# Mech Interp Wiki Page and Why You Should Edit Wikipedia

**TL;DR:**  
A couple months ago, we (Jo and Noah) wrote the first *Wikipedia* article on [**Mechanistic Interpretability**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanistic_Interpretability). It was oddly missing despite Mech Interp’s visibility in alignment circles. We think Wikipedia is a top-of-funnel resource for journalists, policy staffers, and curious students, so filling that gap is cheap field-building. Seeing that the gap existed in one of the most important subfields in AIS, we suspect that there are probably many others. Below, we (1) list other alignment / EA topics that need pages or can be upgraded and (2) share some notes about editing Wikipedia. If you know the literature, an afternoon of edits may be surprisingly high-impact. 

*PS: We also think that there existing a wiki page for the field that one is working in increases one's credibility to outsiders - i.e. if you tell someone that you're working in AI Control, and the only pages linked are from LessWrong and Arxiv, this might not be a good look. *

Wikipedia pages worth (re)writing 
==================================

Below are topics with plentiful secondary literature yet their wiki pages are either missing or a [stub](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Stub).

*   [**Reward hacking**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reward_hacking)
*   [**AI Control**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_capability_control)
*   AI Evaluations
*   **Agent Foundations (and particular ideas from it like Mesa-Optimization)**
*   **Mechanistic superposition**
*   **People pages** – Neel Nanda, [Dan Hendrycks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Hendrycks), Chris Olah, Jacob Steinhardt; each now have mainstream press.
*   AI 2027 - got much media attention ([read by J. D. Vance](https://x.com/AlecStapp/status/1925138917143044154) and [NYT coverage](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/technology/ai-futures-project-ai-2027.html), for instance), so this seems like a priority
*   [The open letter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pause_Giant_AI_Experiments:_An_Open_Letter)
*   [**LessWrong**](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LessWrong&ved=2ahUKEwjOsZqZi52NAxVcv4kEHXwIMaIQFnoECB8QAQ&usg=AOvVaw2GCTIUM3gpTjQMa4UpXDTb)
*   [**Rationalist Community**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalist_community?wprov=sfti1#Beliefs)
*   Many ideas on the [concepts](https://www.lesswrong.com/wikitags/all).  
*   [EA concepts](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics). 

Wikipedia Tips
--------------

*   If you want to work on a new page, discuss with the community first by going to the talk page of a related topic or meta-page.
*   When making substantive updates, prepare the update in your user sandbox first.
*   Attribute claims (*Nature says x,* or *expert y says*) rather than advocate (*z is important because...*).
*   Special:WantedPages lets you filter red-links for terms like “alignment”, “Goodhart”, “interpretability”.
*   **In general, you shouldn't post before you understand** [**Wikipedia rules, norms, and guidelines**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Editing). We recommend consulting the following pages:[^r6m9pnb4ot]
    *   [WP:COI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest) (Conflict of interest)
    *   [WP:NOTE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability) (Notability)
    *   [WP:RS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources) (Reliable Sources)
    *   [WP:NOR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research) (No Original Research)

**Moral of the post**: Work on Wikipedia sites! It doesn't take that long, there is plenty of low hanging fruit, and it could be great for field-building. At the very least, trying it seems like a good experiment. 

[^r6m9pnb4ot]: Thanks to gjm in the comments for recommending this edit.