Gwern Branwen

I've learned far more from editing Wikipedia than I learned from any of my school or college training.

Everything I end up learning about writing, I learned by editing on Wikipedia.

I think building something like an alternative to Wikipedia could be a good training ground.

For me, it was beneficial to combine rabbit holing with Wikipedia because on Wikipedia, you know, they generally would not have many good articles on the thing that I was currently in this rabbit hole on.

So it was this very natural progression from the relatively kind of passive experience of rabbit holing and being obsessed with something and learning about it where you just read everything you can about the topic to kind of compiling that and synthesizing it onto Wikipedia.

You go from piecemeal kind of like a little bit here, there, picking up different things to writing full articles.

And once you're able to get to the point where you're writing full Wikipedia articles that are good and summarize all your work, now you can go off on your own and pursue entirely different kinds of writing now that you've learned to complete things and get them across the finish line.

It would be pretty difficult to do that with the current English Wikipedia.

It's objectively just a much larger Wikipedia than it was back in 2004.

not only are there far more articles filled in at this point, the editing community is also just much more hostile to content contribution, particularly like very detailed, obsessive, rabbit-holey kind of research projects.

They would just like delete it or tell you that, you know, it's not good for original research or that you're not using approved sources.

Possibly you'd have someone who just kind of decided to get their jollies that day by deleting large swaths of your specific articles.

That, of course, is going to make you like very angry and make you probably just want to quit and leave before you really get going.

So I don't quite know how you would figure out this alternative to Wikipedia, one that kind of like empowers the rabbit holer as much as the old Wikipedia did.

When you're an editor with Wikipedia, you have this very like empowered attitude because you know that anything in it could be wrong and you could be the one to fix it.

If you see something that doesn't make sense to you, that could be an opportunity for an edit.

That was at least the Wiki attitude.

Anyone could fix it, and anyone, right, includes you.

It would eat basically as much time in my life as I let it.

I could easily spend eight hours a day reviewing edits and improving articles while I was rabbit holing.