SoullessAutomaton comments on Wiki.lesswrong.com Is Live - Less Wrong

9 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 May 2009 05:17AM

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Comment author: SoullessAutomaton 07 May 2009 12:08:54AM 0 points [-]

One possible reason for favoring the wiki, at least in the long run: a well-structured wiki is more discoverable and accessible. The huge branching tree of your OB posts is daunting enough; the entire past corpus of LW is rapidly going to become even more intimidating for lacking a single author with consistent style and themes. Imagine LW at roughly the same rate of content generation and a slowly expanding user base, three years from now. Where would someone even start?

Distilling the ideas into a manageable synthesis of what's been discussed in multiple posts, with extensive inter-linking, terms defined, and links to relevant posts would be far more useful for a newcomer than just minimal definitions with links to posts.

To use an academic analogy, if LW posts are journal articles, the wiki ought to be a textbook.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 07 May 2009 12:14:30AM 1 point [-]

We just need better scholarship in the LW posts themselves, with review articles and tutorial articles, and possibly thematic workshops.