion.)
If, say, TurnTrout wants to create a user entry /wiki/Reward_is_not_the_optimization_target/TurnTrout as a master key to all of his posts & comments and related ones like Nora Belrose’s posts, rather than go for a consensus entry, that’s fine. And if it becomes commonly-accepted jargon and part of the ontology, and so it becomes a hassle that people can’t edit his user entry (rather than leave their own user entry or comments), his user entry can be ‘promoted’ ie. just be copied by someone into a new consensus entry at /wiki/Reward_is_not_the_optimization_target that can then be edited and his user entry left as historical or possibly collapsed/hidden by an admin for readability.
(The growth of the ad hoc user & consensus ontology might be a bit messy and sometimes it might be a good idea to delete/edit user entries by users who are gone or uncooperative or edit their entries to update links, but that’s little different from a regular wiki’s need for admins to do similar maintenance.)
Like, we probably won’t have a consensus article on the exact ways L in Death Note made mistakes, but Gwern.net would be sadder without that kind of content.
The DN essay mostly would not make sense as a wiki entry, and indeed, it’s been ‘done’ ever since 2013 or so. There’s not much more to be said about the topic (despite occasional attempts at criticism, which typically just wind up repeating something I already said in it). It doesn’t need wiki support or treatment, and it was a post-like essay: I wrote it up as a single definitive piece and it was discussed at a particular time and place. (Actually, I think I did originally post it on LW1?) It benefits from ongoing Gwern.net improvements, but mostly in a general typographical sense rather than being deeply integrated into other pages.
The parts of it that keep changing do have wiki-like nature:
For example, the parts from Jaynes would make sense as part of a ‘Legal Bayesianism’ article, which would be useful to invoke in many other posts like debates on Amanda Knox’s innocence.
The basic concept of ‘information’ from information theory as whatever lets you narrow down a haystack into a needle (which is the ‘big idea’ of the essay—teaching you information theory by example, by dramatizing the hunt for a criminal leaking circumstantial evidence) is certainly a wiki-worthy topic that people could benefit from naming explicitly and appending their own discussions or views on.
This could come up in many places, from looking for aliens to program search in DL scaling or AIXI paradigm or thinking about Bayesian reasoning (eg. Eliezer on how many bits of information it takes to make a hypothesis ‘live’ at all).
Or that big list of side channels / deanonymization methods would make complete sense as a wiki entry which people could contribute piquant instances to, and would be useful linking elsewhere on LW2, particularly in articles on AGI security and why successfully permanently boxing a malevolent, motivated superintelligence would be extremely difficult—because there are bazillions of known side-channels which enable exfiltration/control/inference & we keep discovering new ones like how to turn computer chips into radios/speakers or entire families of attacks like SPECTRE or Rowhammer.
(One reason I’ve invested so much effort into the tag-directory system is the hope of replacing such churning lists with transcludes of tags. The two major examples right now are https://gwern.net/dnm-archive#works-using-this-dataset and https://gwern.net/danbooru2021#publications—I want to track all users/citers of my datasets to establish their value for researchers & publicize those uses, but adding them manually was constant toil and increasingly redundant with the annotations. So with appropriate tooling, I switch to transcluding a tag for the citers instead. Any time a new user shows up, I just write an annotation for it, as I would have before, and add a dnm-archive or danbooru tag to it and then they show up automatically with no further work. So you could imagine doing the same thing in my DN essay: instead of that long unordered list, which is tedious to update every time there’s a fun security paper or blog post, I would instead have a tag like cs/security/side-channel where each of those is annotated, and simply transclude the table of contents for that. If I still wanted a natural-language summary similar to the existing list, well, I could just stick that at the top of the tag and benefit every instance of the tag.)
I agree with Gwern. I think it’s fairly rare that someone wants to write the whole entry themselves or articles for all concepts in a topic.
It’s much more likely that someone just wants to add their own idiosyncratic takes on a topic. For example, I’d love to have a convenient way to write up my own idiosyncratic takes on decision theory. I tried including some of these in the main Wiki, but it (understandably) was reverted.
I expect that one of the main advantages of this style of content would be that you can just write a note without having to bother with an introduction or conclusion.
I also think it would be fairly important (though not at the start) to have a way of upweighting the notes added by particular users.
I agree with Gwern that this may result in more content being added to the main wiki pages when other users are in favour of this.
TLDR: The only thing I’d add to Gwern’s proposal is making sure there are good mechanisms to discuss changes. Improving the wiki and focusing on it could really improve alignment research overall.
