Consider looking for related projects for help or ask at the Teahouse. If you are not currently a project participant and wish to help you may still participate in the project. This status should be changed if collaborative activity resumes.
Welcome to WikiProject Effective Altruism. Several Wikipedians have formed this collaboration resource and group dedicated to improving Wikipedia's coverage of topics relevant to effective altruism. If you would like to help, please add yourself as a participant in the project, inquire on the talk page, and see the to-do list, below.
Our goal is to improve and create articles on topics relevant to effective altruism. Our WikiProject scope includes people and organizations which identify with effective altruism. It also includes topics such as neglected tropical diseases which are perceived by a substantial portion of the effective altruism community to be relevant to doing good effectively. If you would like to create a new article, please ensure that the topic meets Wikipedia's notability guidelines.
There are many topics related to effective altruism that don't have an existing page despite meeting Wikipedia's notability criteria. See Help:Your first article for basic guidelines on how to write an article. For inspiration on article topic ideas, see the list of articles on the EA Forum Wiki (though note that many of the articles listed there will not meet Wikipedia's notability requirements). Here are some examples of pages which we could create:
We also want to improve existing articles related to effective altruism. It may be relatively important and tractable to improve articles from "stub" or "start class" to "C class", so that the article meets the needs of a casual reader.
Here are some other articles that are especially in need of improvement:
Unlimit Health: sourcing needs major improvement as of January 2024
William MacAskill: as of December 3, 2021, the section summarizing Doing Good Better is quite poor and fails to convey the most important points of the book. This article had 1,621 views in the past 30 days.
The Life You Can Save: This article needs improvement. In particular, it does not provide page numbers when summarizing Singer's arguments. As of January 4, 2021, the article had 1,156 pageviews in the past 30 days.
Suffering risks: as of December 4, 2021, this is very brief and does not have any content on why such risks are plausible. This had 337 page views in the past 30 days.
Immigration reform is a stub. It had 1,333 page views in the past 30 days before December 4, 2021.
Scope neglect: On the talk page, someone wrote, "'Subjects were told that either 2,000, or 20,000, or 200,000 migrating birds were affected annually, for which subjects reported they were willing to pay $80, $78 and $88 respectively.[2]' I don't get at all why this is considered surprising. All this says is that people consider $80/year an amount they could relatively easily live without." I believe the study was designed in a way that was insensitive to the participants' income, so the article could be improved here.
(mostly complete for the main articles) Add ((WikiProject Effective Altruism)) to the beginning of talk pages of relevant articles, with a class and importance rating. You can see pages that already have this template at Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:WikiProject Effective Altruism. One heuristic for how important a page is, besides its relevance to effective altruism, is how many views it receives. You can see this information by clicking "Page information" in the sidebar of Wikipedia. See Wikipedia:Assessing articles for more information about how to rate the quality and importance of an article
Prioritisation of articles for improvement or creation[edit]
Improving or creating some Wikipedia articles can easily be 1,000x more socially valuable than others. Therefore, prioritisation is crucial. From the linked article: "The key factors to consider for prioritisation are (i) pageviews, (ii) audience, (iii) topic, (iv) room for improvement, and (v) language."
Topic: All else equal, prioritise improving articles that rate higher on this WikiProject's importance scale, especially the "top importance articles" and the "high importance article".
Please feel free to add yourself here, and to indicate any areas of particular interest.
RegMonkey (talk·contribs) I'm interested in development economics, particularly impact evaluation in global health
Ruthgrace (talk·contribs) I want to get the main Effective Altruism article to Good Article status. 17:06, 3 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Qzekrom (talk·contribs) I've been focused on creating new articles, adding images to articles, and doing maintenance tasks for the WikiProject such as article assessment. I'm also interested in improving philosophy- and social science-related articles relevant to EA. 17:52, 7 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Maonao (talk·contribs) I'm interested in improving content on global catastrophic biorisks and AI. 18:24, 3 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Seaweed_Llama (talk·contribs) I am interested in helping to improve the main EA articles. Beyond those, I'm interested in improving EA-related articles on philosophy/social-science, global health, and animal rights. 20:12, 3 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Eric_Herboso (talk·contribs) Within EA, my work connects to effective animal advocacy, global development, and longtermism, and my interests are in philosophy & mathematics. 23:02, 3 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Cuvs (talk) I am interested in working working on the main EA pages and helping them achieve Good Article status. 00:01, 4 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Ego.Eudaimonia (talk) I'm particularly interested in issues related to international security (especially bio and nuclear security) and philosophy. Also more than happy to help with improving the main EA article to get it to qualify for Good Article status. 15:14, 3 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Jmill1806 (talk·contribs) This is an interesting topic, so I'm happy to help where I can. 02:36, 5 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
ChristianKl ❪✉❫ (I care about issues of rationality, longtermism and X-risk) 12:11, 16 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
LukeEure (talk ·contribs) Want to help get expand articles on EA topics, especially those related to movement building, longtermism, global development. 10:58, 24 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Tommyren (talk·contribs) I am a member of Princeton EA. As a sociology major, I am particularly interested in the social construction of moral spheres, science and technology studies, and the structure of the charity sector. 23:58, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Nathan PM Young (talk·contribs) I am an EA interested in forecasting and collaboration @nathanpmyoung on twitter
Bochykiko New to working on Wikipedia. San Francisco native.
Tinkerer Thinker (talk ·contribs) I want to learn more about EA by contributing to this project.
Keller Scholl (talk·contribs) Interested and with a background in Effective Altruism, long-time drive-by editor. Interested in getting into making articles.
Please feel free to list your new Effective Altruism-related articles here (newer articles at the top, please). Any new articles that have an interesting or unusual fact in them, are at least over 1,500 characters, don't have any dispute templates on them, and cite their sources, should be suggested for the Did you know? box on the Wikipedia Main Page. Suggestions should be made within 7 days after the article is created.
By assessing each article's quality and importance, we can keep tabs on which articles are most in need of improvement—high-importance, low-quality articles. Wikipedia:Assessing articles and Wikipedia:Content assessment provide guidelines on how to assess an article's quality and importance.
Some meaningful content, but most readers will need more
May need improvements to organisation, grammar, spelling, writing style, jargon use and citations
C
Still major gaps, but useful to a casual reader
May have problems with clarity, balance, flow, bias or original research.
B
Mostly complete, may not satisfy a serious student or researcher
Reasonably well-written
A
Essentially complete, very useful to readers
Well-written, clear, well referenced
Many pages have been rated as start-class by other WikiProjects when in fact they satisfy a C-class rating. Sometimes, this can be because the assessment is outdated. As Wikipedia:Assessing articles writes, "Assessments are useful if done right, but are often done wrong. Many articles are given lower quality or importance ratings than they merit based on the criteria. A common mistake is to assess short articles as stub or start class even when there is nothing more to be said about the subject, and longer articles as B (or higher) class even when there is much more to be said."
There are four main categories of an article's importance: top, high, mid, and low. An article's importance is independent of its quality. When assessing an article's importance, you can consider the following questions:
From the perspective of effective altruism, how important is it to have a high-quality article on Wikipedia on this topic? If you were writing a textbook on effective altruism, how important would it be to cover the article's subject in the textbook?
How many views has the article received? You can view this information by clicking "Page information" on the sidebar on the left. Articles that are more widely read are more important.
How relevant is the article's subject to effective altruism? How much of the article's content is relevant?