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This is: The EA Forum Editing Festival has begun! , published by Aaron Gertler on the Effective Altruism Forum.
Over the last few months, we’ve been ramping up the creation of new articles for the EA Forum Wiki. (Some of these articles can be applied to posts: we call those “tags”.)
Today, we’re starting the EA Forum Editing Festival. The festival is an all-out blitz of tagging and article editing, with the goal of:
Applying as many useful tags as possible to as many posts as possible, so that tags become a much better way to find relevant content.
Creating and updating Wiki articles, so that someone interested in a topic can reliably get a good summary and know what to read next.
Improving the way the whole system is organized — including the layout of our tag portal, which tags even exist, and the way posts are ranked within individual tags.
To kick things off, we’ve released an update to the tag portal, showing almost every article on the Forum (not just tags — we may change the title) in a collection of tables.
While the new portal isn't complete, and we may end up reorganizing it entirely, we hope it inspires you to find an article to edit, create a new article, or suggest improvements to the portal itself.
People often say they’re looking for a way to do some small, useful thing for the community in their spare time.
This is one such way. You’ll make the Forum better with every tag you apply, every edit you make, and every suggestion you share.
How long is the festival?
One month. Until Friday, May 7th, we’ll consider any edits, tags, etc., to be part of the festival. This means they’ll make you eligible for fabulous prizes.
If you’ve already been doing lots of editing and tagging — good news! Your past efforts have not gone unnoticed, and we’ll consider them when prizes are given.
Why hold a festival? What’s with all the hullabaloo?
At the moment, most of the tagging and article editing that now happens on the Forum comes from a very small number of people.
We really appreciate their work, but we also want to get more people in the habit of adding tags, editing articles, and generally taking part in the crowdsourced bits of the Forum.
So we’re writing a loud, flamboyant post, pinning it to the top of the frontpage, and giving away fame, glory, and money. We hope the festival will help the Forum settle into a new pattern of broad participation.
If you don’t do much editing or tagging yet, now’s the time! See below for ideas on how to start.
Why is this important?
Improving the Wiki
See my previous post. In short, we’d like people to have access to a collection of material that sums up lots of important bits of EA knowledge: philosophy, cause areas, organizations, even memes. Pablo is working full-time to generate and organize content, but he can only write so much — a really good wiki has to be a community effort.
Tagging posts
There are new posts on the Forum every day. And every day, it becomes just a bit harder to catch up on everything that came before, and a bit harder to feel as though you’ve read the “right” content on a given topic.
Tags make this better. Ideally, a tag will:
Summarize a concept well enough to give someone a basic understanding
Gather together many posts that can help them learn about the concept
Sort those posts according to their relevance
I’ve had many people tell me they feel overwhelmed when they try to explore EA. Our massive backlog of content has been a barrier. But properly tagged and sorted, it can also be one of our greatest strengths. And you can help to make that happen!
How can you help?
As I said before, every tag and every edit helps. The Forum Wiki has no perfect articles, and few posts have every tag they should.
That said, here are some easy ways to get involved:
Tagging
Tag your own posts with as many relevant tags as you can...
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