Using the LW wiki more as a medium for collaborative research could be really useful in bringing new alignment thinkers up to speed rapidly. I think this is an important part of the overall project; alignment is seeing a burst of interest, and being able to rapidly make use of bright new minds who want to donate their time to the project might very well make the difference in adequately solving alignment in time.
As it stands, someone new to the field has to hunt for good articles on any topic, and they provide some links to other important articles, but that’s not really their job. The wiki’s tags does serve that purpose. The articles are sometimes a good overview of that concept or topic, but more community focus on the wiki could make them work much better as a way
Ideally each article aims to be a summary of current thinking on that topic, including both majority and minority views. One key element is making this project build community rather than strain it. Having people with different views work well collaboratively is a bit tricky. Good mechanisms for discussion are one way to reduce friction and any trend toward harsh feelings when ones’ contributions are changed. The existing comment system might be adequate, particularly with more of a norm of linking changes to comments, and linking to comments from the main text for commentary.
Do you have an underlying mission statement or goal that can guide decisions like this? IMO, there are plenty of things that should probably continue to live elsewhere, with some amount of linking and overlap when they’re lesswrong-appropriate.
One big question in my mind is “should LessWrong use a different karma/voting system for such content?”. If the answer is yes, I’d put a pretty high bar for diluting LessWrong with it, and it would take a lot of thought to figure out the right way to grade “wanted on LW” for wiki-like articles that aren’t collections/pointers to posts.
One small idea: Have the ability to re-publish posts to allPosts or the front page after editing. This worked in the past, but now doesn’t anymore (as I noticed recently when updating this post).
Yeah, the EA Forum team removed that functionality (because people kept triggering it accidentally). I think that was a mild mistake, so I might revert it for LW.
Cool idea, but before doing this one obvious inclusion would be to make it easier to tag LW articles, particularly your own articles, in posts by @including them.
A thing that I’ve been thinking about for a while has been to somehow make LessWrong into something that could give rise to more personal-wikis and wiki-like content. Gwern’s writing has a very different structure and quality to it than the posts on LW, with the key components being that they get updated regularly and serve as more stable references for some concept, as opposed to a post which is usually anchored in a specific point in time.
We have a pretty good wiki system for our tags, but never really allowed people to just make their personal wiki pages, mostly because there isn’t really any place to find them. We could list the wiki pages you created on your profile, but that doesn’t really seem like it would allocate attention to them successfully.
I was thinking about this more recently as Arbital is going through another round of slowly rotting away (its search currently being broken and this being very hard to fix due to annoying Google Apps Engine restrictions) and thinking about importing all the Arbital content into LessWrong. That might be a natural time to do a final push to enable people to write more wiki-like content on the site.
Multi-version wikis are a hard design problem.
It’s something that people kept trying, when they soured on a regular Wikipedia: “the need for consensus makes it impossible for minority views to get a fair hearing! I’ll go make my own Wikipedia where everyone can have their own version of an entry, so people can see every side! with blackjack & hookers & booze!” And then it becomes a ghost town, just like every other attempt to replace Wikipedia. (And that’s if you’re lucky: if you’re unlucky you turn into Conservapedia or Rational Wiki.) I’m not aware of any cases of ‘non-consensus’ wikis that really succeed—it seems that usually, there’s so little editor activity to go around that having parallel versions winds up producing a whole lotta nothing, and the sub-versions are useless and soon abandoned by the original editor, and then the wiki as a whole fails. (See also: Arbital.) Successful wikis all generally seem to follow the Wikipedia approach of a centralized consensus wiki curated & largely edited by a oligarchy; for example, Wikia fandom wikis will be dominated by a few super-fans, or the Reddit wikis attached to each subreddit will be edited by the subreddit moderators.
(There is also an older model like the original Ward’s Wiki* or the Emacs Wiki where pages might be carefully written & curated, but might also just be dumps of any text anyone felt like including, include editors chatting back and forth, comments appended to excerpts, and ad hoc separators like horizontal rules to denote a change of topic; this sorta worked, but all of them seem to be extremely obscure/small and the approach has faded out almost completely.)
And for LW2, a lot of contributions are intrinsically personally-motivated in a way which seems hard to reconcile with the anonymous-laboring-masses-building-Egyptian-pyramids/Wikipedias. Laboring to create an anonymous consensus account of some idea or concept is not too rewarding. (Recall how few people seriously edit even a titanic success like Wikipedia!) So you have a needle to thread: somehow individualized and personalized, but also somehow community-like...? Is there any site online which manages to hybridize wikis with forums? Not that I know of. (StackOverflow? EN World has “wiki threads” but I dunno how well they work.) It can’t be easy!
