The purpose of the LW wiki is being confused with the purpose of LW, and I fear this is hurting wiki adoption.
When I tell people what LW is, I tell them “it’s a community that grew up around some very good blog posts”. The blog posts espouse a specific worldview which is shared among the community.
But the LW wiki is supposed to be (as I understand it) a place where people explain and combine academic work in certain fields.
The people who you want to be doing academic work are probably mostly not part of the community, and lots of community members don’t have the expertise or interest to do the academic work.
I’m not sure LW can “be both”. It seems like one identity or another will always dominate. The LW wiki needs its own identity, and its own community norms, and it probably shouldn’t import them from LW community, because you’ll turn off a substantial number of the types of people you need in order to make a wiki successful.
So, the suggestion is to separate the LW wiki identity from the LW community. Probably not calling the wiki Less Wrong at all.
But the LW wiki is supposed to be (as I understand it) a place where people explain and combine academic work in certain fields.
The original purpose of the wiki was to describe the state of discussion or consensus on the blog. SingInst’s recent edits (this year) might have shifted that a bit by adding some less LW-specific content to the wiki.
From the wiki’s User Guide (linked from the sidebar on all pages):
The default workflow for putting content on this wiki is as follows:
Idea for posting → write post on the blog
Notice something generally accepted on LW without a wiki page → write wiki page
Agree strongly with this. Just because the wiki model is publicly editable does not mean that everyone should make significant contributions. (See Wikipedia on being bold and “minor edits”.) Expertise is still a requirement (arguably even more so than with most posts in Main), especially with scholarly or advanced topics such as some of the ones linked in the OP at first glance.
The purpose of the LW wiki is being confused with the purpose of LW, and I fear this is hurting wiki adoption.
When I tell people what LW is, I tell them “it’s a community that grew up around some very good blog posts”. The blog posts espouse a specific worldview which is shared among the community.
But the LW wiki is supposed to be (as I understand it) a place where people explain and combine academic work in certain fields.
The people who you want to be doing academic work are probably mostly not part of the community, and lots of community members don’t have the expertise or interest to do the academic work.
I’m not sure LW can “be both”. It seems like one identity or another will always dominate. The LW wiki needs its own identity, and its own community norms, and it probably shouldn’t import them from LW community, because you’ll turn off a substantial number of the types of people you need in order to make a wiki successful.
So, the suggestion is to separate the LW wiki identity from the LW community. Probably not calling the wiki Less Wrong at all.
The original purpose of the wiki was to describe the state of discussion or consensus on the blog. SingInst’s recent edits (this year) might have shifted that a bit by adding some less LW-specific content to the wiki.
From the wiki’s User Guide (linked from the sidebar on all pages):
Agree strongly with this. Just because the wiki model is publicly editable does not mean that everyone should make significant contributions. (See Wikipedia on being bold and “minor edits”.) Expertise is still a requirement (arguably even more so than with most posts in Main), especially with scholarly or advanced topics such as some of the ones linked in the OP at first glance.