4 ms·

Chris, will Distill support community editing of articles like Wikipedia does?

• colah3 10y ago
  Each Distill article is a github repository, so people can make pull requests, but we mostly encourage people to use that to make corrections. If it's technically feasible to do community editing of articles, why don't we encourage that? It's actually a pretty deep question about how you think about research distillation. It's tempting to see distillation as putting a layer of polish on ideas -- something that people can just jump into and do. But I think it's much more about deeply internally digesting ideas, perhaps with a few collaborators, and putting it together into a framework of thinking. For that, you want a small number of people with a strong vision and a deep investment in the article. If other people have a different vision, they can write a different article. (My impression is that wikipedia works very well for getting lots of facts onto a page, but does a much more mediocre job of distilling ideas.)
  • bfirsh 10y ago
    Wikipedia seems to be the closest thing we have to broad distillation right now. It works pretty well if you are researching a subject in depth. The technical articles tend to be written by experts for experts and they have lots of links to primary sources. But, as you hint at, they are poor quality because they are being written by a committee. I would love to see a collection of community written distillation articles, as you describe. Perhaps with some kind of taxonomy like Wikipedia's.