Going from ‘fast’ to ‘slow’ is one of, I think, the biggest challenges and dividing lines of Internet community design.
* saturn2 notes a 2010 appenwar essay describing the transition from the original exuberant freewheeling almost-4chan-esque wiki culture, and how one of his companies made heavy use of an internal wiki for everything (where the more comprehensive it got, the more useful it got), to the ‘Wikipedia deletionist’ culture now assumed to be the default for all wikis; and also the failure mode of an ‘internal’ wiki starving the ‘external’ wiki due to friction.
Still, if one wanted to try, I think a better perspective might be ‘personal gardens’ and hypertext transclusions (as now used heavily on Gwern.net). The goal would be to, in essence, try to piggyback a sort of Roam/Notion/PMwiki personal wiki system onto user comments & a site-wide wiki.
One of the rewarding things about a ‘personal garden’ is being able to easily interconnect things and expand them and see it grow; this is something you don’t really get with either LW2 posts or comments—sure, you can hyperlink them, and you can keep editing them and adding to them, but this is not the way they are most easily done (which is ‘fire and forget’). Each one is ultimately trapped in its original context, date-bound. You don’t get that with the standard wiki either, unless you either operate the entire wiki and it’s a personal wiki, or you have de facto control over the set of articles you care about. You can’t write a really personalized wiki article because someone else could always come by and delete it. (One of the reasons I stopped editing English Wikipedia is my sadness at seeing interesting blockquotes, humorous captions, and amusing details constantly being stripped out by humorless narrow-minded deletionists who apparently feel that about every topic, the less said the better.)
So to hybridize this, I would suggest a multi-version wiki model where on each page, there is a ‘consensus’ entry, which acts exactly like the current wiki does and like one expects a normal wiki to act. Anyone can edit it, edits can be reverted by other editors, statements in it are expected to be ‘consensus’ and not simply push minority POVs without qualification, and so on and so forth.
But below the consensus entry (if it exists), there are
$USERentries. All$USERentries are transcluded one by one below the main consensus entry. (This will look familiar to any Gwern.net reader.) They are clearly titled & presented as by that user. (They may be sorted by length, most recently modified, or possibly karma; I think I would avoid showing anyone the karma, however, and solely use it for ranking.) Any user can create their own corresponding user entry for any wiki page, which will be transcluded below the consensus entry, and they are the only ones who can edit it; they can write their own entry, criticize the consensus one, list relevant links, muse about the topic, and so on. (I think ‘subpages’ are a convenient syntax here: I don’t know how the current syntax operates, but let’s say that a LW2 wiki entry on ‘Acausal cooperation’ lives at the URL/wiki/Acausal_cooperation; then if I wrote a user entry for it, it would live at/wiki/Acausal_cooperation/gwern.) These entries can be viewed on their own, and given convenient abbreviated shortcuts (why not$USER/article-nameas well?); this makes them dead-easy to remember and type. (“Where’s gwern’s wiki-essay on acausal cooperation? oh.”) and include a list of backlinks by that user and then by other users.Diffs can be displayed on user-profiles similar to comments. User-entries can be displayed in a compact table/block on a user-profile: eg
Foo · Bar · Baz · ...line-wrapping for a few lines ought to cover even highly-prolific users for a long time. They could also be unified with Shortform/Quick Takes: each user entry is just a comment there. (Which might help with implementing comments, if a user entry is just a transcluded comment tree. This means that if you want to add to or criticize some part of a user entry, well, you just reply to it right then and there!)Users might, for the most part, just edit the consensus entry. If they have something spicy to say or they think there’s something wrong with it (like arguing over the definition), they’ll choose to add it to their respective user entry to avoid another editor screwing with it or reverting them. In the best-case scenario, this seduces users into regularly updating and expanding consensus wiki entries as they realize some additional piece doesn’t need to go into their personal entry. Or they might want to make a point of periodically ‘promoting’ their personal entries into the consensus entries, if no one objects.
Users are motivated to create user entries as a way of organizing their own comments and articles across long time periods: every time you link a wiki article (whether consensus or user), you create a backlink which makes re-finding it easier. The implicit tags will be used much more than explicit ones. There is no way to ‘tag’ a comment right now; it’s not that easy to add a tag to your own post; it’s not even that easy to navigate the tags; but it would be easy to look up a wiki article and look at the backlinks.
So one could imagine a regular cycle of writing comments which link to key wiki pages, sometimes accumulating into a regular LW2 post, followed by summarization into a wiki page, refactoring into multiple wiki pages as the issue becomes clearer, and starting over with a better understanding and vocabulary as reflected in the new set of pages which can be linked in comments on each topic...
