The obvious question is how is it even possible that Wikipedia works at all? If Wikipedia didn’t exist in our universe, we would now be tempted walk away from this with a high probability estimate that this concept is simply impossible to pull off due to the various reasons mentioned, yet here we live in a world where Wikipedia is clear evidence to the contrary, and to my knowledge it suffers from many problems you and Qiaochu_Yuan mentioned above. Are we to conclude then, that the sequential nature of the arbital content is the crux here?
As we all know, you can almost always dig up something on what could be considered the most obscure niche topic. So what is the core appeal for the vast number of content creators? Is it simply that Wikipedia is recognized as the internets “centralized encyclopedia” and contributing to it feels so high status that ones total anonymity is not perceived as a huge issue? That would not explain how it got to where it is today, how did Wikipedia bootstrap itself to where it is now?
Post-hoc analysis—Wikipedia relies on a relatively small number of people who have the unusual motives/dispositions necessary to write for it, so it doesn’t have to cater to the masses or even the typical elite. However, that doesn’t explain how enough people got interested in the first place. Maybe it had to do with there being fewer alternative venues back then. Also, I’m not so familiar with the history, but I am guessing it grew out of a fairly vibrant community of wiki users. Arbital, on the other hand, tried to bootstrap in relative isolation. (Sadly the vibrant community of LWers didn’t serve the same function, likely because the use-case for Arbital 1.0 was too different from the use-case for LW.)
I’m sad I didn’t think of it before, but hosting LW content on Arbital might just be amazing. In particular, I’d like some kind of way of keeping track of networks of related claims with community ratings and counter-claims clearly visible.
Sound correct to me. Also, I think it’s much easier to start / contribute to a page on Wikipedia. Arbital’s pages were trying to be educational and readable, which, I think is a higher bar.
Yeah, I don’t really understand how Wikipedia got to where it is today. I think it is mostly edited by people very different from me; if I had to take a wild stab, much more autistic (and bless them for that, to be clear).
When I contributed a little in the early days I think it was driven by desire to promote the things I was interested in (mostly video games this case). I’d guess the same goes for historians etc writing the more serious articles. It helped that standards for things like NPOV and citations were a lot lower back then—I don’t think the project would have gotten far if everything had to be cited up the wazoo like it is now. (Now that Wikipedia is established as being important people are willing to put a bit more work in).
Although I’m not autistic as such I do suspect there’s a connection between the above and the stereotypical autistic desire to excessively talk about one’s topic of obsessive interest.
The obvious question is how is it even possible that Wikipedia works at all? If Wikipedia didn’t exist in our universe, we would now be tempted walk away from this with a high probability estimate that this concept is simply impossible to pull off due to the various reasons mentioned, yet here we live in a world where Wikipedia is clear evidence to the contrary, and to my knowledge it suffers from many problems you and Qiaochu_Yuan mentioned above. Are we to conclude then, that the sequential nature of the arbital content is the crux here?
As we all know, you can almost always dig up something on what could be considered the most obscure niche topic. So what is the core appeal for the vast number of content creators? Is it simply that Wikipedia is recognized as the internets “centralized encyclopedia” and contributing to it feels so high status that ones total anonymity is not perceived as a huge issue? That would not explain how it got to where it is today, how did Wikipedia bootstrap itself to where it is now?
Post-hoc analysis—Wikipedia relies on a relatively small number of people who have the unusual motives/dispositions necessary to write for it, so it doesn’t have to cater to the masses or even the typical elite. However, that doesn’t explain how enough people got interested in the first place. Maybe it had to do with there being fewer alternative venues back then. Also, I’m not so familiar with the history, but I am guessing it grew out of a fairly vibrant community of wiki users. Arbital, on the other hand, tried to bootstrap in relative isolation. (Sadly the vibrant community of LWers didn’t serve the same function, likely because the use-case for Arbital 1.0 was too different from the use-case for LW.)
I’m sad I didn’t think of it before, but hosting LW content on Arbital might just be amazing. In particular, I’d like some kind of way of keeping track of networks of related claims with community ratings and counter-claims clearly visible.
Sound correct to me. Also, I think it’s much easier to start / contribute to a page on Wikipedia. Arbital’s pages were trying to be educational and readable, which, I think is a higher bar.
Wikipedia can often trigger a “this is wrong on the internet” reflex that gets people involved.
Yeah, I don’t really understand how Wikipedia got to where it is today. I think it is mostly edited by people very different from me; if I had to take a wild stab, much more autistic (and bless them for that, to be clear).
When I contributed a little in the early days I think it was driven by desire to promote the things I was interested in (mostly video games this case). I’d guess the same goes for historians etc writing the more serious articles. It helped that standards for things like NPOV and citations were a lot lower back then—I don’t think the project would have gotten far if everything had to be cited up the wazoo like it is now. (Now that Wikipedia is established as being important people are willing to put a bit more work in).
Although I’m not autistic as such I do suspect there’s a connection between the above and the stereotypical autistic desire to excessively talk about one’s topic of obsessive interest.