Wiki.lesswrong.com Is Live
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/ is now live, for all our Wiki needs. The previous Wikia wiki has been imported. Knock yourself out on linking there from comments or blog posts (yes, you will have to link manually, there is no CamelCase convention yet on the blog and comments).
See here for proposed wiki usage guidelines - note that these do not yet seem to appear in the Wiki itself, hint hint.
Proposal: Use the Wiki for Concepts
So... the longer I think about this Wiki thing, the more it seems like a really good idea - a missing piece falling into place.
Here's my proposal, which I turn over to this, the larger community that suggested the Wiki in the first place:
The Wiki should consist mainly of short concept introductions plus links to longer posts, rather than original writing. Original writing goes in a post on Less Wrong, which may get voted up and down, or commented on; and this post should reference previous work by linking to the Wiki rather than other posts, to the extent that the concepts referred to can be given short summaries. The intent is to set up a resonance that bounces back and forth between the Wiki (short concept summaries that can be read standalone, and links to more info for in-depth exploration) and the posts (which make the actual arguments and do the actual analyses).
My role model here is TV Tropes, which manages to be, shall we say, really explorable, because of the resonance between the tropes, and the shows/events in which those tropes occur, and the other tropes that occur in those shows/events. And furthermore, you know that the trope explanation itself will be a short bite of joy, and that reading the further references is optional.
Weekly Wiki Workshop and suggested articles
Now 12 days old, LWiki is still growing. Most of the articles are stubs, but progress is being made. Eliezer confirmed that an official wiki hosted on LW is eventually coming, so be careful about linking to the wiki, but don't let that deter you from adding content.
Standards and conventions are still being hashed out, so jump in now if you want to contribute. There is broad consensus that articles should primarily defer to existing work, either on OB/LW or Wikipedia. However, even quick summaries and links to blog posts can look very different depending on the subject. For example, contrast Rationality as Martial Art and Bias. The former is short and to the point, whereas the latter annotates each link. The latter also makes for much more interesting reading, in my opinion.
Ok, then where do we go from here? The two main avenues of development are creating stubs and then fleshing them out with content. For the first, please suggest any topics, concepts, established phrases, acronyms, techniques, or jargon in this thread that you can think of, and I will be happy to add them as new articles. Or, better yet, feel free to add them yourself.
For the second, I suggest we have a weekly thread that designates one topic for our community to throw its collective intelligence at. That way, we can get all the relevant discussion about the content of an article out at once. For this inaugural Weekly Wiki Workshop, I'm going to suggest the Rationality article.
So, what articles could the wiki use? What should the Rationality article look like?
What isn't the wiki for?
The new wiki is off to a flying start - it's less than 15 hours old, and already it has over 20 articles and five authors. It's probably about time we worked out what it was for.
I created it because as things stand, I can't point my friends to Less Wrong and say "come and learn about rationality and take part in these fascinating and potentially important discussions!" The discussions we have here assume years of reading Overcoming Bias and close attention to what's been said there and here; it must be practically impenetrable to newcomers. So for me the primary goal is simply to provide a glossary, to give newcomers a fighting chance of understanding what on Earth we are talking about and why. I think it can do more than that, but before I come to that, let me say a little about what I think it's not for.
The way I would currently like to see it, the wiki is not there to duplicate what is already done elsewhere. So it's not a place for discussion - that's what this site is for, and the features to support discussion here are far stronger than they are there, what with voting, threading and so forth. By the same token, it's not a place to advance your ideas - it's better to do that here, where people can comment on them and where it's clearly tagged as the work of one author rather than some sort of collective conclusion.
I'd like to avoid duplication in other areas, too. Anything that can go in Wikipedia instead of our wiki should do: we will get better results if we and they are editing the same biography of Eliezer Yudkowsky, rather than creating a fork. To that end, I've created a {{wikilink}} template that can go at the top of an article, linking to the article with the same name in Wikipedia. Have a look at our current article on Newcomb's paradox - there is far more detail in the linked Wikipedia article, but there are some things we carry because they (rightly) won't: the sometimes non-standard vocabulary we tend to use around it (eg "Omega") and links to related articles in Overcoming Bias/Less Wrong on the subject, which they might not choose to keep (since Wikipedia is not a link farm).
Similarly, we don't want to provide our own index of heuristics and biases, since there's one on Wikipedia and another on the Psychology wiki, and most of what they lack on the subject we can fix there rather than trying to address by duplication.
It's often easier to say what a thing is not for than what it is for. What have I missed out here that we should be using the wiki for; am I right to discourage what I set out above; what else do we need to say about how best to use it? Because we could be discussing anything in a given week, but a wiki evolves more slowly, I'd like to hope that if in a year's time I meet someone who seems open to the ideas we discuss here and wants to learn more, it's the wiki I'd point them at rather than this website; it might eventually be the best starting point on how to become less wrong.
Rationalist wiki, redux
This site is very likely impenetrable to the newcomer. You one-box and defect on the True Prisoner's Dilemma, but is that just because of a cached thought, or is it your Tsuyoku Naratai? So I've created the LessWrong Wiki on Wikia. I'd like this to become a respository of useful definitions and links: it can support our discussions here, and create something lasting from the ephemerality of a blog.
badger already created a Wiki, but as you can see in the updates to that article badger and others pretty quickly concluded that TiddlyWiki wouldn't be up to the job. MediaWiki, the software Wikipedia and Wikia use, is the monster of them all, and will give us good support for practically anything we want to do, including mathematical notation. I've ported across a couple of articles from the old wiki onto the new, but many more are needed. The "download" link in TiddlyWiki and a text editor may help.
EDIT: Usernames are global across all of Wikia, so you may not be able to use the same name there as here. Sorry.
Rationalist Wiki
Some (including myself) have suggested that a rationality wiki would be a useful supplement to this site. In the spirit of getting things done, I set one up here: http://rationality.tiddlyspot.com/ The password to save edits is omega.
The TiddlyWiki framework it uses is very lightweight and won't be satisfactory as a long-term solution. I do think it has potential as a minimalist beginner's guide though, and could serve us well for the time being. I am not very knowledgable about wiki software in general, but TiddlyWiki has served me well for multiple personal wikis. I planned on developing it a little further before revealing it to the community, but other commitments demand my attention. Please feel free to contribute.
Comments, suggestions? Is it better to start with something that can handle a significant user base and future growth, or should it stay small and self-contained to remain accessible to beginners?
Update: I think it's becoming clear this can't serve as more than a short-term hack, even for a minimalist beginner's guide. At least it is provoking discussion. I'm still hoping for contributions so we have a leg up once an official solution emerges. If you do contribute, please try to keep markup to a minimum to facilitate a future conversion.
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