I appreciate the intention here but I think it would need to be done with considerable care, as I fear it may have already led to accidental vandalism of the epistemic commons. Just skimming a few of these Wikipedia pages, I’ve noticed several new errors. These can be easily spotted by domain experts but might not be obvious to casual readers.^[1] I can’t know exactly which of these are due to edits from this community, but some very clearly jump out.^[2]

I’ll list some examples below, but I want to stress that this list is not exhaustive. I didn’t read most parts of most related pages, and I omitted many small scattered issues. In any case, I’d like to ask whoever made any of these edits to please reverse them, and to triple check any I didn’t mention below.^[3] Please feel free to respond to this if any of my points are unclear!^[4]

False statements

• The page on Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA) claims that IIA is one of the vNM axioms, and that one of the vNM axioms “generalizes IIA to random events.” 

  Both are false. The similar-sounding Independence axiom of vNM is neither equivalent to, nor does it entail, IIA (and so it can’t be a generalisation). You can satisfy Independence while violating IIA. This is a not a technicality; it’s a conflation of distinct and important concepts. This is repeated in several places.

• The mathematical statement of Independence there is wrong. In the section conflating IIA and Independence, it’s defined as the requirement that
   
  for any $p\in [0,1]$ and any outcomes Bad, Good, and N satisfying Bad≺Good. This mistakes weak preference for strict preference. To see this, set p=1 and observe that the line now reads N≺N. (The rest of the explanation in this section is also problematic but the reasons for this are less easy to briefly spell out.)

• The Dutch book page states that the argument demonstrates that “rationality requires assigning probabilities to events [...] and having preferences that can be modeled using the von Neumann–Morgenstern axioms.” This is false. It is an argument for probabilistic beliefs; it implies nothing at all about preferences. And in fact, the standard proof of the Dutch book theorem assumes something like expected utility (Ramsey’s thesis).

  This is a substantial error, making a very strong claim about an important topic. And it's repeated elsewhere, e.g. when stating that the vNM axioms “apart from continuity, are often justified using the Dutch book theorems.”

• The section ‘The theorem’ on the vNM page states the result using strict preference/inequality. This is a corollary of the theorem but does not entail it.

Misleading statements

• The decision theory page states that it’s “a branch of applied probability theory and analytic philosophy concerned with the theory of making decisions based on assigning probabilities to various factors and assigning numerical consequences to the outcome.” This is a poor description. Decision theorists don’t simply assume this, nor do they always conclude it—e.g. see work on ambiguity or lexicographic preferences. And besides this, decision theory is arguably more central in economics than the fields mentioned.
• The IIA article’s first sentence states that IIA is an “axiom of decision theory and economics” whereas it’s classically one of social choice theory, in particular voting. This is at least a strange omission for the context-setting sentence of the article.
• It’s stated that IIA describes “a necessary condition for rational behavior.” Maybe the individual-choice version of IIA is, but the intention here was presumably to refer to Independence. This would be a highly contentious claim though, and definitely not a formal result. It’s misleading to describe Independence as necessary for rationality.
• The vNM article states that obeying the vNM axioms implies that agents “behave as if they are maximizing the expected value of some function defined over the potential outcomes at some specified point in the future.” I’m not sure what ‘specified point in the future’ is doing there; that’s not within the framework.
• The vNM article states that “the theorem assumes nothing about the nature of the possible outcomes of the gambles.” That’s at least misleading. It assumes all possible outcomes are known, that they come with associated probabilities, and that these probabilities are fixed (e.g., ruling out the Newcomb paradox).

Besides these problems, various passages in these articles and others are unclear, lack crucial context, contain minor issues, or just look prone to leave readers with a confused impression of the topic. (This would take a while to unpack, so my many omissions should absolutely not be interpreted as green lights.) As OP wrote: these pages are a mess. But I fear the recent edits have contributed to some of this.

So, as of now, I’d strongly recommend against reading Wikipedia for these sorts of topics—even for a casual glance. A great alternative is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which covers most of these topics.

1. ^{^}

   I checked this with others in economics and in philosophy.

2. ^{^}

   E.g., the term ‘coherence theorems’ is unheard of outside of LessWrong, as is the frequency of italicisation present in some of these articles.

3. ^{^}

   I would do it myself but I don’t know what the original articles said and I’d rather not have to learn the Wikipedia guidelines and re-write the various sections from scratch.

4. ^{^}

   Or to let me know that some of the issues I mention were already on Wikipedia beforehand. I’d be happy to try to edit those.

This seems true, thanks for your editing on the related pages.

Trying to collect & link the relevant pages:

• Dutch book theorems
  • Money pump
• Von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theorem
  • Utility
• Rational Choice Cheory
• Decision Theory
  • Causal Decision Theory
  • Evidential Decision Theory
  • Functional Decision Theory
• Cox's Theorem
• Discounting
  • Hyperbolic discounting
  • Dynamic inconsistency
  • Time preference

A typical Wikipedia article will get more hits in a day than all of your LessWrong blog posts have gotten across your entire life, unless you're @Eliezer Yudkowsky.

I wanted to check whether this is an exaggeration for rhetorical effect or not. Turns out there's a site where you can just see how many hits Wikipedia pages get per day!

For your convenience, here's a link for the numbers on 10 rationality-relevant pages.

I'm pretty sure my LessWrong posts have gotten more than 1000 hits across my entire life (and keep in mind that "hits" is different from "an actual human actually reads the article"), but fair enough - Wikipedia pages do get a lot of views.

Thanks for the parent for flagging this and doing editing. What I'd now want to see is more people actually coordinating to do something about it - set up a Telegram or Discord group or something, and start actually working on improving the pages - rather than this just being one of those complaints on how Rationalists Never Actually Tried To Win, which a lot of people upvote and nod along with, and which is quickly forgotten without any actual action.

(Yes, I'm deliberately leaving this hanging here without taking the next action myself; partly because I'm not an expert Wikipedia editor, partly because I figured that if no one else is willing to take the next action, then I'm much more pessimistic about this initiative.)

Well, it seems like this story might have to do something with it?: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3XNinGkqrHn93dwhY/reliable-sources-the-story-of-david-gerard

I don't know to what extent that is, though; otherwise, I agree with you.

I think the thing that actually makes people more rational is thinking of them as principles you can apply to your own life rather than abstract notions, which is hard to communicate in a Wikipedia page about Dutch books.