At no point is the user committed to some of Big Deal website or Essay, like they think they’re a big shot who’s earned some sort of hero license to write online—“creating your own public wiki? my, that’s quite some self-esteem there; remind me again what your degree was in and where you have tenure?” Like tweeting, it all just happens one little step at a time: link a wiki entry in one comment, another elsewhere, leave a quick little clarification or neat tangent in your user entry in an obscure page, get a little more argumentative with another consensus entry you think is mistaken, go so far as to create a new page on a technical term you think would be useful...
Technically-wise, I think this shouldn’t require too much violence to the existing codebase as a wiki is already implemented & running, LW2 already supports some degree of transclusion (both server & client-side), sub-pages are usually feasible in wikis and just requires access controls added on to match user==page-name, and backlinks should already be provided by the wiki and automatic for sub-pages as well. The difficulty is making it seamless and friction-free and intuitive.
So, the key difficulty this feels to me like its eliding is the ontology problem. One thing that feels cool about personal wikis is that people come up with their own factorization and ontology for the things they are thinking about. Like, we probably won’t have a consensus article on the exact ways L in Death Note made mistakes, but Gwern.net would be sadder without that kind of content.
So I think in addition to the above there needs to be a way for users to easily and without friction add a personal article for some concept they care about, and to have a consistent link to it, in a way that doesn’t destroy any of the benefits of the collaborative editing.
My sense is that collaboratively edited wikis tend to thrive heavily around places where there is a clear ontology and decay when the ontology is unclear or the domain permits many orthogonal carvings. This makes video game wikis so common and usually successful, as via the nature of their programming they will almost always have a clear structure to them (the developer probably coded an abstraction for “enemies” and “attack patterns” and “levels” and so the wiki can easily mirror them and document them).
It feels to me that anything that wants to somehow build a unification of personal wikis and consensus wikis needs to figure out how to gracefully handle the ontology problem.
My proposal already provides a way to easily add a personal article with a consistent link, while preserving the ability to do collaborative editing on ‘public’ articles. Strictly speaking, it’s fine for people to add wiki entries for their own factorization and ontology.
There is no requirement for those to all be ‘official’: there doesn’t have to be a ‘consensus’ entry. Nothing about a
/wiki/Acausal_cooperation/gwernuser entry requires the/wiki/Acausal_cooperationconsensus entry to exist. (Computers are flexible like that.) That just means there’s nothing there at that exact URL, or probably better, it falls back to displaying all sub-pages of user entries like usual. (User entries presumably get some sort of visual styling, in the same way that comments on a post look different from a post, which in addition to the title/author metadata displayed, avoids confusion.)If, say, TurnTrout wants to create a user entry
/wiki/Reward_is_not_the_optimization_target/TurnTroutas a master key to all of his posts & comments and related ones like Nora Belrose’s posts, rather than go for a consensus entry, that’s fine. And if it becomes commonly-accepted jargon and part of the ontology, and so it becomes a hassle that people can’t edit his user entry (rather than leave their own user entry or comments), his user entry can be ‘promoted’ ie. just be copied by someone into a new consensus entry at/wiki/Reward_is_not_the_optimization_targetthat can then be edited and his user entry left as historical or possibly collapsed/hidden by an admin for readability.(The growth of the ad hoc user & consensus ontology might be a bit messy and sometimes it might be a good idea to delete/edit user entries by users who are gone or uncooperative or edit their entries to update links, but that’s little different from a regular wiki’s need for admins to do similar maintenance.)
The DN essay mostly would not make sense as a wiki entry, and indeed, it’s been ‘done’ ever since 2013 or so. There’s not much more to be said about the topic (despite occasional attempts at criticism, which typically just wind up repeating something I already said in it). It doesn’t need wiki support or treatment, and it was a post-like essay: I wrote it up as a single definitive piece and it was discussed at a particular time and place. (Actually, I think I did originally post it on LW1?) It benefits from ongoing Gwern.net improvements, but mostly in a general typographical sense rather than being deeply integrated into other pages.
The parts of it that keep changing do have wiki-like nature:
For example, the parts from Jaynes would make sense as part of a ‘Legal Bayesianism’ article, which would be useful to invoke in many other posts like debates on Amanda Knox’s innocence.
The basic concept of ‘information’ from information theory as whatever lets you narrow down a haystack into a needle (which is the ‘big idea’ of the essay—teaching you information theory by example, by dramatizing the hunt for a criminal leaking circumstantial evidence) is certainly a wiki-worthy topic that people could benefit from naming explicitly and appending their own discussions or views on.
