Mech Interp Wiki Page and Why You Should Edit Wikipedia
TL;DR: A couple months ago, we (Jo and Noah) wrote the first Wikipedia article on Mechanistic Interpretability. It was oddly missing despite Mech Interp’s visibility in alignment circles. We think Wikipedia is a top-of-funnel resource for journalists, policy staffers, and curious students, so filling that gap is cheap field-building. Seeing that the gap existed in one of the most important subfields in AIS, we suspect that there are probably many others. Below, we (1) list other alignment / EA topics that need pages or can be upgraded and (2) share some notes about editing Wikipedia. If you know the literature, an afternoon of edits may be surprisingly high-impact. PS: We also think that there existing a wiki page for the field that one is working in increases one's credibility to outsiders - i.e. if you tell someone that you're working in AI Control, and the only pages linked are from LessWrong and Arxiv, this might not be a good look. Wikipedia pages worth (re)writing Below are topics with plentiful secondary literature yet their wiki pages are either missing or a stub. * Reward hacking * AI Control * AI Evaluations * Agent Foundations (and particular ideas from it like Mesa-Optimization) * Mechanistic superposition * People pages – Neel Nanda, Dan Hendrycks, Chris Olah, Jacob Steinhardt; each now have mainstream press. * AI 2027 - got much media attention (read by J. D. Vance and NYT coverage, for instance), so this seems like a priority * The open letter * LessWrong * Rationalist Community * Many ideas on the concepts. * EA concepts. Wikipedia Tips * If you want to work on a new page, discuss with the community first by going to the talk page of a related topic or meta-page. * When making substantive updates, prepare the update in your user sandbox first. * Attribute claims (Nature says x, or expert y says) rather than advocate (z is important because...). * Special:WantedPages lets you filter red-links for terms like “alignment”, “Go
Hi Aryaman, thanks again for the great technical writeup in the mech interp article. Moving to the mech interp talk page to address the COI and RS concerns.