1) Some sort of “example-pedia” where, in addition to some sort of glossary, we’re able crowd-source examples of the concepts to build upon understanding. I think examples continue to be in short supply, and that’s a large understanding gap, especially when we deal with concepts unfamiliar to most people.
2) Something similar to Arbital’s hover-definitions, or a real-time searchable glossary that’s easily available.
I think the above two things could be very useful features, given the large swath of topics we like to discuss, from cognitive psych to decision theory, to help people more invested in one area more easily swap to reading stuff in another area.
1) I think this would be great, but is also really hard. I feel like you would need to build a whole wiki-structure with conflict resolution and moderation norms and collaborative editing features to achieve that kind of thing. But who knows, there might be an elegant and simple implementation that would work that I haven’t thought of.
2) Arbital-style greenlinks are in the works and should definitely exist. For now they would only do the summary and glossary thing when you link to LW posts, but we can probably come up with a way of crowdsourcing more definitions of stuff without needing to create whole posts for it. Open to design suggestions here.
1) I think this would be great, but is also really hard. I feel like you would need to build a whole wiki-structure with conflict resolution and moderation norms and collaborative editing features to achieve that kind of thing. But who knows, there might be an elegant and simple implementation that would work that I haven’t thought of.
I think the wiki is an integral feature of LW, such that if the new site lacks a Wiki, I’ll resist moving to the new site.
We are planning to leave the wiki up, and probably restyle it at some point, so it will not be gone. User accounts will no longer be shared though, for the foreseeable future, which I don’t think will be too much of an issue.
But I don’t yet have a model of how to make the wiki in general work well. The current wiki is definitely useful, but I feel that it’s main use has been the creation of sequences and collections of posts, which is now integrated more deeply into the site via the sequences functionality.
The wiki is also useful for defining basic concepts used by this community, and linking to them in posts and comments when you think some of your readers might not be familiar with them. It might also be helpful for outreach, for example our wiki page for decision theory shows up in the first page of Google results for “decision theory”.
This does update me towards the wiki being important. I just pinged Malo on whether I can get access to the LessWrong wiki analytics, so that I can look a bit more into this.
The easiest method for 1, I think, would just to have a section under every item in the glossary called “Examples” and trust the community to put in good ones and delete bad ones.
For 2, I was thinking about something like a page running Algolia instant search, that would quickly find the term you want, bolded, with it’s accompanying definition after it, dictionary-esque.
Two things I’d like to see:
1) Some sort of “example-pedia” where, in addition to some sort of glossary, we’re able crowd-source examples of the concepts to build upon understanding. I think examples continue to be in short supply, and that’s a large understanding gap, especially when we deal with concepts unfamiliar to most people.
2) Something similar to Arbital’s hover-definitions, or a real-time searchable glossary that’s easily available.
I think the above two things could be very useful features, given the large swath of topics we like to discuss, from cognitive psych to decision theory, to help people more invested in one area more easily swap to reading stuff in another area.
1) I think this would be great, but is also really hard. I feel like you would need to build a whole wiki-structure with conflict resolution and moderation norms and collaborative editing features to achieve that kind of thing. But who knows, there might be an elegant and simple implementation that would work that I haven’t thought of.
2) Arbital-style greenlinks are in the works and should definitely exist. For now they would only do the summary and glossary thing when you link to LW posts, but we can probably come up with a way of crowdsourcing more definitions of stuff without needing to create whole posts for it. Open to design suggestions here.
I think the wiki is an integral feature of LW, such that if the new site lacks a Wiki, I’ll resist moving to the new site.
We are planning to leave the wiki up, and probably restyle it at some point, so it will not be gone. User accounts will no longer be shared though, for the foreseeable future, which I don’t think will be too much of an issue.
But I don’t yet have a model of how to make the wiki in general work well. The current wiki is definitely useful, but I feel that it’s main use has been the creation of sequences and collections of posts, which is now integrated more deeply into the site via the sequences functionality.
The wiki is also useful for defining basic concepts used by this community, and linking to them in posts and comments when you think some of your readers might not be familiar with them. It might also be helpful for outreach, for example our wiki page for decision theory shows up in the first page of Google results for “decision theory”.
Oh, that’s cool! I didn’t know that.
This does update me towards the wiki being important. I just pinged Malo on whether I can get access to the LessWrong wiki analytics, so that I can look a bit more into this.
Several people have suggested pmwiki; perhaps you should give it a try?
The easiest method for 1, I think, would just to have a section under every item in the glossary called “Examples” and trust the community to put in good ones and delete bad ones.
For 2, I was thinking about something like a page running Algolia instant search, that would quickly find the term you want, bolded, with it’s accompanying definition after it, dictionary-esque.
Doesn’t the wiki already achieve (1) to a satisfactory level?
I support (2).