This could come up in many places, from looking for aliens to program search in DL scaling or AIXI paradigm or thinking about Bayesian reasoning (eg. Eliezer on how many bits of information it takes to make a hypothesis ‘live’ at all).
Or that big list of side channels / deanonymization methods would make complete sense as a wiki entry which people could contribute piquant instances to, and would be useful linking elsewhere on LW2, particularly in articles on AGI security and why successfully permanently boxing a malevolent, motivated superintelligence would be extremely difficult—because there are bazillions of known side-channels which enable exfiltration/control/inference & we keep discovering new ones like how to turn computer chips into radios/speakers or entire families of attacks like SPECTRE or Rowhammer.
(One reason I’ve invested so much effort into the tag-directory system is the hope of replacing such churning lists with transcludes of tags. The two major examples right now are https://gwern.net/dnm-archive#works-using-this-dataset and https://gwern.net/danbooru2021#publications—I want to track all users/citers of my datasets to establish their value for researchers & publicize those uses, but adding them manually was constant toil and increasingly redundant with the annotations. So with appropriate tooling, I switch to transcluding a tag for the citers instead. Any time a new user shows up, I just write an annotation for it, as I would have before, and add a
dnm-archiveordanboorutag to it and then they show up automatically with no further work. So you could imagine doing the same thing in my DN essay: instead of that long unordered list, which is tedious to update every time there’s a fun security paper or blog post, I would instead have a tag likecs/security/side-channelwhere each of those is annotated, and simply transclude the table of contents for that. If I still wanted a natural-language summary similar to the existing list, well, I could just stick that at the top of the tag and benefit every instance of the tag.)Users can just create pages corresponding to their own categories
Like Notion we could allow two-way links between pages so users would just tag the category in their own custom inclusions.
I agree with Gwern. I think it’s fairly rare that someone wants to write the whole entry themselves or articles for all concepts in a topic.
It’s much more likely that someone just wants to add their own idiosyncratic takes on a topic. For example, I’d love to have a convenient way to write up my own idiosyncratic takes on decision theory. I tried including some of these in the main Wiki, but it (understandably) was reverted.
I expect that one of the main advantages of this style of content would be that you can just write a note without having to bother with an introduction or conclusion.
I also think it would be fairly important (though not at the start) to have a way of upweighting the notes added by particular users.
I agree with Gwern that this may result in more content being added to the main wiki pages when other users are in favour of this.
TLDR: The only thing I’d add to Gwern’s proposal is making sure there are good mechanisms to discuss changes. Improving the wiki and focusing on it could really improve alignment research overall.
Using the LW wiki more as a medium for collaborative research could be really useful in bringing new alignment thinkers up to speed rapidly. I think this is an important part of the overall project; alignment is seeing a burst of interest, and being able to rapidly make use of bright new minds who want to donate their time to the project might very well make the difference in adequately solving alignment in time.
As it stands, someone new to the field has to hunt for good articles on any topic, and they provide some links to other important articles, but that’s not really their job. The wiki’s tags does serve that purpose. The articles are sometimes a good overview of that concept or topic, but more community focus on the wiki could make them work much better as a way
Ideally each article aims to be a summary of current thinking on that topic, including both majority and minority views. One key element is making this project build community rather than strain it. Having people with different views work well collaboratively is a bit tricky. Good mechanisms for discussion are one way to reduce friction and any trend toward harsh feelings when ones’ contributions are changed. The existing comment system might be adequate, particularly with more of a norm of linking changes to comments, and linking to comments from the main text for commentary.
Do you have an underlying mission statement or goal that can guide decisions like this? IMO, there are plenty of things that should probably continue to live elsewhere, with some amount of linking and overlap when they’re lesswrong-appropriate.
One big question in my mind is “should LessWrong use a different karma/voting system for such content?”. If the answer is yes, I’d put a pretty high bar for diluting LessWrong with it, and it would take a lot of thought to figure out the right way to grade “wanted on LW” for wiki-like articles that aren’t collections/pointers to posts.
One small idea: Have the ability to re-publish posts to allPosts or the front page after editing. This worked in the past, but now doesn’t anymore (as I noticed recently when updating this post).
Yeah, the EA Forum team removed that functionality (because people kept triggering it accidentally). I think that was a mild mistake, so I might revert it for LW.
Cool idea, but before doing this one obvious inclusion would be to make it easier to tag LW articles, particularly your own articles, in posts by @including them.