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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.Idea: Veritula Articles
Currently, Veritula is a discussion website. I believe it could one day do what Wikipedia (and Grokipedia) do, but better.
A step towards that would be enabling users to produce ‘articles’ or something similar.
An ‘Articles’ tab would be distinct from the ‘Discussions’ tab, featuring explanatory documents similar to encyclopedia entries, and perhaps also blogpost-like content.
Articles focus on distilling the good ideas created/discovered in the discussions that occur on Veritula.
‘Articles’ are functionally no different than top-level ideas in a discussion thread.
Top-level ideas in a discussion thread are not standalone pages.
One thing that Wikipedia does well is having a structured, high level page for each idea/subject. This enables readers to get a good sense of an idea quickly.
Right now, to get a good sense of an idea on Veritula, a user often has to study a branching discussion, which can take a lot of work depending on how the discussion played out. A discussion also emphasises things that were relevant to the disagreements that took place in the discussion, rather than distilling the most important elements of an idea into a hierarchy, regardless of disagreements that took place in getting to it (like an encyclopedia entry does).
Top-level ideas in a discussion thread are not standalone pages.
Every idea (including every top-level one) has a separate, linkable page. You can reach it by clicking the link starting with the # sign.
These are not standalone pages in the sense that a Wikipedia page is a standalone page.
Articles would have the same ‘page’ status as the discussion pages that currently exist. (Forgive my lack of technical vocabulary.)
A possible counter-factual that may or may not be relevant to the goals of Veritula: An article with title metadata ‘Boron’ would presumably be much more search engine-friendly than a top-level ideas for Boron where the metadata title is ‘#[ID]’ and the actual desired title is merely included as the first line of the body text, while it is effectively a subpage of a discussion of another name.
Right now, to get a good sense of an idea on Veritula, a user often has to study a branching discussion, which can take a lot of work depending on how the discussion played out.
While this is true for most existing discussions, it’s not a fundamental limitation of discussions in general. For example, ‘How Does Veritula Work?’ has several long-form posts without much discussion. It just depends on what kinds of posts people want to submit.
See #2777.
While it is true that discussions don’t restrict people from posting long-form content like what is on the ‘How Does Veritula Work?’ discussion, that is not the intuitive function of a discussion thread. I believe the long-form content in that discussion is much more natural to an article format.
I think it is worth noting that I am much more excited to publish standalone articles than to drop top-level ideas into discussion topics.
I am not marking this as a criticism, as my personal desires in this respect may be irrelevant to the goals of Veritula.
Top-level ideas need to be published to a specific discussion, which will cause some amount of silo-ing or similar dynamics.
Didn’t you want competing articles on some topic? In which case the same criticism applies to articles as well, unless I’m missing something.
I used to think that articles would need to be grouped in some way, but I no longer think so. Articles will often compete, even if they aren’t about the same or even similar topic.
E.g. an article ‘Easy-to-Vary Explanations’ would compete with an article ‘The Simulation Hypothesis’
Users would be able to point out and connect conflicting articles, but that wouldn’t cause them to be connected by topic, but rather by conflict.
I think so. If Veritula did implement articles, the first thing I’d want is the ability to criticize them; to submit deeply nested counter-criticisms; and to render a label showing how many pending criticisms an article has, calculated based on criticism chains. Which is just what Veritula has already.
If Veritula did implement articles, the first thing I’d want is the ability to criticize them; to submit deeply nested counter-criticisms; and to render a label showing how many pending criticisms an article has, calculated based on criticism chains.
I agree, and I think here you have inadvertently pointed at a key difference between discussions and articles. In terms of implementation, articles would be a near clone of discussions, except that the articles themselves can be criticised by users, including all the functionality that articles being criticisable may one day come with, like entire articles going dormant if they don’t answer criticisms within a certain period.
A couple of examples: If I wanted to keep and share information on Karl Popper, it would be a lot more intuitive to produce an article on him in encyclopedia style—where I can present information in a hierarchy, rather than creating a discussion and then making each detail about him a top-level idea, which is more chaotic. The same would be true if I wanted to make articles on CR terms—this doesn’t seem very natural to do in a Veritula discussion, but would be very natural in a series of Veritula articles, one for each term.
It also favours this articles idea that implementing it would be fairly straightforward, due to how much could be carried over from the discussions implementation. It makes it low cost to try.
If I wanted to keep and share information on Karl Popper, it would be a lot more intuitive to produce an article on him in encyclopedia style—where I can present information in a hierarchy, rather than creating a discussion and then making each detail about him a top-level idea, which is more chaotic. The same would be true if I wanted to make articles on CR terms—this doesn’t seem very natural to do in a Veritula discussion, but would be very natural in a series of Veritula articles, one for each term.
Just because something feels unintuitive or unnatural to you doesn’t mean it isn’t the right way for it to be done in the grand scheme of things.
If a goal of Veritula is for it to eventually be widely used, it should cater to at least some of what people are used to. The articles and encyclopedia formats are the most standard way for high-level information to be presented in written form, and internet users expect different kinds of content in articles vs discussions.