I've created a wiki at http://www.felicifia.org/wiki, with the help of James Evans. It uses the Mediawiki software. This has a couple of significant advantages:
> It's familiar, because it's what is used on Wikipedia
> It's separate from wiki farms, such as Wikispaces, Wikidot, Socialtext, Wetpaint, or Wikia. i.e. it involved more than just completing a sign-up form. Although this demands maintenance, it means we’re ad-free, and we have full control over our content.

If we get the wiki off the ground, it could help us to all arrive at a better shared understanding of utilitarianism. It could help anyone, utilitarian or otherwise, to learn how to make the world better. But a Wiki isn’t just a repository of knowledge. Just as the existence of the Wikipedia community proves something about people’s devotion of science, the existence of a Wiki Felicifia could become a monument to utilitarianism. It could defy critics by showing that utilitarianism can be comprehended and implemented. Of course, it will bring new people to Felicifia, but more importantly, it will provide a challenge and a sense of direction to utilitarians.

So what next? The wiki is fully functioning. We could edit it right away. But I suggest that we would be better served to make some preparations first:
1. We should consolidate other utilitarian wikis with Wiki Felicifia. There is Alan Dawrst’s Reducing Suffering Wiki, as well as at least one other project that I am aware of.
2. We should gather a launch team. We should ideally gather at least around five people, especially considering that Arepo is time-poor at the moment. Please post if you’re interested.
3. We should choose a launch period. It should last at least a week.
4. During the launch period, we should gather previously new and old members. In my experience, the main thing that a wiki needs to survive is a strong community. So recruitment will be the main thing we need to launch the wiki. When Arepo and I recruited over a year ago when Felicifia moved, we used forums and we used facebook. It was effective. This time, we should become even more resourceful.

If the launch of Wiki Felicifia fails somehow, then we will gain more information by having acting decisively. We will know that we have given it our best shot, and that the creation of a utilitarian wiki will not be possible again for some time. We will have also saved ourselves from spending huge volumes of time on a Wiki that is unpopular.

In summary: I made a wiki, with the help of James Evans. We should popularize it, partially to spread the understanding of utilitarianism, and to enrich this utilitarian community. We’ll get the best outcome by recruiting decisively. Let me know if you’re interested.
Ryan

Book and Article Summaries

How about detailed summaries of classic or important works (books or journal articles) as a way to get the ball rolling. The book summaries can then be referenced in higher-level explanations of consequentialism written by those who have a good grasp of the big picture. The core team can volunteer (or volunteer to be assigned) to write the first draft of summaries, then others can review and refine it as needed. If people commit to write about specific sources, then they might be motivated to read other interpretations of those source and add refine the wiki (i.e., develop expertise in that source).

Wiki Essays?

I'm not sure if the wiki format can be used to improve the cumulative value of the current discussion board. Some of the longer discussions become so disorganized that that it is difficult to glean the final conclusion(s) from them. I'm wondering if an 'essays' section would allow the discussions to become more organized. For example, if I write an essay and discuss three main points (and perhaps name the arguments and create subheadings to facilitate discussion) somebody else can make a comment after I make my point and say something like "others believe that the XYZ argument fails to address ABC thereby leads to 123."

What a coincidence! I've recently created two wikis in portuguese at wikia (these are the google translator links):

http://translate.google.com.br/translat ... co&act=url

http://translate.google.com.br/translat ... co&act=url

They are aimed at brazilian utilitarianists (few people yet) to promote knowledge about theoretical and practical utilitarianism respectively. The original links are:
http://tinyurl.com/utilitarismoetico
http://tinyurl.com/utilitarismopratico

Still looking for colaborators though. Hope we can make a big network of utilitarian websites.

I created a page about a Bentham book (only the first chapter is summarized so far)
wiki/index.php?title=Principles_of_Mora ... egislation

Feel free to contribute. I'll try to add to it a couple times per week.

Those look great Leo.

Principles of Morals and Legislation is looking good. I noticed you wrote Under Construction at the top of the page, so I created a template that we can put at the top of any such page.

