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trimeta comments on Proposal: Use the Wiki for Concepts - Less Wrong
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As a person who's completely obsessed with the TV Tropes wiki (and has only just recently started to peruse this site), I applaud any efforts to apply that model to furthering the cause of rationality. One problem I foresee, however, is hinted at with your comment that "the trope explanation itself will be a short bite of joy" and that this promotes opening up new tabs to acquire said bite of joy. If you're trying to compare the postings themselves to the trope descriptions and the comment threads to the references, the analogy breaks down due to the length of the posts. It's simply not practical to whittle down the post lengths such that one could reasonably say "I'll open a couple more of these, I'm sure it won't add too much time to my browsing session." This sort of multiplicative effect might come into play on the LW wiki, but I fear it cannot drive traffic back here to the degree you would hope.
You should try the tree-style tabs Firefox extension, which makes it practical to manipulate browser windows with 50-100 open tabs at a time. It takes about a day of getting used to, after which time you'll wonder how you got along without it.
Thinking about it now, I realize that TVTropes was the website that convinced me I needed that functionality.
You should've seen my browser windows when I first discovered OB a year and a half ago.
Two or three weeks of continuous reading, reading, reading in awe.
Martin
I have always at least a couple of Eliezer's OB posts on my pda. Today I went through some hitherto underexplored sections of OB -- meaning I only read them once -- and I have now dozens of posts on my trusty old Acer N30.
The idea is that the wiki summary provides the short bite of joy. The blog post linked is a long bite of joy, analogous to the references and lists in TV Tropes. The comment thread... has no real analogue, it's a whole different sort of time sink. :)
I don't understand why the wiki shouldn't be both, a short summary followed by a longer article, maybe with additional stress on the short summaries being really, really stand-alone. When article is already in good health elsewhere, then wiki won't contain a longer article, but only because it's not needed. In other cases, shoot away. The difference from TV Tropes is that shows can't be themselves edited and incrementally improved on the wiki.
A hypothesis: are you talking about TV Tropes having two kinds of articles, short ones and long ones, linking to each other, analogizing short articles with LW Wiki, and long articles with LW Blog?
This is a good point. One of the features of TVTropes (helped by its wiki format) is that you can get a short explanation of any linked concept right at the top of the page. This is a good argument for why the wiki is what one should link to first, instead of the post explaining it on LW. Should wiki articles start with a short, definition-like summary?
ETA: I agree with Vladimir_Nesov below. Abstracts are key.
Ideally, long blog posts should also start with an abstract, like any other publication, and contain a systematic review of related material in one of the sections.
It was the whole point of the above proposal that wiki articles are the short, definition-like summary and the blog posts are the long, original arguments.
Then I disagree. A wiki is good because it can be rewritten and improved upon incrementally, but the blog posts should not be changed after the comments have started since they're in a sense historical. If we have a standard argument in favor of something, it should go on the wiki, even if it hasn't been so clearly or succinctly stated elsewhere.
Or maybe we're just assuming different values for 'short' and 'long'.