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ESRogs comments on Low-hanging fruit: improving wikipedia entries - Less Wrong
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I was honestly surprised to learn that there's no overarching Altruism or Charity or Humanitarianism WikiProject. Seems like the most obvious void LWers can fill, the best place to put resources into developing GAs and FAs, a useful way to draw some Wikipedians (who already tend to be unorthodox altruists) to Effective Altruism, and a good framing mechanism for drumming up interest and goodwill in general.
If enough LWers want to get involved with Glacian's Wikipedia PR project, and enough agree that a WikiProject:Altruism is a useful way of organizing our collaboration, I'd propose that we have several editorial Task Forces for topics that aren't currently the focus of any group:
We could also regularly team up with existing WikiProjects that already cover areas that would have been natural Task Forces for WP:Altruism, building ties to those Wikipedians and infusing their projects with more energy, direction, and humanpower:
What are GAs and FAs?
FAs = Featured Articles, the most heavily vetted, consistently high-quality, comprehensive articles on Wikipedia. An FA is a candidate for appearing, once only and for a single day, on the main page of Wikipedia. Which is an excellent way to advertise a topic you like. You also literally get a gold star to commemorate the success.
GA = Good Article. A bronze medal for articles that are pretty good, but not up to FA snuff. Kind of a silly honor, but a good benchmark to shoot for if you just want to polish things up without doing lots of new research and repeated rounds of vetting. Or if you want a waystation before approaching FA. WikiProjects also keep tabs on the general quality of articles in their scope at lower levels.
Ah, thanks!
Before going for an FA, keep in mind that FA is very rarely granted, the process is absurdly nitpicking, and it's mostly given to people who've already earned FAs or have participated in the process for a long time. I tried going for an FA for one or two of my best-researched articles, and the process was so frustrating that I never tried again. And this was back in 2008 or so, when the process was more reasonable.
(GA isn't too great any more compared to its original form, but it's a lot more doable.)
I'm reading through the names of the FA's on Wikipedia.
It looks as though the FA's are heavily represented by highly regional events like hurricanes, highly local historical places, and very specific things. I'd like to hazard a guess that at least half of all FA's are written by people with a close personal connection or hobby with the subject.
The mathematics section is looking pretty empty, as is the computing section. Maybe they'd like another article for those?
Note that those are also highly delineated and uncontroversial topics, which means that they can pass FAs easily. FA isn't so much about 'is this a great article?' but 'can we find any excuse to not make this an FA?'; hence, crabbed uninteresting topics. Hurricanes aren't very controversial.
So articles on those subjects aren't especially good?
They're good in a very stereotypical, narrow, uncontroversial, lowest-common-denominator sort of way.
Good articles and featured articles, respectively. Part of the Wikipedia system for grading article quality.