TLDR: is there any reason EA community doesn't actively use wiki approach? Or do I miss something and it does?
Problem
Searching for "effective altruism wiki" I mostly meet broken links. Several years ago the announcement was posted that wiki moves to EA Hub. None of the three links posted there works, but EA Hub has Priority Wiki. However Priority Wiki is focused only on cause prioritization and is almost empty know. So I'm wondering, what happened to the old EA Wiki? Were there any reasons for closing it? What happened to the knowledge published there? And, more broadly, why creating a common knowledge base is almost (see below) never mentioned as an impactful contribution?(see below)
Motivation
During the last half year I was talking a lot with people exploring different EA options (like me), and each of them performed some EA-related research and shared some valuable information with me. So I'm surprised why such kind of knowledge isn't gathered together. Even gathering information about all organizations related to some topic is troubling: there are lots of them with different quality and roles. Definitely, 80k does great job collecting it in the problem profiles. But wouldn't it be more efficient (and effective) to outsource this task to the community? Another example: just today I met two old EA lists (1, 2), which would be nice to have updated and open for contribution.
Indeed, I've found that several years ago Vipul Naik was contributing actively to EA-related articles on wikipedia. And according to his page, he switched to timelines, which are mostly focused on EA. Moreover, Foundational Research Institute also proposes contributing to wikipedia as one of the volunteering activities.
But with all my respect to wikipedia, I think that having a local wiki would allow to focus on more action-related topics instead of some general knowledge. And it would greatly simplify searching for such information and increase chances that the content you write will be read by people with similar goals.
I actually did not give that enough thought. I think using MediaWiki or Wikidot might be fine for start, and I am very fond of Roam. Notion might be great here as well. All of them require getting used to because the syntax is not straightforward, but that suffices for textual edits if there are people who go over and fix design problems. Roam is more difficult because it is... different.. and because it is less mature. Roam being in it's starting phases might actually be a good thing, because it's development can probably shift to the needs of the EA community in this case if the EA Wiki will be hosted there (Roam Research received a grant from the Long Term Future Fund)
That is all to say that I think a basic wiki infrastructure might be fine for start, if there is a good roadmap and support from the community. I assume that markets and fancy prizes can wait for later or be hacked into existence, but maybe that should be in the design from the start 🤷♂️