Hello all,
Because Progit (progit.org) is not freely licensed (the license forbids commercial use), and contributing to it is unnecessarily difficult, I have begun working on a textbook about Git on Wikibooks, and I've reserved space for a chapter on Gerrit: http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Git/Gerrit_Code_Review&action=...
If anyone would like to help with that chapter, or the larger Git textbook, I'd be happy to help you along as you get comfortable with Wikibooks. You can email me privately (I think you can see my email address), or you can leave me a message on the wiki: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User_talk:Mike.lifeguard
Cheers, -Mike
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I wanted to spur discussion about part of this, specifically:
On 10-03-07 10:41 AM, Mike.lifeguard wrote:
Because Progit (progit.org) is not freely licensed (the license forbids commercial use), and contributing to it is unnecessarily difficult, I have begun working on a textbook about Git on Wikibooks
Progit is a textbook about git, which is hosted in a git repository on GitHub. This means that if you want to fix errors or translate, you can fork the repository, make your changes, and the author can incorporate them if they want to.
This gives the illusion of being able to contribute, when really your edits are held hostage by one person. Not only are they a bottleneck, but they can also refuse to accept your changes. More to the point, in this case, they don't seem keen on accepting anything that isn't simply fixing errata, or translating the English text.
Have other folks encountered other seemingly-open textbook-writing efforts that aren't really open upon further inspection? How can we capitalize on the frustration that might arise when people are unable to contribute in practice (or doing so is more difficult than on Wikibooks)?
More to the point, I'm concerned (you may have seen my recent posts to foundation-l) that using Flagged Revisions is killing Wikibooks because it is taking us towards this seemingly-open-but-not-really model of editing, which is contrary to the spirit of openness which got us this far. I'd be interested to hear whether people think it is time to abandon the extension, revamp the configuration, or something else.
Thanks, - -Mike
At most, 23% of the English Wikibooks main space pages have been sighted. I for one am happy that vandals do not get the instant gratification of edits showing up immediately to readers. Simply by logging in you will see the most recent version by default and if you intend to make serious contributions you should be making an account anyway. The one problem would be lack of people to sight changes and that problem stems not from Flagged Revisions but rather the state of Wikibooks in general. Without Flagged Revisions that same state would yield a slow degradation of all the pages as subtle vandalism slips through the cracks without any notice.
If (English) Wikibooks is dying it's because of a lack of critical mass, the compartmentalization inherent in having textbooks each with their own scope (lack of community), intimidation of newcomers in contributing to books that appear to be the work of one person (lack of continuity between books as one would see with pages in an encyclopedia or dictionary), and the steeper learning curve due to more complex link syntax and structure required for textbooks. These are just issues derived from what Wikibooks is and I don't feel the implementation of Flagged Revisions or not on Wikibooks will have any meaningful effect compared to these other factors.
- Adrignola
On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 8:59 AM, Mike.lifeguard mike.lifeguard@gmail.comwrote:
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I wanted to spur discussion about part of this, specifically:
On 10-03-07 10:41 AM, Mike.lifeguard wrote:
Because Progit (progit.org) is not freely licensed (the license forbids commercial use), and contributing to it is unnecessarily difficult, I have begun working on a textbook about Git on Wikibooks
Progit is a textbook about git, which is hosted in a git repository on GitHub. This means that if you want to fix errors or translate, you can fork the repository, make your changes, and the author can incorporate them if they want to.
This gives the illusion of being able to contribute, when really your edits are held hostage by one person. Not only are they a bottleneck, but they can also refuse to accept your changes. More to the point, in this case, they don't seem keen on accepting anything that isn't simply fixing errata, or translating the English text.
Have other folks encountered other seemingly-open textbook-writing efforts that aren't really open upon further inspection? How can we capitalize on the frustration that might arise when people are unable to contribute in practice (or doing so is more difficult than on Wikibooks)?
More to the point, I'm concerned (you may have seen my recent posts to foundation-l) that using Flagged Revisions is killing Wikibooks because it is taking us towards this seemingly-open-but-not-really model of editing, which is contrary to the spirit of openness which got us this far. I'd be interested to hear whether people think it is time to abandon the extension, revamp the configuration, or something else.
Thanks,
- -Mike
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Textbook-l mailing list Textbook-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l
I know nothing about Wiki but all my stuff is under GNU Free Document License. As far as I know, the only way to go.
Regards --scrhemmer
On Mar 7, 2010, at 9:59 AM, Mike.lifeguard wrote:
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I wanted to spur discussion about part of this, specifically:
On 10-03-07 10:41 AM, Mike.lifeguard wrote:
Because Progit (progit.org) is not freely licensed (the license forbids commercial use), and contributing to it is unnecessarily difficult, I have begun working on a textbook about Git on Wikibooks
Progit is a textbook about git, which is hosted in a git repository on GitHub. This means that if you want to fix errors or translate, you can fork the repository, make your changes, and the author can incorporate them if they want to.
This gives the illusion of being able to contribute, when really your edits are held hostage by one person. Not only are they a bottleneck, but they can also refuse to accept your changes. More to the point, in this case, they don't seem keen on accepting anything that isn't simply fixing errata, or translating the English text.
Have other folks encountered other seemingly-open textbook-writing efforts that aren't really open upon further inspection? How can we capitalize on the frustration that might arise when people are unable to contribute in practice (or doing so is more difficult than on Wikibooks)?
More to the point, I'm concerned (you may have seen my recent posts to foundation-l) that using Flagged Revisions is killing Wikibooks because it is taking us towards this seemingly-open-but-not-really model of editing, which is contrary to the spirit of openness which got us this far. I'd be interested to hear whether people think it is time to abandon the extension, revamp the configuration, or something else.
Thanks,
- -Mike
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Textbook-l mailing list Textbook-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l
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On 10-03-07 05:45 PM, Alain Schremmer wrote:
I know nothing about Wiki but all my stuff is under GNU Free Document License. As far as I know, the only way to go.
Regards --scrhemmer
Actually, Wikibooks uses the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) license now. It is essentially the same, but without silly requirements like attaching the license text.
However, I'm not importing progit - it uses an incompatible license, and even if some contributors release the parts they wrote under CC-BY-SA, it would be less work to just start over, rather than figuring out which parts of progit were freely licensed and which aren't.
- -Mike
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