Beginning with the name, “Tags”, I don’t see this system as a wiki. I see it as a tags system whose main purpose is to surface related articles; and occasionally a tag has an explanation attached. Unfortunately, article surfacing doesn’t work well because a) articles are tagged inconsistently[1]; and b) articles are sorted by how highly their tag is upvoted, which I find unintuitive behavior with unintuitive sorting results.
Anyway, if I look at the Tags system for a minute as if it was Wikipedia, here’s what I see:
On Wikipedia, one wiki page leads to either other wiki pages or external links. In the LW Tags pages, there’s a weird separation between linking to other tags pages vs. linking to LW posts vs. the list of tagged LW posts at the bottom. Because of this, there’s no LW equivalent to wiki rabbit hole browsing.
Any tag which exceeds one page’s worth of text (like this one) hides that text behind a “Read more” button. That’s not the behavior you’d expect to see if the Tags explanations were meant to be read.
LW has a strong authorship focus; for any normal post I know exactly who is responsible for what part of the text: namely, the author is responsible for everything. Whereas in the Tags system, I just noticed that the Tags pages do indicate who is responsible for which edits, but I still don’t have nearly the same trust in the authoritativeness or cohesiveness of the overall content as I would for a normal post.
Also, normal LW posts have comments at the bottom; tags pages have a discussion section you have to click into, which I expect few people to do.
From what I can tell, there’s no curation of tags pages, to indicate whether a tags page is accurate and/or worth reading. The rest of LW promotes posts if they have high karma, but a voting system seems ill-suited for content which is regularly edited. Imagine if curated tags pages appeared in the LW Recommended section or in the main feed.
Anyway, LW contains way way way too much text for anyone to read everything, so I consider the lack of discoverability and promotion of good tags reason enough that I basically never bother with them.
Due to lack of discoverability of Tags pages, I’d have to seek tags out intentionally, but the big Tags page is intimidating and doesn’t encourage exploration and rabbit hole browsing in the way the Wikipedia homepage does.
All this taken together means that, if I want to know what a concept like “Calibration” is, my first impulse is not to check the tags page, but to look for high-karma LW posts which answer this question. So I hardly ever read the contents of Tags pages.
Addendum: Apparently parts of the old LW1.0 wiki were imported as untaggable “wiki” pages (basically just tags with an internal checkbox which prevents them from being associated with any posts). Example page.
These pages are not visible on the Concepts (All Tags) page, either, except for one link at the top which mentions this import process. The wiki pages can be found via the search, though. I’m not sure whether they can be reached or found anywhere, otherwise.
So that’s one more point in favor of Tags being implemented almost entirely as a tags system, and barely as a wiki system.
… apparently it’s not a thing, sorry, I thought I was using the correct term and I wasn’t. I’ve edited the OP. I meant e.g. “falling in a Wiki rabbit hole”: reading a Wiki article, then following links to another Wiki article, and so on until you’ve spent a lot of time on the Wiki and end up somewhere very different than you started.
While I’ll withhold judgment on whether it’s good or bad that this happens, when it does happen it significantly increases wiki usage. And because not all tags and posts on LW are cross-linked like a Wiki, this kind of rabbit hole browsing can’t happen in the same way.
Beginning with the name, “Tags”, I don’t see this system as a wiki. I see it as a tags system whose main purpose is to surface related articles; and occasionally a tag has an explanation attached. Unfortunately, article surfacing doesn’t work well because a) articles are tagged inconsistently[1]; and b) articles are sorted by how highly their tag is upvoted, which I find unintuitive behavior with unintuitive sorting results.
Anyway, if I look at the Tags system for a minute as if it was Wikipedia, here’s what I see:
On Wikipedia, one wiki page leads to either other wiki pages or external links. In the LW Tags pages, there’s a weird separation between linking to other tags pages vs. linking to LW posts vs. the list of tagged LW posts at the bottom. Because of this, there’s no LW equivalent to wiki rabbit hole browsing.
Any tag which exceeds one page’s worth of text (like this one) hides that text behind a “Read more” button. That’s not the behavior you’d expect to see if the Tags explanations were meant to be read.
LW has a strong authorship focus; for any normal post I know exactly who is responsible for what part of the text: namely, the author is responsible for everything. Whereas in the Tags system, I just noticed that the Tags pages do indicate who is responsible for which edits, but I still don’t have nearly the same trust in the authoritativeness or cohesiveness of the overall content as I would for a normal post.
Also, normal LW posts have comments at the bottom; tags pages have a discussion section you have to click into, which I expect few people to do.
From what I can tell, there’s no curation of tags pages, to indicate whether a tags page is accurate and/or worth reading. The rest of LW promotes posts if they have high karma, but a voting system seems ill-suited for content which is regularly edited. Imagine if curated tags pages appeared in the LW Recommended section or in the main feed.
Anyway, LW contains way way way too much text for anyone to read everything, so I consider the lack of discoverability and promotion of good tags reason enough that I basically never bother with them.
Due to lack of discoverability of Tags pages, I’d have to seek tags out intentionally, but the big Tags page is intimidating and doesn’t encourage exploration and rabbit hole browsing in the way the Wikipedia homepage does.
All this taken together means that, if I want to know what a concept like “Calibration” is, my first impulse is not to check the tags page, but to look for high-karma LW posts which answer this question. So I hardly ever read the contents of Tags pages.
Tagging of new and existing LW posts is an obvious candidate to benefit from AI assistance; I vaguely recall seeing someone already looking into that.
Addendum: Apparently parts of the old LW1.0 wiki were imported as untaggable “wiki” pages (basically just tags with an internal checkbox which prevents them from being associated with any posts). Example page.
These pages are not visible on the Concepts (All Tags) page, either, except for one link at the top which mentions this import process. The wiki pages can be found via the search, though. I’m not sure whether they can be reached or found anywhere, otherwise.
So that’s one more point in favor of Tags being implemented almost entirely as a tags system, and barely as a wiki system.
What is wiki-crawling?
… apparently it’s not a thing, sorry, I thought I was using the correct term and I wasn’t. I’ve edited the OP. I meant e.g. “falling in a Wiki rabbit hole”: reading a Wiki article, then following links to another Wiki article, and so on until you’ve spent a lot of time on the Wiki and end up somewhere very different than you started.
While I’ll withhold judgment on whether it’s good or bad that this happens, when it does happen it significantly increases wiki usage. And because not all tags and posts on LW are cross-linked like a Wiki, this kind of rabbit hole browsing can’t happen in the same way.