Announcement: LessWrong Coronavirus Links Database 2.0
There is a massive amount of information and discussion about the coronavirus, and it can be challenging to keep track of all the things coming in from different sources.
To combat that, 11 days ago we announced that the LessWrong team built and is maintaining a database with all the links that we think are useful, categorizing them, summarizing them, and sorting them.
We’ve just built a major update for the database. Originally it was a Google spreadsheet but we have now integrated it into the LessWrong site proper and improved the information structure.
You can find the new version at lesswrong.com/coronavirus-link-database. It looks like this:
And on mobile it looks like this:
We publish daily updates of the added links (here’s the most recent one) and you can get notification of those by going to Habryka’s profile page and subscribing to his posts.
How to Contribute to the Database
You can submit links using the Link Submission Form, which is also findable from the Link Database page itself. This is the primary way to help out.
If you would like to put in the time to help maintain this database, you can help us with the data entry work using the more detailed LWC19 Database Data Entry Form, which takes ~5 mins to fill out per link (varying time depending on the link). If you submit 5 links this way, we’ll reach out to thank you and give you better access to the database.
If you’d like to help out further with the LessWrong response to the coronavirus, here is my post on 3 low-key ways to help out.
Thank you to the following awesome people who submitted link: Jess Reidel, Ray Arnold, Justin Shovelain, Shri Samson, Jeffrey Ladish, Kyle, Christopher Paul, Roman, VillainMaterial, Sarira, romeostevensit, Jacob Lagerros, ESRogs, Ruby, William-Jose Velez, Matthew Hollett, silverdrake11, Erik Willekens, Eugene Esca, Rod, Vincent Lau, Naryan Wong.
Are there any plans to use this for anything else in the future?
I personally have been interested in using some of the UI here to try an alternate version of the All Posts page. But other team members were skeptical of that and there are no concrete plans at the moment.
I expect to learn some lessons from it, in particular in how to design high-density UIs in a LessWrong context, that I expect will show up in other parts of LessWrong. I can also imagine that at some point we would more generally support complicated tables and databases on LessWrong, but that seems quite a while away.
Suggestion: a forecasting section. Already some of your “Other” links would do well there.
Another suggestion: could this post be linked to by the link database page?