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.
That's very useful, thanks! Pingbacks especially.
Wow, so we even have some theory on that. And motivation from the paper looks aligned with EA values.
Completely agree. And also really appreciate your science-based approach. We definitely should discuss it if more of us agree that some platform for open contributions is needed.
+1
Yep! We also have such list in EA Denmark though ours is much simpler. And indeed, it was one of the things that pushed me to ask this question.
I was thinking a lot about GitHub-like structures. It's too complicated for general knowledge, but designed pretty well for more complex domains. For example, if a group works on something like OpenPhil Cause Reports, where producing each piece of information takes long time, and also work of the beginners must be validated by more experienced users. In such cases system of branches allows splitting publishing-ready information from work in progress, issues allow to contribute for those who isn't skilled enough to create product, but has enough experience to note a problem. And so on. But that's just one of possibilities.
Not sure about that. Different kind of information requires different types of knowledge bases. And here as an example we can take forums, StackOverflow and wikipedia. As far as I understand, if you want to share information about a topic, where some consensus can be found over time and once found is not expected to be changed quickly, then you want wiki. So, someone writes an article with main ideas about the topic and others polish it up (which is kind of impossible on forums). Another situation is if your domain changes too quickly (such as programming languages). Then there is no reason in having overhead for having nicely written articles about every aspect of it. At maximum you'll need to have some blog posts. And the third popular case is asking for personal opinion: it can be either some tips and hacks (StackOverflow has plenty) or just discussion of some ideas like we do know. And this is impossible on wiki.
My impression is that in EA community we lack well-organized up-to-date information, which would represent some kind of consensus instead of a bunch of personal opinions. Your list "how to do the most good" is one example of a thing, which can't be implemented on forum. For such lists, suggestions to EA Hub resources, which @cafelow mentioned would solve the problem. But in general I wouldn't expect them being as effective as wiki.
Hah, if you have problems with incentives, just add some markets! :)