Proposal: Use the Wiki for Concepts

Programmers have a saying: "Any problem in computer science can be solved with another level of indirection." (It appears that this is properly attributed to David Wheeler.) That's exactly what this post is proposing, and I approve highly.

However, this post didn't appear to mention one of the biggest benefits of indirection. This post said that a Less Wrong post "should reference previous work by linking to the Wiki rather than other posts". I want to point out that this will also reference future work, when the Wiki is updated after the post. (In C++ programmer jargon, the Wiki can be thought of as a vtable.)

I believe that this is one of the strongest reasons to adopt the scheme suggested by this post. When post P links to the Wiki while mentioning dimly understood concept C, and later posts Q, R, and S appear that explore concept C, and the Wiki is updated accordingly, post P automatically becomes more useful. This addresses one of the most significant concerns that I've had about blogs (namely, that their posts can easily reference each other backwards but not forwards).

Eliezer, I don't know if you're familiar with the CIA's Intellipedia, but you seem to have hit the nail on the head.

The CIA have had huge success doing exactly what you describe here. You can read more about it in the paper here. The basic idea is that the intelligence community should harness the synergy of the blog/wiki combo.

From the paper:

The Wiki and the Blog are complimentary companion technologies that together form the core workspace that will allow intelligence officers to share, innovate, adapt, respond, and be—on occasion—brilliant. Blogs will cite Wiki entries. The occasional brilliant blog comment will shape the Wiki. The Blog will be vibrant, and make many sea changes in real-time. The Wiki, as it matures, will serve as corporate knowledge and will not be as fickle as the Blog. The Wiki will be authoritative in nature, while the Blog will be highly agile. The Blog is personal and opinionated. The Wiki is agreed-upon and corporate.

Something that will help tremendously is redirecting lesswrong.com/wiki/ to the wiki. Or, possibly, wiki.lesswrong.com... or something that makes the link easier to change in the future if we bring the wiki over here.

Also, a link somewhere on the main page would be nice.

This is a large job - though 10 posts a day would get it done in two months - so don't step up if you don't have the time.

I'll provisionally step up. I really should not touch this website at all over the next three weeks as I wrap up my bachelor's degree. Over the summer though, I'll have the free time this would require. My comparative advantage is in wiki rather than blog activity, and I'm eager to help out, if that isn't already evident. If someone volunteers before then, that's great.

Inspired by Andrew Hay and Rob Zahra, I began a comprehensive list of Overcoming Bias posts with title, date, author, and summary. Given the usefulness of the other resources, I could see myself referring to a list like this daily. (In three weeks, when I have time) I plan on adding 10-20 posts per day to the list. If someone has the know-how to automagically generate the list except the summaries, that would be great. I think it is a great opportunity to become reacquainted with the OB archives and generate wiki content. If no one steps up before then, I'd also be happy to populate Eliezer's posts with wikilinks at the same time.

During the last cycle of harrumphing at Hacker News over the possibility that successively larger batches of new users were diluting the quality of the discussion there, I started building a startup around an improved community discussion platform. I had some cool mathematical/algorithmic ideas WhichThisMarginIsTooSmallToContain, and I came to similar conclusions about structure.

But I differ on a big issue. I think the wiki should be outward-looking rather than inward-looking.

It seems to me that the focus in this post is on developing the wiki as a tool so that lesswrong members can read lesswrong posts more easily. That's great, of course. It's healthy for the community to articulate its goals, social mores, and world view, and a wiki is a good way to lower the barriers to participation by new members.

But I think we ought to build a section of the wiki as a resource for people who are interested in topics like rationality, "philosophy," standards of argument, and debate. Giving away useful stuff is the best recruiting we can do -- there are no accessible resources out there on these topics. What's out there now is arid.

TVTropes provides a good example of how to do this: a catalog of relatable examples, a community aesthetic, and a lot of sharp analysis in a Devil's Dictionary-like format that's fun to read. People follow a link from an online discussion, pause because the writing is witty and engaging -- they got me with unobtanium -- and leave a few days later, dazed and much more savvy about narrative entertainment than they were when they showed up.

If you thiink this is an impossibly high standard (a common objection), consider that the originators of most of the ideas to be found on that site, collectively, were the people Alan Sokal was joking about. Mention this to such a person, and he'll make a clicky, disapproving noise with his tongue and say "That's not funny."

Good discussion has a very similar role, in the average netizen's life, to good storytelling. Both are commonplace, social, and therefore inherently interesting, human experiences where the difference between "done well" and "done badly" is immediately, viscerally obvious. So if we can provide some useful information on decision and discussion -- the exact contents of the starter kit are the subject of a top-level post I've been marinating -- the world should beat a path to our door.

