Good concepts get wiki pages, not necessarily posts. Test by finding an occasion to use a concept isn’t always necessary and isn’t always sufficient, the judgment of concept’s notability may be incorrect either way. In this case, the concept seems salient enough to me.
But a lot of people may think XYZ is a “good concept” and crowd the Wiki. Keeping it down to concepts that people find themselves using in discussion outside the original post, is, indeed, our version of Wikipedia’s notability rule.
Can you please explain how you think the Wiki can get “crowded”? Are we going to run out of hard drive space, or is someone going to print this out, or what?
The dangers of crowding the wiki are not very intuitive, which makes some kinds of “crowding” fine, and others not so much.
One problem is redundancy: each given topic should be focused, so that a small cluster of pages is sufficient to cover it, while not making the rest of the pages repetitive. This, for example, suggests that creating pages for blog posts is a bad idea, because the info would be shared by the blog post pages and concept pages that discuss the concepts introduced in those blog posts. This problem is typically healed by merging pages, rewriting the content, throwing out redundancy, and factoring out the less relevant points into separate pages. The wiki has a lot of growing to come to a stage where this becomes sufficiently relevant.
Another problem is lack of structure. Bits and pieces of each topic are all over the place, so it’s hard to systematically see them together, especially if you visit the wiki for the first time. This is solved by interlinking, categorization (currently, the former gets better, the latter is in disarray), and by summary pages.
Yet another problem is expected quality of articles. If there are too many articles, most of them will be bad, and so reading the wiki would be more like treasure hunting. Keeping high quality requires keeping the speed of creating new pages below the speed of sufficiently improving the existing articles. This is somewhat in conflict with requirement for better structure, and in alliance with fighting redundancy. At the same time, adding stand-alone high-quality articles doesn’t hurt, as long as they have a prospect of being integrated in the structure of the wiki eventually.
Good concepts get wiki pages, not necessarily posts. Test by finding an occasion to use a concept isn’t always necessary and isn’t always sufficient, the judgment of concept’s notability may be incorrect either way. In this case, the concept seems salient enough to me.
But a lot of people may think XYZ is a “good concept” and crowd the Wiki. Keeping it down to concepts that people find themselves using in discussion outside the original post, is, indeed, our version of Wikipedia’s notability rule.
Can you please explain how you think the Wiki can get “crowded”? Are we going to run out of hard drive space, or is someone going to print this out, or what?
The Wiki itself can’t become crowded, but categories, lists, “see also” sections, and the like can. Not sure if this is Eliezer’s point.
The Wiki itself can’t become crowded, but categories, lists, “See Also” sections, and the like can.
The dangers of crowding the wiki are not very intuitive, which makes some kinds of “crowding” fine, and others not so much.
One problem is redundancy: each given topic should be focused, so that a small cluster of pages is sufficient to cover it, while not making the rest of the pages repetitive. This, for example, suggests that creating pages for blog posts is a bad idea, because the info would be shared by the blog post pages and concept pages that discuss the concepts introduced in those blog posts. This problem is typically healed by merging pages, rewriting the content, throwing out redundancy, and factoring out the less relevant points into separate pages. The wiki has a lot of growing to come to a stage where this becomes sufficiently relevant.
Another problem is lack of structure. Bits and pieces of each topic are all over the place, so it’s hard to systematically see them together, especially if you visit the wiki for the first time. This is solved by interlinking, categorization (currently, the former gets better, the latter is in disarray), and by summary pages.
Yet another problem is expected quality of articles. If there are too many articles, most of them will be bad, and so reading the wiki would be more like treasure hunting. Keeping high quality requires keeping the speed of creating new pages below the speed of sufficiently improving the existing articles. This is somewhat in conflict with requirement for better structure, and in alliance with fighting redundancy. At the same time, adding stand-alone high-quality articles doesn’t hurt, as long as they have a prospect of being integrated in the structure of the wiki eventually.