How We Can Use This Wiki

Most of the following text was copied from http://www.sl4.org/wiki/HowWeCanUseThisWiki , by Peer Infinity.

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Philosophy

Wikis are a unique and interesting way of organizing a web community. Unlike chat rooms, newsgroups, or private e-mail, wiki content is expected to have some seriousness and permanence. Authors are encouraged to write thoughtfully and to think about how their writings fit in with the rest of the existing wiki content. That doesn't mean we don't allow fun and frivolity here, it just means that we try not to waste one another's time by writing without thinking.

People commonly edit other people's writing in a wiki. Indeed, many would consider it an honour that someone else cared enough about their ideas to edit them. A wiki community generally discourages individual ownership of contributions. The idea is that by leaving our egos out of the discussion, the ideas will be given full attention. There are exceptions to this: when someone has an especially controversial opinion, it's probably better to sign it. See Wiki Etiquette.

Somebody looking for an answer should not have to read through a long series of messages to see all the nuances of the answer, they just read the wiki page where all of those nuances have been continually edited into an integrated whole.

Wikis permit a sort of segregated interaction between technical topics like "What Friendliness content needs to be added to the AGI by hand?" and general-interest topics like "This hard take-off concept sounds a little scary!" On a mailing list or an IRC channel, when these discussions happen in parallel, they sometimes trip each other up. In a Wiki forum, the technical nodes would point mainly to each other, the general-interest nodes would point mainly to each other, and when a person wants to cross over, they just follow the link to the other part of topic-space.

Etiquette

See Wiki Etiquette

Some ideas

• The Scenarios Project!

• Nodes for ubiquitous concepts like "intelligence" and "Singularity" could short-circuit some of the definitional debates that recur endlessly.

• • See the Glossary, the Category:Definition Pages, and best of all, the Lexicon.

• Nodes for subjects which have been hashed out at length on the mailing lists and other forums (perhaps with links to the original post, or an indication of concensus if one was reached), and on which further posting is discouraged unless it contributes truly new material. For example: "Isn't belief in the Singularity the same as religion?" with a link to the relevant post

• • There's a central node for all the "hashed out subjects": Category:Dead Horse Pages

• There could be nodes for topics like "CFAI 3.4.3.6", where particular subsections of important documents can be discussed, quizzed or critiqued.

• • There's a central node for all these discussions: Wiki Commentaries On Important Documents

• A list of members, with some information about each person.

• FAQ.

• • Some good FAQ-style pages that have been written so far are FAQ and Questions. There's also the Lexicon.

• Starting point(s) for discussion. See All Topics

• • Category:Discussion Pages lists all of the pages currently being used for discussion.

• Mailing List archive summary (or Table of Contents).

• • This will be a huge project. A similar project has been started at http://www.sl4.org/wiki/CategorizedSL4Archive. The threads from a few months were untangled and categorized, but then "The Great Renumbering" happened, and all the links were broken, and the project was abandoned.

• A collection of the mailing list's most interesting (or insightful, or controversial) posts.

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