I still think that we should make a serious recruitment effort for Wiki Felicifia, including coordinating efforts through a facebook event page, writing some material for forum signatures, editing an About Us, having an editing 'working bee', and more. If anyone thinks they might be interested in recruiting in this way and in other ways, please let me know.

Sounds great, RyanCarey -- I hope this effort goes well!

My Reducing Suffering wiki is small and not actively updated, so I don't think it will overlap with this wiki. In fact, I can leave it alone and use the Felicifia wiki in the future when I have things to share. It's much better to have a single, big wiki than two small ones, and the intended content is nearly identical.

Here's a link to the older (but dead for about a year) utilitarian wiki I've mentioned:

http://www.utilitarianism.com/wiki/inde ... =Main_Page

I'll transfer the relevant material to the new wiki soon.

It's a shame I only came across this wiki recently, Jesper. I would have enjoyed editing it. Anyway, the 25 or so articles there will definitely be beneficial, and I may be able to help with the transfer. Alan, thanks for also lending your support. I believe there are some useful pages on the Reducing Suffering Wiki: Caring About Wild Animals, Can insects feel pain, Wild Animal Links and Machine Functionalism. Could I transfer those to Wiki Felicifia?

It seems our next goal is to build a launch team and to recruit. The first step in this direction is the creation of our Wiki Felicifia Launch event page.

I've created a page on the Act/Omission Distinction based on an old web article of mine, hope it's the right sort of thing.

Glad to hear, Ryan. The Felicifia wiki project looks promising.

RyanCarey wrote:I believe there are some useful pages on the Reducing Suffering Wiki: Caring About Wild Animals, Can insects feel pain, Wild Animal Links and Machine Functionalism. Could I transfer those to Wiki Felicifia?

That would be great. Thanks!

Hi all,

The Wiki Felicifia (Wikicifia?) is a very interesting idea. I'm especially interested in what Ryan said about "If we get the wiki off the ground, it could help us to all arrive at a better shared understanding of utilitarianism. It could help anyone, utilitarian or otherwise, to learn how to make the world better." Presumably the Felicifia Forum helps with this too, and the earlier Felicifia blogs. That was one of my main motivations in setting up the blogs back then. But I imagine a wiki can help enhance understanding in different ways. In particular, whereas the forum and the blogs have been good for facilitating conversation, a wiki seems ideally suited for developing content on static topics. And there are plenty of static topics within utilitarianism that we might write entries on. Indeed, a lot of the writing I did back when I was most active at Felicifia was on static topics. One reason I stopped being as active is that I had already worked through all the static topics that I wanted to work through, and so I moved on to other endeavors. (The other reason is that I started having more in the way of other endeavors to move on to.)

Given that, I would be delighted to dig through the old Felicifia blog content and make it available for the wiki as appropriate. We had writing on e.g. preference vs. hedonistic utility, infinite utility, measurement issues, etc. Between the initial posts and the accompanying comments, you/we could probably piece together decent first drafts of several wiki articles. If any of you would be interested in this, please send me an email in case I get distracted again and don't check back on this forum thread.

One other thing: If you don't mind, I'd be delighted if you would, as the wiki project unfolds, take a little time to reflect on how you learn as a wiki participant vs. a forum participant vs. other activities. I could use your insights to inform my own teaching and other endeavors. I'm sure we could find several ways to make this mutually beneficial.

Regards,
Seth

Seth, I very much like the proposal of uploading the old Felicifia content to the wiki, since there are many times when I wish I could cite that material. That said, I don't expect to have much bandwidth to help out myself, but I'm definitely supportive of the idea.

I'm excited about the Wiki
I'm curious how free users should be in creating pages they think are relevant to the Wiki. I'd be interested in getting a page that has a list of issues that are considered of greatest concern when doing the utilitarian calculus. May I create one and populate it with several (hoping others join in and make the list more thorough)?

