Our plans for hosting an EA wiki on the Forum

Abstract

In this 2021 forum post and accompanying discussion, Aaron Gertler outlines plans by the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) to develop an “EA wiki” integrated directly into the Effective Altruism Forum’s tagging architecture. Gertler argues that core effective altruism concepts are often dispersed across disparate long-form publications, creating a need for accessible definitions and overviews. Hosting the encyclopedia on the Forum—seeded with approximately 150 article stubs drafted by Pablo Stafforini under an EA Infrastructure Fund grant—is presented as a strategy to avoid the attrition suffered by previous wiki attempts by leveraging daily forum traffic, domain search engine visibility, automated tagging connections, and professional technical support. Gertler solicits community participation in editing and tagging ahead of a planned “editing festival.” The ensuing discussion examines the project’s viability, with commenters and contributors debating the ongoing labor costs of maintaining specialized entries against the alternative of editing Wikipedia directly. Participants note that while Wikipedia offers broader reach, its strict notability guidelines and restrictions on paid editing limit its utility for niche EA concepts. Commenters further propose technical refinements, including measures against link rot, user-friendly linking syntax, and quantitative tracking of editor contributions. – AI-generated abstract.