taw comments on Beware Trivial Inconveniences - Less Wrong

90 Post author: Yvain 06 May 2009 10:04PM

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Comment author: gwern 07 May 2009 01:15:26AM *  19 points [-]

'I was reminded of this recently by Eliezer's Less Wrong Progress Report. He mentioned how surprised he was that so many people were posting so much stuff on Less Wrong, when very few people had ever taken advantage of Overcoming Bias' policy of accepting contributions if you emailed them to a moderator and the moderator approved. Apparently all us folk brimming with ideas for posts didn't want to deal with the aggravation.'

I don't really have a point here, but this shouldn't really be surprising at all, not at this moment in time.

I mean, has anyone here not used Wikipedia? (I'd also wager even odds that >=90% of you have edited WP at some point.)

EDIT: Looking back, it seems to me that what would not be surprising is, upon observing LW suddenly skyrocketing in contributors & contributed material, noticing that the sudden increase comes after a loosening of submission guidelines. When a site skyrockets, it's for one of a few reasons: being linked by a major site like Slashdot, for example. Loosening submission guidelines is one of those few reasons.

But that's not to say that Eliezer should have confidently expected a sudden increase just because he loosened submission criteria; the default prediction should have been that LW would continue on much as OB had been going. Lots of wikis never go anywhere, even if they let anyone edit.

Comment author: taw 07 May 2009 02:47:49PM 9 points [-]

Oh Wikipedia - that reminds me - in late 1990s before Wikipedia there was "Free Online Dictionary of Computing". The main difference between two was that you needed to email the moderators to get your changes included. The results were even more extreme than OB vs LW.

Comment author: gwern 07 May 2009 08:30:58PM 4 points [-]

FOLDOC was the basis of a number of entries I've worked on. I had no idea that it was participation based! I guess that explains why the entries were so scrawny...

Comment author: David_Gerard 23 May 2012 12:57:58PM *  6 points [-]

When the FOLDOC maintainer saw Wikipedia, he promptly gave up and said "use my stuff, you're already doing better" - this is why he released it under GFDL, so WIkipedia could just take it.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 May 2012 07:47:04PM 3 points [-]

Even after normalizing by the total number of visitors to FOLDOC and the total number of visitors to Wikipedia respectively?

Comment author: taw 23 May 2012 12:20:09PM 6 points [-]

Wikipedia didn't get hundreds of millions of visitors until after it got so big.

I know it's hard to believe, but when we started in 2001, it was a very tiny very obscure website people were commonly making fun of, and we were excited with any coverage we could get (and getting omg slashdotted - that was like news of the month).