Should we use wiki to improve knowledge management within the community?

Some thoughts:

• This post on how to find EA documents, the forum pingbacks and asking questions on the forum are some examples of ways to find information.
• There is research on what gets people motivated to write in wikipedia. Here is a recent study that found some interesting stuff, and they conclude with

In summary, the empirical results paint a somewhat different picture of sustained contribution than originally hypothesized. Specifically, sustained contributors appear to be motivated by a perception that the project needs their contributions (H1); by abilities other than domain expertise (H2); by personal rather than social motives (H3 & 4); and by intrinsic enjoyment of the process of contributing (H7) rather than extrinsic factors such as learning (H6). In contrast, meta-contributors seem to be motivated by social factors (H3 & 4), as well as by intrinsic enjoyment (H7).

• I think that we should strategically plan how to incentivize possible contributors. Ideally, people should contribute based on what would be the most valuable, which is something that may be achievable through prizes (possibly "Karma" or money, but perhaps better is something like certificates of impact), bounties, peer support and acknowledgment, and requests and recognition from leaders of the community.
• I think that it would take a big effort to bootstrap something new. The efforts going into EA Hub seems to me like a good place to start a centralized knowledge base.
• I'd like something like a top/bottom research agenda on "how to do the most good", that ends with concrete problems ([like these])(https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2zcBy7eDXjEti9Sw7/a-collection-of-researchy-projects-for-aspiring-eas). Something that can help us be more strategic in our resource allocation, and through which we can more easily focus experts on where they can help the most (and have a good infrastructure for moral trade).
• It seems that something like Roam could be great, because it is designed to make it easy to create pages and has backlinks to support exploration and has other neat stuff. It is still not mature enough though.

Similarly to EdoArad, I am afraid that without some incentive/gamification structure, there would be a lack of motivation for users to edit an EA wiki. I haven’t read any science on motivations but I want to share my personal point of view. Personally, I don’t feel very motivated to edit the priority wiki because:

• I will probably receive no comments or feedback on what I wrote
• I don’t know who and when will read whatever I write there
• Even if someone reads it, it’s unlikely that they will notice that it was me who wrote it. That means that writing there won’t improve my career prospects or social status.^[1] No one will come to me at the EAG or something to talk about this thing that I wrote.

Note that none of these problems apply to the EA forum which is why it feels much more motivating to write here.

I used to edit Lithuanian Wikipedia and these things didn’t apply there either because:

• I knew that many people were reading pages I was editing. It was very useful and motivating to check pageview statistics.
• There was a community, editing wikipedia felt like a collaborative project because:
  • There were often discussions on talk pages and a skype channel
  • I knew that admins and some other users on the Lithuanian wikipedia are looking at the recent changes page (which is much less eventful for smaller wikis) and that my new contributions will not go unnoticed. It was irrational for me to try to impress these people whom I have never met in real life but the human brain is wired to care about this kind of stuff (or at least my brain).
  • People would give other people “awards” which were just pieces of html that you could put on your user page. E.g. see awards for this random wikipedia user. Receiving such awards made me feel like my effort was appreciated.
  • We also had an “article of the week” which was a new article written that week that would be featured on the frontpage. I often tried to get my article featured and then it would get a lot of views. It’s almost like gamifying contributions
  • Best articles on wikipedia are marked as featured or good. It was motivating to try to get my articles one of these statuses.

I’m not sure if I’m suggesting to have any of these motivation structures for an EA wiki though. It would probably not reach the critical mass where doing some of this stuff would start making sense. If it did reach the critical mass, I’d be afraid to put too many of these motivation structures in place. We don’t want EAs are spending too much time editing an EA wiki instead of doing more direct things to help the world. But maybe there is some middle ground here.

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

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.

I'm interested in the answer to this question; I was just discussing it when discussing the EA Forum on a team retreat. I'm interested in the creation of reference documents in general. Something I was thinking about very brainstorm-y, no plans to implement in the near term) was to add a type of post to the EA Forum that allowed either direct editing or inline suggestions by not-the-author.