Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Proposal: Use the Wiki for Concepts - Less Wrong

36 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 April 2009 05:21AM

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Comment author: trimeta 22 April 2009 08:24:11AM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 April 2009 06:20:56PM 1 point [-]

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. :)

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 22 April 2009 06:38:49PM *  1 point [-]

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?