Of course, YBoris, and remember never to ask permission before writing a new page on the wiki ever again! Mistakes are easily reversed and improvements are easily made. If you can, link from The utilitarianism page to your new page using This notation: [[|]]

I'm in, and I'm guessing we're going with the "throw lots of stuff onto the wiki and fix it later" approach, 'cause that's what I'm doing.

This is a great project! I hope it succeeds.

Hi all, feel free to edit Wiki Felicifia once again. It's now located atfelicifia.com instead of felicifia.org/wiki. I thought we might as well put the dot com address to some use! I've transferred across the data. Unfortunately, some data was lost in the transfer. My most recent backup was from Thursday, so several days of edits were lost. It's a shame, but I haven't been able to recover them. I think one user, with a name along the lines of Expanded Circle, will have to register again too. To ward against future mistakes, I'll back the website up for carefully and frequently in the future.

I've upgraded Mediawiki to version 1.17.0. Now we're using UTF8 rather than LATIN1.
> This allowed me to make some neat navigation boxes at the bottom of every page, along with some/ categories. I think that'll help us to see how pages relate to each other, how they fit into the bigger picture, which ones are lacking, etc. (You can't miss them, they're pretty obvious).
> This is also going to help with future anti-spam measures.

I hope you all enjoy the update. Over the coming weeks, I'll start to address the spam issue, and also i'll start to maximise our exposure to google. Also, if there are any teething issues with the update - let us hope not - then let me know.

> My most recent backup was from Thursday, so several days of edits were lost.

Your ISP should have nightly backups (unless you have the machine at home). If you are doing your own backup, you'll need to verify that the backup works and you know how to recover files. I hade backups of the big changes that I made, but I had to retype some things and some edits are lost. I wrote a program this morning to take a snapshot of the main pages, but it doesn't capture any of the internal stuff (user database, logs, etc.).

It's now located atfelicifia.com instead of felicifia.org/wiki. I thought we might as well put the dot com address to some use!

There are some SEO reasons for using just the one domain for everything..

James Evans indeed does have a more recent backup. Thanks for pointing this out, Rehoot. Using it, I've reuploaded:
Criticisms of utilitarianism‎*
‎Assumptions and antecedents of utilitarianism*
Discounted utilitarian criterion*
Indirect consequences
Consequentialism
a minor edit to Principles of Morals and Legislation.

*In the former three, I've put the older material on the talk page, for editors' discretion regarding what should be reintegrated into the page. In the latter three, I've reintegrated the material by myself because it was self explanatory.

The question regarding the SEO advantages of using just the one domain for everything is how substantial they are. I'm content to defer to others' expertise in this area. We mustn't forget that any SEO advantages have to be weighed against how memorable the URL is. Perhaps the forum eventually ought to move to felicifia.com/forum. And/or redirects could be used. Thoughts?

It's hard to quantify these things, but my impression is that your overall domain authority is pretty important. So if you want .com for memorability there's a case for using felicifia.com/forum if you can redirect all the old threads. If you stick with .org then redirecting people from .com will catch those who don't remember the right domain.

Ah, interesting.

On another note, I've an error that stops us from logging into the wiki has surfaced: "Wiki Felicifia uses cookies to log in users. You have cookies disabled. Please enable them and try again.". I'm looking into it.

edit: I'll thoroughly investigate this problem on Sunday.

Update: Wiki Felicifia is currently down. This appears to be due to a problem with permissions and probably has the same cause as the login error. I have forwarded all relevant information to James Evans, the administrator of our server, who is working on the problem. I'll note that no data has been lost.

It shouldn't be too long before Wiki Felicifia is repaired but I'll share extra information as it comes to hand.

Update 2: We're back. The Wiki is back online. We can log in normally again.

We were over our quota and this caused the login errors and the brief downtime. The quota has generously been tripled by James Evans and Knightsbridge.net, so the problem should not happen again.

To reiterate, no data was lost. So if you'll all help, it's time to get on with improving the wiki!

