Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Effective Altruism

Made some redirects

I've created some redirects that could be expanded into full articles:

• Sendwave - currently redirects to WorldRemit
• Moral cluelessness - currently redirects to Utilitarianism#Predicting consequences

Qzekrom (she/her • talk) 17:47, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Invitation to join WikiProject

Hello Eric Herboso, Ego.Eudaimonia, Vermeer dawn, Sir Paul, Throughthemind, Cuvs, 4hedons, RyanCarey1, Sbyrnes321, Xodarap00, Niel.Bowerman, Silence, Biogeographist, Max.schons, Seaweed_Llama, and MontanNito!

Thank you all for supporting the WikiProject proposal for effective altruism! Now that the WikiProject has been created, I would like to invite you to take a few moments to list yourself as a participant of the WikiProject here: Wikipedia:WikiProject Effective Altruism#Participants. Although this WikiProject is currently very barebones, over the coming weeks, I will be working to develop it further. —Enervation (talk) 19:10, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Page for Centre for Effective Altruism

Currently, CEA doesn't have its own page; Centre for Effective Altruism instead redirects to 80,000 Hours, but 80K is only one suborg of CEA. We should probably create a page for CEA describing all of its current and former suborgs, including:

• 80,000 Hours
• Giving What We Can
• Forethought Foundation
• EA Funds

At the least, we can create a category for all of CEA's suborgs and programs. Qzekrom (she/her • talk) 19:13, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

I can't easily find reliable sources covering the Centre for Effective Altruism in substantive detail, which is a big issue for its Wikipedia:Notability. See Google News results for CEA—the articles just mention it in passing. I see you've already created a category for CEA, which looks good to me. Enervation (talk) 22:06, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

It doesn't have to be news sources. You can also use books as sources, so long as they meet the WP:ORG criteria. Not all the books in this link qualify, but so long as the author isn't a CEA employee, and so long as the mention of CEA in the book is significant (and not just a single line or page), these should work as the necessary requirements for notability. (I haven't actually checked to ensure that enough book sources exist, but it seems likely that they do from a quick glance at the search engine result page.) — Eric Herboso 23:27, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Improving the Effective Altruism article

I've seen several people mention a desire to improve the main article on effective altruism. What would be the best way to coordinate those efforts? Coordinating on the talk page for that article? Coordinating here? Somewhere else? I haven't done much collaborative editing work so I wanted to ask up front. I believe I saw Ruthgrace, Biogeographist, and Enervation mention interest in this, among others. Thanks! Seaweed Llama (talk) 20:30, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Please take a look at Talk:Effective altruism if you are interested in improving the main article; there is some backstory (past discussion) there that you can review. Then just go ahead and start editing the article, which is how most progress on Wikipedia happens. If you want to make changes that you think will be controversial, you can ask for feedback at Talk:Effective altruism first if you wish, but again, WP:BOLD editing is encouraged on Wikipedia. Biogeographist (talk) 20:45, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Assessing page quality

A lot of articles related to effective altruism are presently rated as "start class" according to other WikiProjects. But when I look at the project based on the guidelines set out in Wikipedia:Assessing articles and Wikipedia:Content assessment, I find myself wanting to assign the article a higher rating. Here is the description of "start class":

An article that is developing but still quite incomplete. It may or may not cite adequate reliable sources. The article has a usable amount of good content but is weak in many areas. Quality of the prose may be distinctly unencyclopedic, and Wikipedia:Manual of Style compliance non-existent. The article should satisfy fundamental content policies, such as Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons. Frequently, the referencing is inadequate, although enough sources are usually provided to establish verifiability.

OpenAI and The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity are rated as start-class, but the articles are actually quite thorough and well-written. Cari Tuna is rated as stub-class, but I'm not sure how if there's much to expand on the article.

Besides following the guidelines from Wikipedia:Content assessment, we want the process of content assessment to be useful for understanding which articles should be prioritized for improvement, and which are already decent enough. For that purpose, it's not useful to rate most pages as start-class even when they are quite adequate, lest we label all the inadequate articles as stub class even when they are not stubs.

Would I be wrong to rate these sorts of articles as C-class or higher? —Enervation (talk) 22:30, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

@Enervation: You can change the quality ratings if you think they deserve a higher rating, but for now, we should only do it for this WikiProject. We can ask the other projects that have banners on each page if it's okay to update their ratings to match, or otherwise coordinate with them. Qzekrom (she/her • talk) 23:10, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Okay, sounds good to me! —Enervation (talk) 23:17, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

My experience is that the ratings rarely get changed even when they become wildly inaccurate, either because nobody cares about the ratings, and/or because nobody thinks it's their place to change the ratings. So if a rating seems wrong, it probably is. I wouldn't overthink it. Just my opinion. --Steve (talk) 01:30, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Priorisation

I have created a list to gather all relevant articles and their pageviews in the last 30 days: Wikipedia:WikiProject Effective Altruism/Article pageviews. This might be helpful in order to prioritise on which articles to work. --MontanNito (talk) 22:52, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

@MontanNito: It would be best to create such a list here on Wikipedia so that it stays permanently part of the freely licensed record in the wiki. You can create a sortable table in a wiki page, so it's not necessary to send Wikipedians off-wiki to view one. You could put the table in a subpage of this WikiProject, or you could just put it in this talk page section. Biogeographist (talk) 23:10, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

@Biogeographist: Sure. Done: Wikipedia:WikiProject Effective Altruism/Article pageviews. Feel free to move it around if you think it should be in another location. (I edit the first comment and change the external link for convenience of future readers.) MontanNito (talk) 23:37, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Request for edits on ACE

I have a conflict of interest for the Animal Charity Evaluators page because I'm a part of that organization. Could I get someone else here (who doesn't have a COI) to make a few edits to that page? The infobox has old info: it lists an executive director, managing director, and managing editor that no longer work at ACE. Also, current structure at ACE has the ED at the top, and then the director level positions are all equal under it, so it feels weird to list only some director positions and not others. My recommendation is to list only the ED, but as I have a COI, I'll defer to whatever others think is best here. — Eric Herboso 23:18, 3 December 2021 (UTC)