david gerard writes:
No, no. All wikiprojects could be merged into
*Wikibooks* if one were
so inclined. The encyclopedia is clearly only one book in the library,
it's just by far the biggest one.
Indeed. Or into Wiktionary, since it's all just a matter of defining
in detail various keywords, stemwords, and phrases.
On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 6:12 PM, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk> wrote:
Certainly not
zero. Perhaps 10%? Neither textbooks nor wikipedia are
normally designed to give a total soup-to-nuts explanation of how to
do something.
Ha.
[[Wikibooks:Constructing an Industrial Civilisation from Scratch]].
You are stopping at industrial civilisation why?
==Chapter 1: on flint nodules==
==Chapter 307: smelting copper==
==Chapter 87,823: the basics of nuclear fission==
I love it as an intellectual exercise, but the plausible *utility* of
the whole thing might be open to question!
Precisely how I felt about the idea of a million-articles Wikipedia
many years ago. Once a thing has been done once, it's easier to see
the value in iteration. I don't doubt the utility of the above for an
instance, nor that it would be used year to year, and not primarily as
a 'disaster recovery' mechanism. I think this is a non-linear
approach to capturing practical knowledge that will deprecate
standalone texts and manuals.
At any rate, we have a very basic idea of what kinds of
massively-parallel tasks we can learn how to do. We should be
actively exploring what else we can learn as a group.
SJ
ps - All the Weyrs of Pern is a nice ref. There is non-fiction
specifically for disaster recovery and making anything you might need
while on a space shuttle. Most are focused on crafts and engineering,
however. Figuring out how to cull the data for and publish the
Transparent Hand also comes to mind.