I'll judge the project successful when commenters in highbrow fora like LtU and Hacker News start using the lesswrong wiki to decide (or end) arguments the way they currently reference Snopes or invoke Godwin's Law.

e.g. NoItDoesNotFrackingBegTheQuestion.

aside -- In case it's relevant to anyone, I'm no longer working actively on this project. I'm about to start on a different startup with more funding and a shorter path to profitability.

For what it's worth, if you're using MediaWiki -- I'm a MediaWiki developer and would be happy to help out if anyone wants to know "how do I do X" or otherwise get assistance of some kind setting up or configuring the wiki.

Markup for referencing the wiki in comments would help a lot.

As a person who's completely obsessed with the TV Tropes wiki (and has only just recently started to peruse this site), I applaud any efforts to apply that model to furthering the cause of rationality. One problem I foresee, however, is hinted at with your comment that "the trope explanation itself will be a short bite of joy" and that this promotes opening up new tabs to acquire said bite of joy. If you're trying to compare the postings themselves to the trope descriptions and the comment threads to the references, the analogy breaks down due to the length of the posts. It's simply not practical to whittle down the post lengths such that one could reasonably say "I'll open a couple more of these, I'm sure it won't add too much time to my browsing session." This sort of multiplicative effect might come into play on the LW wiki, but I fear it cannot drive traffic back here to the degree you would hope.

I would still like to see a list of recent edits and/or active pages in the Less Wrong blog sidebar, and a list of recent blog posts and recent comments in the Wiki sidebar.

If the recent edits were available as a feed (which they are after a quick look at MediaWiki) then this is very easy to implement. In fact it would be entirely Javascript. This is exactly how the "New on Overcoming Bias" section in the side bar works.

My apologies for my late reply.

My todo list is now mostly clear of time-critical projects, and I can now officially volunteer to import all relevant Overcoming Bias posts to Less Wrong.

I also volunteer to:

*create Less Wrong wiki pages for all of the LW and OB posts, including all relevant information. However, writing the short summaries of the articles is a job that I would gladly delegate to someone else. What I should probably do is to just leave a placeholder for the article summaries, with tags to mark which articles still need summaries, and let all the other users fill in the summaries after the wikipages are posted to the wiki.

*update the links in the LW articles, changing them to link to the article's wiki page, rather than the article itself

*set up the new Less Wrong wiki, hosted at LessWrong.com, importing all of the content from the current wiki

*create the dependency graphs for all of the Less Wrong articles

*set up a system to automatically generate dependency graphs for new posts to Less Wrong, by reading tags placed on the articles' wiki pages.

*set up a system to automatically generate dependency graphs for the concepts themselves, rather than the articles, by reading tags placed on the articles' wiki pages.

*update the Less Wrong forum code so that you can create links to the wiki by using the [[WikiPage]]-style links.

*set up a system to automatically monitor which pages on the Less Wrong wiki have corresponding articles on Wikipedia or on the Accelerating Future wiki, or possibly some other relevant wikis, and create the appropriate links to these other wikis.

For more ideas for future projects, see http://lesswrong.wikia.com/wiki/How_We_Can_Use_This_Wiki

I would also like to get the contact info for whoever is currently in charge of the Less Wrong website.

Some other things I have already done recently:

*setting up the Accelerating Future wiki: http://acceleratingfuture.com/wiki

*setting up the Accelerating Future forums: http://acceleratingfuture.com/forum

*upgrading the SL4 wiki to MediaWiki format, importing all relevant content from the SL4 wiki to the Accelerating future wiki

*fixing all of the broken links in the Categorized SL4 mailing list archive: http://acceleratingfuture.com/wiki/Categorized_SL4_Archive

*creating a first draft of the Scenarios Project: http://acceleratingfuture.com/wiki/The_Scenarios_Project

*creating a java applet for browsing through the dependency graphs of the Overcoming Bias posts: http://acceleratingfuture.com/lesswrong/dependencygraph/ WARNING: This is a resource-intensive java applet, and it may crash your web browser.

This proposal seems sound to me.

Why are the old posts going to be imported, by the way? It seems tricky - I can't imagine porting the comments across is practical since the two blogging engines have very different ideas about comments, but if the comments are lost, why put them in a blog at all?

I see no link to the wiki anywhere on the homepage or even on this wiki-specific entry. I had to click on the tag to find an older post which linked to the wiki.

Shouldn't we have a top level Wiki link like the 'About' page?

Added: In fact, even the About page doesn't have a link to the wiki!

