What feature or behavior would you like to see: All existing LW posts, and future ones, automatically link jargon terms to LW articles (on the wiki or the main site, though maybe just the wiki to start) that explain the jargon. Ex.: the first instance of "FAI" in any post would link to http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/FAI Another idea is to make it possible for users to mouse over jargon terms and get tooltip definitions based on wiki pages. Logged-in users would have an option in their preferences to turn this auto-linking off. From an SEO perspective, it might make sense to introduce these new links gradually so it didn't look like some kind of automated link-building attempt. Tell us a story of a user using this feature (invent humorous character names): Grouchy Gary is reading Hacker News and comes across a story from Less Wrong. As he reads the story, he finds that LWers seem to use a lot of specialized jargon that's inaccessible to newcomers. Grouchy is frustrated by this. It takes him a while to figure out that he can use site:lesswrong.com and LW Wiki search to piece together what is being said, and he finds this inconvenient. He decides that LW is an echo chamber with its own bizarre set of ideas.
A few months later, after the feature is implemented, a friend of Grouchy's, Helpful Heather, sends Grouchy another link to LW. Grouchy finds this article much easier to read since all the terms he doesn't know have links to their related wiki pages. He finds himself clicking around, reading more and more interesting stuff, and thanks Helpful for the great link.
From notifyj...@gmail.com on July 01, 2013 04:37:05
What feature or behavior would you like to see: All existing LW posts, and future ones, automatically link jargon terms to LW articles (on the wiki or the main site, though maybe just the wiki to start) that explain the jargon. Ex.: the first instance of "FAI" in any post would link to http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/FAI Another idea is to make it possible for users to mouse over jargon terms and get tooltip definitions based on wiki pages. Logged-in users would have an option in their preferences to turn this auto-linking off. From an SEO perspective, it might make sense to introduce these new links gradually so it didn't look like some kind of automated link-building attempt. Tell us a story of a user using this feature (invent humorous character names): Grouchy Gary is reading Hacker News and comes across a story from Less Wrong. As he reads the story, he finds that LWers seem to use a lot of specialized jargon that's inaccessible to newcomers. Grouchy is frustrated by this. It takes him a while to figure out that he can use site:lesswrong.com and LW Wiki search to piece together what is being said, and he finds this inconvenient. He decides that LW is an echo chamber with its own bizarre set of ideas. A few months later, after the feature is implemented, a friend of Grouchy's, Helpful Heather, sends Grouchy another link to LW. Grouchy finds this article much easier to read since all the terms he doesn't know have links to their related wiki pages. He finds himself clicking around, reading more and more interesting stuff, and thanks Helpful for the great link.
Original issue: http://code.google.com/p/lesswrong/issues/detail?id=391