Do you use the EA Wiki?

By Nathan Young @ 2022-01-04T15:40 (+11)

Do you use the EA wiki? The one on this forum. If so, how do you use it?

Also, what do you like about it? What could be improved?

Pablo @ 2022-01-04T16:03 (+27)

Not an answer to your question, but it may answer or address some of your underlying questions or concerns:

EA Funds recently extended funding for my work on the EA Wiki, but the current plan is to focus more on experimentation and less on content creation. Currently, I'm exploring the possibility of launching a more ambitious encyclopedia of effective altruism following roughly the model of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, with authoritative, comprehensive, and up-to-date articles on core EA concepts and topics commissioned to experts from both academia and the broader EA community. It is unclear, at this stage, whether the Wiki should be kept alongside this other reference work, or whether it should be integrated with it in some form. I would greatly appreciate critical or constructive feedback on this idea, either as a comment to this answer or sent to me privately at firstname@lastname.com (or anonymously).

Nathan Young @ 2022-01-04T18:29 (+2)

Yeah it's my strong view that if the wiki is set up right, the content should more or less create itself. That the wiki isn't useful suggests that people don't feel comfortable adding stuff to it.

Personally, I'd like ways to integrate it more with posts and encourage poeple to correct errors - perhaps people can tag phrases in posts with links to the wiki and then people would hover over those links to understand the concepts. When that's happening, people would find and correct errors as they saw them.

casebash @ 2022-01-04T17:33 (+2)

Well even if you implement that model I still think it'd be important to keep tags and for those tags to be able to have descriptions.

Pablo @ 2022-01-04T18:12 (+2)

Yes, agreed. One model would be for tags to have content that corresponds to a glossary rather than an encyclopedia. In this model, each tag would be associated with a concise definition or description of the tag, spanning 1–3 sentences, and perhaps also a short list of references for further reading. Then there would also be SEP-style encyclopedia articles corresponding to some of these tags, but it's unclear how the two should be integrated, or whether they should be integrated at all.

Khorton @ 2022-01-04T16:54 (+22)

Is the Wiki what you get to if you click through on one of the tags? I like that it provides an overview of the topic and a list of all posts on that topic

Nathan Young @ 2022-01-04T22:58 (+2)

Yes. Though I think it might be intended to be more than that.

Nathan Young @ 2022-01-04T15:40 (+19)

Yes.

Nathan Young @ 2022-01-04T15:41 (+11)

Nathan Young @ 2022-01-04T22:59 (+4)

I wish I wanted to use it like I use wikipedia - I wish I trusted it to be a broad summary of the articles beneath the tag, rather than a quick overview.

Nathan Young @ 2022-01-04T15:42 (+4)

I like that we have a wiki attached to one of the biggest EA sites.