Note by Nathan Young:
This is a deliberate bastardisation and subversion of how the wiki is used
In order that people don’t think I’m a defector, I’m making clear what I’m doing as I’m doing it. Tell me what you think
Anyone should still edit this document as if it were theirs
The wiki would be better if it had a range of features I discuss below
If you disagree, edit it! Sometimes edit wars are good
Wiki features and how valuable they would be
“New Wiki Page” in the dropdown menu under “New Shortform”
Every wiki has karma, to signal what people think of it
Docs-like comments on wikis
It would make it much cleaner to write things I intend to work on in future.
The tech exists
Double bracket search and tagging
When you use [[, it opens up a search window to all Lesswrong pages. You type in what you want to reference. If there isn’t one. it creates it eg [[Solipsism]]
Disputed changes sit beside text, like comments
A process for requesting a number → getting an accurate forecast
There is a description in the text
A user flags it for quantification
Other users collaboratively write a forecasting question
Users give estimates, weighted by LW karma score (I hate this but it would be better than nothing, hard to abuse etc)
Ideally, eventually this gets replaced by a manifold market or similar
Toggle open close sections
Gwern-style floating windows which appear when you hover over text in Lesswrong
Embeddable manifold markets
Embeddable squiggle estimation
Taking variables from manifold markets and squiggle and displaying them within the text
Some pages I have edited to be the style of what I think should be all pages
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/effective-altruism
It now has a section on funding use, impact and criticims
With a little more work I think it could be the best single page introduction to EA
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/forecasting-and-prediction
A better overview of the topic
oh this is great, agreed on all points.
(but what if they just embed logseq)I generally disagree with the idea that fancy widgets and more processes are the main thing keeping the LW wiki from being good. I think the main problem is that not a lot of people are currently contributing to it.
The things that discourage me from contributing more look like:
-There are a lot of pages. If there are 700 bad pages and I write one really good page, there are still 699 bad pages.
-I don’t have a good sense of which pages are most important. If I put a bunch of effort into a particular page, is that one that people are going to care about?
-I don’t get much feedback about whether anyone saw the page after I edited it—karma for edits basically just comes from the tag dashboard and the frontpage activity feed.
So the improvements I would look for would be like:
-Expose view counts for wiki pages somewhere.
-Some sort of bat-signal on the tag dashboard for if a page is getting a lot of views but still has a bunch of TODO flags set.
-Big high-quality wiki page rewrites get promoted to frontpage or something.
-Someone of authority actually goes through and sets the “High Priority” flag on, say, 20 pages that they know are important and neglected.
-Some sort of event or bounty to drive more participation.
Nathan, I assume this is posted also on the EA Forum?
No, they don’t let me post to their wiki like this and I haven’t had enough success to publicise it yet.