The wiki is overrun by spambots - they have created pages for exciting things like cialis and japanese dating sites. I'd be if it wasn't so

Would disallowing non-registered visitors from editing the site avoid the trouble?

That's the old address. The current address is spam-free and I've installed one modification so far to keep it that way. It's www.felicifia.com.
This weekend, I'm deleting the old address, replace it with a redirect and delete all links to it that I can find.
edit: ...and done. Next, fixing the forum's RSS feed.

yboris wrote:Would disallowing non-registered visitors from editing the site avoid the trouble?

felicifia.com is now under attack. Until a solution is found, please consider requiring registration and requiring a manual approval process for new users.

This page might help with changing user creation rights:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Pr ... t_creation

disable anonymous edit rights:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Pr ... us_editing

Thanks for letting me know, Rehoot.

So far, I've just required registration. Once a user is registered, it's already easier to revert their changes at once and ban them.

This evening, I'll get to work at either restoring from a backup or reverting all the changes. I'll evaluate whether further measures are needed too.

I think I removed all the spam from the first attack on felicifia.com, but I can't do that on a regular basis due to the time requirements and my lame Internet connection.

I'm not sure about the following page. There is a chance that it contained spam when it was imported from elsewhere:
http://felicifia.com/index.php?title=Te ... Transclude

That page might need some manual correction or comparison to the original source.

I noticed that some pages are tagged with "practice." I'm guessing that many of those tags should be removed:
http://felicifia.com/index.php?title=Category:Practice

Thanks for removing all the spam, rehoot. There are no obvious problems.

With regard to the transclude template, it was imported from wikipedia. The code is the same, there's no spam. Granted, it looks like a mess. That's because it includes other templates or modifications that are located at wikipedia, not wiki felicifia. I could work on porting them across with no guarantee of success. What's important to me, though, is that the template functions 100% of the time, not that it's documented in five languages etc., so I'm loathe to attempt to change it.

With regard to the 'practice' tag, it's a counterpart to the theory tag. It's practice as in practical ethics. Not practice as in 'improving a skill by training'. If you favour a particular unambiguous title, I'll happily make the change

With regard to future anti-spam measures for this kind of attack, Rehoot, if you have some suggestion for the Felicifia Wiki as you've suggested in "thought for content for the felicifia wiki" thread, then my PM inbox is always open. Same is true for anyone's suggestions with any suggested improvement for any part of felicifia whatsoever.

Lastly, but not least, the spam situation puts a fine point on the concept of a wiki felicifia launch. Spam comes randomly, but on average, at a constant rate. The total work involved in removing it is proportional to the life of the wiki. If we concentrate our effort in the upcoming few weeks, then the effort involved in managing troublemakers will pale in comparison to the amount of good work done. I do believe in this wiki's capacity to spread understanding of utilitarianism and outline a shared utilitarian vision. So over the coming few weeks, you'll see more edits than usual from me and I hope the wiki project finds support from the members of felicifia too!

Two more changes:
> slightly adjusting felicifia.org including renaming The Life You Can Save forum as a philanthropy forum
> I've fixed the 'main article' template, see here, which should help us to minimise redundancy.

There's a lot of spam on the Wiki. Gwern over at Less Wrong offers a potential solution, though:

So Trike has enabled a MediaWiki extension called the edit filter: a small functional programming language which lets you define predicates applied to edits which trigger one of a set of actions, like banning a user, deleting an edit/page, or stopping an edit from going through. I have so far defined one rule: page creation is forbidden for users younger than 24 hours. This so far seems to have worked well; spam pages have fallen from 5-10/day to ~5 over the past 2 weeks.

When I try to log in, the following message is displayed:

Login error
Wiki Felicifia uses cookies to log in users. You have cookies disabled. Please enable them and try again.

I couldn't create a new account anymore, either:

Login error
The user account was created, but you are not logged in. Wiki Felicifia uses cookies to log in users. You have cookies disabled. Please enable them, then log in with your new username and password.

Here is some advice on how to solve the problem. On the other hand, leaving it the way it is solves the spam problem!