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Mirzhan_Irkegulov comments on LessWrong 2.0 - Less Wrong
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Something seems wrong to me about the "Welcoming Committee / Rationality Materials" section in the OP. I mean, if we imagine someone arriving in Rationalistan as a result of a link in the HPMOR author's notes or something of the kind and getting intimidated by how much stuff there is and/or how little they feel they know ... whyever would what they then need look like Wikipedia? Wikipedia is terrific and I am a huge fan, but it's not great at providing "social reinforcement" and "other people to ask questions of".
Vaniver's other suggestion for something that would serve this need better than a Redditalike is Stack Overflow. That's a better fit, but the SO model works best where what people need is answers to specific questions that have clear-cut answers. Surely that's not the situation of someone newly arriving in Rationalistan. Their questions are going to be more like "WTF is all this?" or "I think I need to reevaluate how I think about lots of important questions but I barely know where to start; what shall I do?". Stack Overflow itself (and I think most of its offshoots) strongly discourages that sort of open-ended question on the grounds that that's not what SO is good at.
The biggest weakness of Less Wrong as a welcoming committee isn't that it's a forum rather than an encyclopaedia or a Q&A site; I think a forum is the Right Thing for that purpose. The biggest weakness is the whole "ghost town of unquiet spirits" thing -- which I think is an unkind exaggeration but it's hard to deny has some truth to it. LW would make a better welcoming committee if it were livelier and more impressive, and it won't gain those attributes as a welcoming committee.
Having said that, I agree that there's a place for something Wikipedia-like. The LW wiki was meant to be that, but it's never had a great deal of participation. I have no idea what could be done to change that. People contribute to things to benefit others, or to benefit themselves. Editing a wiki is never going to bring much personal gain, and when all the material that would go into the wiki is already out there in other forms (e.g., the Sequences) it's hard to see that the benefit is going to be big enough to excite people doing it altruistically.
While I'm not against LW wiki itself (it already exists, for starters), I'm very much against making LW “something like a wiki”, because I'm >50% confident it will fail. I flinched when I read “community-maintained wiki pages with explanations and links” in the original post, because “community-maintained wiki” are almost universally dead before reaching maturity.
Michael Snoyman wrote a small article on why people are willing to contribute to free software documentation via pull requests, but not via wiki edits. I wholeheartedly recommend everyone to read the article, but the gist is as follows.
For a wiki:
For documentation that is improved through pull requests:
Why LW-as-a-wiki would discourage contributing (writing wiki-like articles)? Of all wikis I remember, the only successful are Wikipedia and very narrow-focused wikis (e.g. UESP for The Elder Scrolls or Ring of Brodgar for Haven and Hearth video games). In both cases they are thriving because there are very clear expectations of what a final article is supposed to look like.
LW is far away from being definitive canonical reference, which is good. Every rationality-relevant topic could be explained from different perspectives, so I would hate there to be the one definitive article on, say, control theory.
Then you'd have all the Wikipedia problems: edit wars, deletionism, constant arguing over the rules and article layout, slowly corrupting powers of wiki moderators, censorship. On a wiki everything is supposed to be canonical, so much effort will be wasted on arguing over canonical definitions and phrasings, or on referencing more and more rules and guidelines. Wiki model has bad incentives: wins the one, who is more stubborn.
LW-as-a-wiki would stagnate very quickly, as there will be huge psychological and social obstacles for people to contribute. I will go into these obstacles in greater detail in follow-up comments. For now I want to say that we should analyze what is wrong with the wiki model from cognitive psychology and science of human motivation perspective, and see how we can do better.
The most important revolutionary idea behind LW (and more specifically lukeprog era LW) is that science is a superweapon, and if diligently learn relevant science and then try to fix the problem, you can outdo your competitors by a large margin (see also: beating the averages). So maybe we should figure out psychology of motivation, incentives for contributing, that kinds of things, before patching LW codebase. Maybe LW should be a community blog, a Reddit-style site, a wiki; or maybe it should be something completely different.