LessWrong:Closed Projects

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This page is an archive of closed projects discussed on Lesswrongwiki:Projects and Requests.

Article format

On the topic of Help:Style Guide.

It might be simpler to get away from the OB/LW dichotomy and seven-storied references structure, and to just enumerate all the articles under the same second-level section, like this one, titled "Blog posts". Btw, since the standard article capitalization is lower-case, and it's this way on Wikipedia, the same convention should be applied to section names in the articles.

I suggest the following sections:

  • See also
  • Footnotes
  • Blog posts
  • External references

Any comments? --Vladimir Nesov 18:10, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

We still haven't used the Footnotes section on any wiki page yet, have we? Also, I would suggest the name "Articles", instead of "Blog posts". --PeerInfinity 18:29, 25 May 2009 (UTC)
Footnotes were used a couple of times, and all sections are by-demand anyway. The jargon seems to be for the wiki pages to be called "articles", and essays on the blogs to be called "posts". "Articles" sounds nice, but they really are blog posts, by design of this wiki, so I'm not sure... --Vladimir Nesov 20:07, 25 May 2009 (UTC)
How about simply grouping articles, posts, and other resources together under "References"? Though personally, I find it useful to have the references sorted into "Overcoming Bias Articles", "Less Wrong Articles", and "Other Resources", and would prefer to continue sorting the references this way. --PeerInfinity 20:09, 25 May 2009 (UTC)
Considering that EY long threatened to import the OB posts into LW, the distinction is going to blur, and it's not very useful anyway. Blog posts and "see also" references within the wiki should be selected, so "external references" is everything else (but naming it "everything else" is worse if it's the only reference section), and "footnotes" is a separate formatting feature. --Vladimir Nesov 21:06, 25 May 2009 (UTC)
We have a script to automatically scan the wiki, and report any pages with improper formatting. See the script, the output, and the instructions. --PeerInfinity 19:45, 24 October 2009 (UTC)


Dependency Graphs

(It was decided for the time being to not introduce dependency graphs.) --Vladimir Nesov 18:13, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

  • Now that the wiki is hosted on lesswrong.com, we can install the GraphViz Extension. It might be nice if we could set up Dependency Graphs for all of the articles. Automatically generated, if possible. Actually, if the graphs are going to be automatically generated, then maybe they shouldn't be on the wiki itself, but in some subfolder of lesswrong.com --PeerInfinity 20:20, 23 April 2009 (UTC)
  • Better idea: Have dependency graphs for the concepts themselves! Then, just keep track of which concepts the articles depend on. Then the dependency graph for the article will just be a collection of the dependency graphs of the concepts. --PeerInfinity 20:20, 23 April 2009 (UTC)
  • One other suggestion to make the dependency graphs much more readable: Let the nodes have multiple child nodes, but not multiple parent nodes! Instead, have multiple copies of the node each time it appears as a child node. It should be fairly simple to set up a way to tell GraphViz to duplicate the nodes, rather than reusing them. If you want to keep track of how many times a node is used, you could use something like node colour, or line thickness. Make the line thicker or the colour darker for each time the node appears in the graph. The Dependency Graphs for Eliezer's OB posts should be redone in this style.--PeerInfinity 20:20, 23 April 2009 (UTC)
  • Update: I tried manually untangling the graphs, but it looks like the result will be uglier than I expected. Here is what my first quick attempt looks like: original version, partially untangled version. To finish untangling this version, I would need to create even more nodes. If I was going to try to properly untangle the mega-cluster, I would need to use a script, since editing it by hand would be totally impractical. --PeerInfinity 19:35, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
  • I thought it would be a good idea to set up a script to automatically generate wiki pages for all of the Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong articles, automatically filling in all of the details for the articles: Article name, Author, Original site, Date posted, and Permanent link. However, Eliezer voted against this idea. It would have also been good if the script would automatically generate the tags for the article's dependencies. The simplest method I can think of is to have tags on the wiki pages to indicate the article's dependencies, and have the script automatically generate these tags. By default, the script would just count every page that an article links to as a dependency. We could set up different tags for different kinds of dependencies: "Required Reading", "Useful Reading", "Side-topic", etc. We could then set up the dependency graphs to display these different types of dependencies differently. --PeerInfinity 19:35, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
  • Another idea I just thought of: Once we have the dependency graph, we could create a tool to keep track of which articles you have already read, and which articles you have already read the prerequisites for. This tool would provide newcomers a way to gradually climb their way up the web of dependencies without getting hopelessly lost along the way. The tool would basically just have a list of which articles the user has already read, and would update the colours of the nodes in the dependency graph to indicate which articles are read, which articles the user has the prerequisites for, and which articles the user does not have the prerequisites for. This could be as simple as a text file or database containing the list of articles already read, and a script file to generate a .svg file as output, using GraphViz. If we wanted to get really fancy, we could have a tool that gives multiple-choice questions to verify that the user remembers the stuff from the pages they already read. If we wanted to get even fancier, we would integrate all this into the lesswrong.com website, having the website itself track which articles each user has read, and maybe scoring them on how well they remember the lessons. We could also have questions that test the user on their application of the lessons, rather than just pure recall. But all of this is just wild brainstorming. I'll wait until I get some feedback before I start writing any code. --PeerInfinity 19:35, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
  • Another idea: What if someone writes a new article that provides a simpler explanation of the same concept as another article, and the new article has less dependencies than the old article? This would provide a sort of shortcut in the climb up the dependency graph. We would need some way to keep track of this, but perhaps we should wait until such an article is created, before we go into any detail discussing what to do about it. --PeerInfinity 19:35, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

Moving the wiki to lesswrong.com

On May 6, 2009, the Less Wrong Wiki was moved from http://lesswrong.wikia.com to http://wiki.lesswrong.com

  • We will need to make sure that we have the appropriate extensions installed in the wiki. Wikia installs a whole lot of extensions to the wiki by default, and if the new wiki doesn't have these extensions, then the pages that require these extensions will be broken. See Special:Version and [[1]] for a full list of these extensions. It looks like all of the important extensions are installed on this wiki, even though there are several extensions on the old wiki that are not on the new wiki. --PeerInfinity 19:35, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
  • We can now create permanent links to the wiki. One alternate idea that was suggested is that we edit the reddit code at lesswrong.com so that you can create links to the wiki just by using the usual [[ and ]] marks that you use on the wiki itself. --PeerInfinity 19:35, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
  • We can now install new extensions to the wiki. One extension that could be really useful is the GraphViz extension, for generating the dependency graphs, though it looks like we'll probably end up using an external script for that, rather than having the graph generator be part of the wiki itself. --PeerInfinity 19:35, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

By my request, the wiki on wikia was closed to avoid confusion. --Vladimir Nesov 20:44, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

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