hirvinen comments on A Scholarly AI Risk Wiki - Less Wrong

22 Post author: lukeprog 25 May 2012 08:53PM

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Comment author: hirvinen 23 October 2012 02:32:40PM 0 points [-]

The price tag of the wiki itself sounds too high: If 1920 hours of SI staff costs USD 48000, that's USD 25/h. If hosting and maintenance is 500 / month(should be much less), over 24 months that would leave USD 18k to design and development, and at SI staff rates that would be 720 hours of work, which sounds waaay too much for setting up a relatively simple(?) wiki site

Comment author: DaFranker 25 October 2012 09:32:34PM *  1 point [-]

You seem to be vastly underestimating the time-cost of running a successful, pertinent, engaging, active and informative online community that isn't held together by a starting group of close friends or partners who have fun doing a particular activity together.

For a bit of practical grounding, consider that simple "clan" (or "guild" or whatever other term they pick) websites for online gaming communities that somehow manage to go above 100 members, a paltry number compared to what I believe is the target size of userbase of this wiki, often require at least three or four active administrators who each put in at least 5 hours of activity per week in order to keep things running smoothly, prevent mass exodus, prevent drama and discord, etc.

The goal isn't just to make a wiki website and then leave it there, hoping that people will come visit and contribute. The goal is to go from a bunch of low-profile scholarly stuff to the scientific AI risk version of TV Tropes, with a proportional user base to the corresponding target populations.

Comment author: gwern 25 October 2012 10:44:03PM 0 points [-]

FWIW, I estimate that I spend 5-15 minutes every day dealing with spam on the existing LessWrong wiki and dealing with collateral damage from autoblocks, which would be ~3 hours a month; I don't even try to review edits by regular users. That doesn't seem to be included in your estimate of maintenance cost.

Comment author: hirvinen 14 November 2012 09:56:47AM 0 points [-]
  • 1,920 hours of SI staff time (80 hrs/week for 24 months). This comes out to about $48,000, depending on who is putting in these hours.
  • $384,000 paid to remote researchers and writers ($16,000/mo for 24 months; our remote researchers generally work part-time, and are relatively inexpensive).
  • $30,000 for wiki design, development, hosting costs
  • Dealing with spam shouldn't be counted under "design, development and hosting".
  • The first item establishes SIAI staff time cost at 25 $ / h. If the (virtual) server itself, bandwidth and technical expert maintenance is 500 $ / month, that still leaves 720 hours of SIAI staff-priced work in the "design, development and hosting" budget.
  • If we roughly quadruple your time estimate to 3 hours per week to combat spam, then that still leaves 720 hours - 2 years * 52 weeks * 3 hours/week = 408 hours, which still seems excessive for "design, development and hosting" considering that we have a lot of nice relatively easily customisable wiki software available for free.
Comment author: gwern 14 November 2012 04:15:47PM 0 points [-]

Dealing with spam needs to be counted somehow for an open wiki, and if you go to closed wiki, then that needs to be taken into account while reducing the expected benefits from it...

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