For a time, I adopted the Special Threads page, because it looked like a valuable resource. Eventually it grew to be too much of a hassle, and after that code changes made it less useful (because now there are links to the latest open thread and rationality diary and quotes thread and so on). There have been a lot of attempts to build up various parts of the wiki as useful, but I don’t think all that much of it is actively maintained, and the parts of it I use the most seem to be metaposts (sequence lists, etc.).
This thread is to be used to voice updates Less Wrong users would like to be made to the WIki, especially so it’s easier to use it as a reference for introducing a new concept from Less Wrong for the first time.
Several things come to mind here.
Be bold. If you want the wiki to have pages on X, add pages on X, and maintain pages on X. If it’s not being done, that’s because the wiki is waiting for you to do it. We are likely better off encouraging people to edit the wiki than we are encouraging people to ask what they would like to be done (because who will do it?).
Inferential distance. If it took two thousand words to explain the concept in 2008, say, do we think it will take significantly less words to explain the concept now? Quite possibly, yes. That wiki page is a much shorter explanation than the Eliezer post that discussed the evopsych reasons for why we should expect inferential distances to be a problem, but that wiki page might also be optimized for someone in the LW-sphere who just doesn’t know the jargon, rather than someone outside of the LW-sphere who would need it explained to them what evidence actually means. (The evidence wiki page is terse, and links to seven blog posts about evidence.)
Who gets what value from the wiki?
For a time, I adopted the Special Threads page, because it looked like a valuable resource. Eventually it grew to be too much of a hassle, and after that code changes made it less useful (because now there are links to the latest open thread and rationality diary and quotes thread and so on). There have been a lot of attempts to build up various parts of the wiki as useful, but I don’t think all that much of it is actively maintained, and the parts of it I use the most seem to be metaposts (sequence lists, etc.).
Several things come to mind here.
Be bold. If you want the wiki to have pages on X, add pages on X, and maintain pages on X. If it’s not being done, that’s because the wiki is waiting for you to do it. We are likely better off encouraging people to edit the wiki than we are encouraging people to ask what they would like to be done (because who will do it?).
Inferential distance. If it took two thousand words to explain the concept in 2008, say, do we think it will take significantly less words to explain the concept now? Quite possibly, yes. That wiki page is a much shorter explanation than the Eliezer post that discussed the evopsych reasons for why we should expect inferential distances to be a problem, but that wiki page might also be optimized for someone in the LW-sphere who just doesn’t know the jargon, rather than someone outside of the LW-sphere who would need it explained to them what evidence actually means. (The evidence wiki page is terse, and links to seven blog posts about evidence.)