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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.
As far as search engines are concerned, every idea page is already a standalone page. Not an SEO expert but I cannot imagine search engines penalize URLs containing an ID.
‘page’ status
What is a page status? How did you determine that an idea’s page status is not the same as a Wikipedia article’s?
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.
How I find myself using Veritula at the moment is looking at the latest developing threads. Catching up on the context of that thread through clicking “Activity” is not time-effective; it reminds me of trying to catch up with a group chat full of messages. Threads naturally become messy, and not all points serve to advance the problem (some can be misunderstandings or micro-corrections). For this reason, there should be some summary that considers the following as context:
- The thread problem + metadata
- The discussion points under that thread (considering different branches) that relate to the problem.
- A prompt that aims at addressing “messiness” minimisation.
The summary should preserve substantive developments, competing answers and unresolved criticisms, while compressing resolved misunderstandings and linking back to the relevant posts.
If such a setup, including the summary, prompt and rules for what gets included, were kept open and criticiazable, we should arrive at a good system (so there should be a thread where we can iterate on ideas).
Top-level ideas need to be published to a specific discussion, which will cause some amount of silo-ing or similar dynamics.
See #2765. People can make discussions as general as they want. So there need not be any silo-ing.
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.
Users may wish to publish articles that don’t neatly fit into a discussion topic.
They can start a new discussion with as wide a topic as they want.
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.
You already don’t have to do divvy it up like that. Nothing is stopping you from creating a discussion called ‘Karl Popper’ and then posting a single, long-form, top-level idea where you present information in a hierarchy.
Since discussions themselves are criticisable, is there anything wrong with just titling a discussion 'Karl Popper' and then putting the equivalent of an encyclopedia article in the about section? That is functionally identical to what an article would be, but I am interested if you would prefer discussions not be used that way.
Since discussions themselves are criticisable…
They’re not, see #2871.
… is there anything wrong with just titling a discussion 'Karl Popper' and then putting the equivalent of an encyclopedia article in the about section?
Yes. About sections can’t be part of criticism chains.
… is there anything wrong with just titling a discussion 'Karl Popper' and then putting the equivalent of an encyclopedia article in the about section?
About sections are for context or background info, not content.
Given #2877, will this still be the case?
#2877 doesn’t mean you should put entire articles in the about section. (That’s still what top-level ideas are for.) It means that, if you’re willing to use the about section for that, then by your own logic there’s no need for this new feature.
Note: Discussions with outstanding top-level criticisms do not render a 'criticised' pill like ideas with outstanding criticisms do.
Continuing on from #2882, would it make sense to enable users to criticise the discussion/entry/topic, such that it would render a criticism pill?
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.
I just realised that it is possible to publish a top-level idea as a 'criticism' in a discussion, in the way I have advocated an article would be criticisable. I am struggling to understand what it means to criticise a discussion. @dennis-hackethal* may you please explain this?
I am struggling to understand what it means to criticise a discussion.
Top-level criticisms don’t criticize the discussion as a whole. They’re just criticisms of something. Anything. It depends on context.
For example, top-level criticisms in the Veritula – Meta discussion are often bug reports. So they’re criticisms of Veritula.
If ‘discussions’ take on a broader form, like we have discussed up to #2880, would this change? What if a user wishes to express that they take issue with something written in the entry/topic body text? I suppose they would quote it in their top-level criticism.
If ‘discussions’ take on a broader form, like we have discussed up to #2880, would this change?
Maybe. It could depend on which term Veritula adopts.
What if a user wishes to express that they take issue with something written in the entry/topic body text? I suppose they would quote it in their top-level criticism.
Yes.
Maybe about sections should themselves be criticizable… In which case they’re just regular top-level ideas. So maybe I could just remove about sections for future discussions. I’ll mull it over.
You wrote in #2856:
… is there anything wrong with just titling a discussion 'Karl Popper' and then putting the equivalent of an encyclopedia article in the about section?
If you are willing to do that, I don’t see the need for this new feature.
What you said you were after, posting ideas without starting a discussion (#2813), is possible now: you can post on your profile (#4399). And as of f27080b9, the activity feed has a Profiles tab for browsing those posts.
Archiving #2753 for now, since #2751 and #2877 still stand. If profile posts fall short of what you had in mind, leave a criticism and I’ll take a look.
Forget the term ‘article’ for a second. It sounds like you want the ability to post ideas without having to associate them with a discussion, is that right?
What if somebody wanted to post something related that isn’t a comment or criticism? Where/how would they do that?
The user could publish it as a separate independent idea, including a link to the idea they want to relate/refer to.
This is how relating discussions works currently. For instance, if I start a discussion on Bitcoin, I might want to connect it to the existing discussion on Zcash. At present, the only way to achieve this is by adding a link to the Zcash discussion within my new Bitcoin discussion.
I suspect you would agree with me that this approach to how discussions interact isn’t really an issue. I also think it wouldn’t be an issue for independently published ideas, for the same reasons.
Note: This has led me to the idea that links within Veritula could be bidirectional. Each idea could have an option to display all other ideas that refer to it. I will submit this as a top-level idea in this thread.
The user could publish it as a separate independent idea, including a link to the idea they want to relate/refer to.
Posting a sibling on an existing discussion is far easier.
I still think that Veritula already offers what you want – posting a single, top-level idea that is structured any way you like, to a new discussion whose title can be as open-ended as you like – but I’m sympathetic to your motivation.
Not every user is always interested in starting a discussion. Maybe they just want to put some information out there. And although others should still be able to discuss that information, criticism chains and all, that may not always be their primary motivation for posting the information in the first place.
So I’m open to replacing the word ‘discussion’ with a more general word. It should still communicate a sort of ‘grouping’ of ideas but need not be as narrow as ‘discussion’. Would that help?
ChatGPT suggestions:
Topic, thread, subject, space, entry, note / post / piece, context, cluster.
It’s also worth considering what each word would sound like in terms of UI elements. For example, ‘Start a new topic’, ‘Share a space’, etc.
So I’m open to replacing the word ‘discussion’ with a more general word. It should still communicate a sort of ‘grouping’ of ideas but need not be as narrow as ‘discussion’. Would that help?
Certainly. I think this makes a lot sense.
I think ‘entry’ is my favourite of the ones you mentioned (and of some others I explored with Gemini). ‘Topic’ is also alright, but seems more leading than ‘entry’. I like ‘entry’ because it seems the most agnostic to user intent, while also working fine with UI elements.
Interview published today, with one of the founders of Wikipedia:
He argues, like I do, that Wikipedia should allow multiple competing articles on each topic.
I partly agree with him on other problems he identifies, but unfortunately he doesn’t come at it from a Popperian angle.
Another idea: letting users post ideas to their own profile. Such ideas wouldn’t be part of a discussion.
Implemented as of ecc72ff. Check your profile.