Talk:Less Wrong/2007 Articles/Summaries

Summary length

My guess is about 30% of my summaries are only one sentence long. Any commentary on whether that is sufficient? --John Maxwell IV 23:36, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

I think that that is too short. I aim for summaries that are about four or five sentences long. Very roughly speaking, I try to have a sentence for each principal thesis, and a sentence for each supporting argument. As a self-imposed constraint, I keep my summaries under 70 words.

---Tyrrell McAllister 23:37, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

I can't seem to pull off 70, but I'll always look for ways to improve brevity.

SilasBarta 20:21, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Importance of article summaries

There was a rumor on the SIAI mailing list that if the Less Wrong articles were not eventually summarized, Eliezer was going to do it himself. Here's a quote from an email I got from Eliezer that should dispel that rumor:

There needs to be a fairly large project to organize the OBLW material. Most of this needs to take the form of writing wiki articles that summarize concepts and link to explanatory blog posts, and rewriting the blog posts to link back to the wiki pages (which only an admin will be able to do).

As part of this general project, there's certainly a case for summarizing each page in at most a few sentences, in order to provide accessibility to the new reader, or remind old readers of where they read something.

But the most important part of the project, I think, is *summarizing* concepts in the Wiki (but *not* transforming entire blog posts to Wiki pages). See the current Wiki pages, especially the ones I've written, and this post:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/cg/proposal_use_the_wiki_for_concepts/

--John Maxwell IV 04:34, 21 August 2009 (UTC)