How to incentivize LW wiki edits?

Make it easier, or automatic, for people with a LW account to have a LW-wiki account.

Start by implementing the anti-spam measures that have been in the pipeline for oh-so-long, and which would finally make the Wiki sidebar relevant, instead of creating an ugh field around even visiting the Wiki - as I suspect is currently the case.

Next, rather than implement complex reward features such as the one proposed above, just try to catch posts and comments that contain Wiki-suitable material and point that out to their authors. Also, lead by example.

Explain what the point of the wiki is. Right now it seems like a bunch of links to LW posts with short descriptions, which is neither worthwhile nor interesting to edit.

A monthly wiki open thread to remind everyone that it exists?

The purpose of the LW wiki is being confused with the purpose of LW, and I fear this is hurting wiki adoption.

When I tell people what LW is, I tell them "it's a community that grew up around some very good blog posts". The blog posts espouse a specific worldview which is shared among the community.

But the LW wiki is supposed to be (as I understand it) a place where people explain and combine academic work in certain fields.

The people who you want to be doing academic work are probably mostly not part of the community, and lots of community members don't have the expertise or interest to do the academic work.

I'm not sure LW can "be both". It seems like one identity or another will always dominate. The LW wiki needs its own identity, and its own community norms, and it probably shouldn't import them from LW community, because you'll turn off a substantial number of the types of people you need in order to make a wiki successful.

So, the suggestion is to separate the LW wiki identity from the LW community. Probably not calling the wiki Less Wrong at all.

What kind of traffic is the wiki getting? Are we sure this is a good goal?

A major problem is that the wiki isn't very usable (not just to edit, but to USE). It's hard to find what you are looking for (especially if you don't know the exact phrase you need), and to navigate in general. Big problem: The search bar is hidden. You have to scroll down the sidebar to see it. The search bar should be either top right or front and center.

If it's not usable, then no one is going to use it. If no one uses it, then no one wants to work on it. Why work on something that no one's going to read?

Some ideas:

1. Make a detailed list of things that need worked on. Post a link to this list somewhere VERY VISIBLE on the front page. Right now there are three links of articles that need help, but I went to one, and didn't really know what would've been needed to better-ify it.

2. (My favorite idea) Make a monthly wiki thread on Discussion where you can ask for what specifically you want done. People can talk about it. Ask questions if they want. Get karma for it. It feels more visible, versus just going in and editing wiki stuff on your own, sans discussion. The wiki isn't active enough that the discussion pages for each article can support ongoing conversation, IMO. I clicked on two pages, and neither had anything at all in their discussion pages.

3. Set it up as a project on the volunteer network.

4. Run a one-month-ish competition for who has done the most (useful) work on the wiki. There are prizes that are cheap for you guys to give away, but worthwhile to others. (i.e. Sing Summit tix. Name a HPMOR character. One on one Skype conversation. etc) The most difficult part would be having someone judge the editors (which would be easier if you allowed multiple ties). The good part of this is it might jump start people into getting habituated to doing wiki work.

5. From the comments here, it seems like people aren't even in agreement about what the wiki is FOR. It probably needs a mission statement or something.

6. Post regular (weekly?) links to wiki articles on the LW discussion page. This will lead to: a) Getting people ONTO the wiki in general. (People will want to edit it more, if other people are on it more.) b) Discussion and improvement on that particular page.

tl;dr- It needs to be easier to use the wiki as a user. The wiki needs more traffic, to make editing it more worthwhile. It needs to be easier to find out what needs to be edited, hopefully with specifics of what needs work in the article. It needs to be clearer what the final product should be like.

Make the wiki the front-and-center place where LW's content resides.

Today, most of the interesting content is in the Sequences, which are interlinked to each other (to some degree), but which do not link to the wiki. You could move the Sequences to the wiki. This would get people onto it. Part of why the Sequences are considered to be poorly organized is that the organization efforts can't touch the actual Sequences. Moving them to the wiki would change this. I expect the Sequences to improve with more eyes.

(Potential drawback: people don't expect blog posts to appear in wiki format, and could easily be confused about what Less Wrong was.)

It's really not clear what the purpose of the wiki is. When you search LessWrong for "Politics is the Mind-Killer", the first result is this blog post and the second result is this wiki article. The primary thing the second has is a bunch of links- but the blog posts have navigation links too. If there's a clearer purpose, then people will be much more willing to post stuff to it, because they'll know whether or not it's appropriate. I only add stuff I write to the wiki if someone asks me to or it's obvious it fits (like adding my book reviews to this list).

Make the wiki no longer think links to LessWrong are external links. When I realized that this page hadn't been updated in six months, I decided to adopt it. I quickly learned that every update requires convincing the system that, no, I'm not a spammer, and my desire to continue maintaining that page is rapidly fading. (I'm currently only updating it monthly, when it probably should be updated at least every two weeks.) I know MinibearRex has been through four or five wiki accounts because of various hassles associated with links and the Sequences Rerun.

Payment oriented:

• Pay after they write, for particularly valuable improvements, rather than commissioning improvements.
• Pay based on community agreement (upvote changes)
• Pay based on lottery (triggering intermittent rewards)

Appoint a chief editor. Chief's most important job would be to maintain a list of what most urgently needs adding or expanding in the wiki, and posting a monthly Discussion post reminding people about these. (Maybe choosing a different theme each month and listing a few requested edits in that category, together with a link to the wiki page that contains the full list).

When people make these changes, they can add a comment and chief editor (or some other high status figure) will respond with heaps of praise.

People will naturally bring up any other topics they'd like to see on the wiki or general comments about the wiki. Chief editor should take account of these and where relevant bring them up with the relevant people (e.g. the programmers).

I suspect that adding code to the wiki for calculating who's "most responsible" for a good article, so that articles can be voted on for karma (or anything else of this nature that's been suggested) is really tricky. This practically ensures it would never get done, especially since it first requires the account synchronization, which is nontrivial in itself (but worth doing in any case).

I think that the same can be done manually, either by having an actual vote for "Wiki Editor of the Month" or just by announcing completed wiki tasks in a monthly thread and waiting patiently to receive lots of karma votes. Or both, or another similar idea.

Have a monthly "wiki open thread", where people can:

• Mention what they've worked on the wiki recently
• Mention other wiki issues (hings they find confusing, need fixing, etc.)

That way, blam, extra attention AND karma incentive without any need for new technology.

It could even beocme a thread for general "community public goods" things, like helping the site's code, moderator work, etc.

integrate karma points

I think the rules surrounding the wiki pages should be made more clear and strict. I suggest we use the same rules as wikipedia but with some twists, the main difference being that posts on lesswrong itself count as valid links to reference/quote from in wiki articles. Also we might want to consider now allowing downvoted posts to be used.

Other than that we might want to use a queuing system where a page maintainer reviews changes made and gives karma for accepted changes. At some point you might also consider removing karma for bad changes.

This maintainer thing does not have to mean we don't instantly see the change. The review can be done after the fact or they can be queued and not be made visible until reviewed.

Randomly select people and order them to improve a specific wiki article. Give then +30 if they do, -30 if they refuse. Such a message is cheap, so it can work on spam economics.

This requires a single someone with authority who's job it is to imropve the LW community. This would fit into the general pattern of this person having such a job and having the power to deputize people.

I need to write a post on this general idea...

Edit: Also what manfred said. The general idea is to make it require less agency to improve LW. Either by having someone supply that agency as a service (my idea) or making the actual job require less (manfred's idea)