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'm curious to hear more about your concerns with just using Wikipedia. I agree that there will be some topics which are outside the scope of Wikipedia, but it seems like many EA-relevant topics are within the scope of Wikipedia, and do not have very well established pages. For example: there is no page on longtermism, cause neutrality, or the INT framework. Even the page on effective altruism itself is pretty short.
My guess is that someone could pretty easily just go through old Forum posts and copy facts into Wikipedia. E.g. the section on invertebrate sentience is two sentences long, and I would bet that a huge chunk of recent Forum posts on invertebrate sentience could be justifiably included in that Wikipedia article.
In general I have a lot of nervousness about trying to re-create an existing successful product (NIH syndrome), and my guess is that Wikipedia will be more considered trustworthy, get more views, and generally be more influential than a local wiki.
There are only two main concerns. The first was explained in details by @saulius, and I share his vision about motivation. Having something local would allow us to design award system in the way relevant for EA community and infrastructure.
The second is different scopes of relevance between local wiki and Wikipedia. Let's say, "List of annual EA events in Europe" would be relevant for EA community, but not for the others. I'd even expect that it could be harmful for the community to have such info on wikipedia. Moreover, searchability of a local wiki is mu
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