I've already seen at least one person call Overcoming Bias "a bigger, and far more productive, time sink than Wikipedia or even TV Tropes"

LessWrong is already way too addictive for me (and that's not counting OB), but I definitely don't mind having addictions like this one.

Once my old posts are imported from Overcoming Bias, it would be nice if someone went through them and changed the links to posts (that reference concepts per se, rather than conversational events or parts of arguments) to links to the Wiki, creating appropriate pages and concept summaries as necessary.

A data point: intuitively, I don't see this ending well, or being useful, including the importing of old posts.

Once my old posts are imported from Overcoming Bias, it would be nice if someone went through them and changed the links to posts (that reference concepts per se, rather than conversational events or parts of arguments) to links to the Wiki, creating appropriate pages and concept summaries as necessary. That is, it would be nice if I didn't have to do this myself. Anyone interested in volunteering, leave a comment - it'd be nice if you had some comments to your name, by which to judge your writing skills, and perhaps some karma. This is a large job - though 10 posts a day would get it done in two months - so don't step up if you don't have the time. It does seem like the sort of thing that should definitely get done by someone who is not me.

I am willing to help in this area, considering I am planning on reading it all anyway. I can create stubs, rough outlines, and categorize obvious points. I do not know everything inside and out, but I feel strong enough to start. Since the basic concept is condensing larger posts into summaries I should be okay. I am not actually adding content, just shifting it around and organizing it.

As far as time, I do not have a lot of time in any given week, but I have nothing coming up in the next few months so I should be able to stay on task. If this does not describe what you are looking for, fair enough. If it is, I can work with the wiki guys to start building templates that will make all of this much easier.

The summary:

Strengths:

• I will be in the archives anyway, so I may as well contribute while I am there
• Decent wiki experience, including templating
• Time in terms of helping see the project through

Weaknesses:

• I am just learning how all of this works
• Time in terms of day to day, week to week availability

Blog posts in a directed acyclic web can't be incrementally refactored, split, or merged. If the original author isn't around, blog posts also can't be edited, so a new author who wants to write an improved standalone post on a concept has to write a post that is redundant with all previous standalone posts on the concept. They will want to not do this unless the improvement is large, and this will prevent incremental improvements.

The SL4 wiki had users writing in subdirectories under their user pages. I like this. User subdirectory pages could be left out of sidebar lists of recent edits.

This is going to involve a lot of retooling of one another's text -- it seems like a certain amount of copyleft might be in order.

In case it helps:

I, Michael Blume, do license everything I have written, and everything I will write using the handle MBlume at the website Less Wrong and its associated Wiki under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

(this has been my license of choice in the past -- if anyone thinks we ought to use a different one here I'd be open to that too)

And just the other day on the TVtropes forum discussing transhumanism i pointed people towards overcoming bias.

TV Tropes is a collection of content and references to content, not links.

The Wiki should link to Less Wrong, certainly, but not substitute Less Wrong links for original content.

Every article at Wikipedia is original content that concerns and is about important content. The articles at the rationality wiki should be original content that is about important content; they should include links to original work here but not consist of links to original work here, as a rule.

This is a large job - though 10 posts a day would get it done in two months.

I'm not sure that a job-like approach is the right way to do this kind of work. IMO, it's best done naturally, with no time constraints, by someone genuinely interested in the topic who is is currently re-reading a particular OB sequence.

I'm sure that there are a lot of people here who plan to re-read some OB sequences (I'm one of them, but I don't have enough time) and who are good enough at writing summaries, so perhaps the work can be distributed between these people, instead of assigning a single person to it. This approach will take more time, but the resulting quality of summaries should be higher.

A couple questions

I'm not that good of a programmer or anything, but... how useful would a beginner-ish level Python person be for these purposes, or would I need to basically seriously level up before being useful in that capacity?

Next, I'm not sure how involved this would be, but if it's simple enough, one idea might be to have a wiki stub automatically generated for each post in LW, and the LW post automatically being linked to the (initially blank) wiki page for it.

Also, is it just your posts that will be imported to LW? Why not, well, the whole of OB (assuming none of the other authors (primarily Robin Hanson, presumably) object?

As far as the last bit of volunteering, I may be willing to help out a bit, but right now my self evaluation would be "no way I could do the full load... yet. But maybe some." ie, if you can't find any single person to do the whole thing, maybe it can be split up among a bunch of us that might each do a fraction of it?

Actually, for stuff that is part of larger sequences, may also be good to, say, assign a volunteer to each of the sequences? I think I'd be willing to take on the QM sequence, for instance.