Cross posted to Textbook-L

Brion wrote:

The thing that would make a Project Sourceberg worthwhile is wiki-style annotation of the texts.

Yes! Just so everybody knows, we've been talking about annotation for the Wikibooks project on Textbook-L. See "disappearing/reappearing column-side notes," "public domain works with marginal notes" and "Re: disappearing/reappearing column side-notes" at http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/textbook-l/2003-August/subject.html#star...

Here is a hack of what that may look like: http://www.wikipedia.org/upload/5/56/Sidenote-column.html

The current idea is to have <note> annotation </note> act as the actual syntax.

Annotations could include cross-links to Wikipedia and Wiktionary as well as within the document, and

Yep. What would really be neat is an optional java-script feature whereby double clicking on any word in the text will bring-up the corresponding Wiktionary entry. But that has to wait for Wiktionary to define many tens of thousands more words first. I was also thinking of wikifying terms within the public domain source text on Wikibooks to point to their corresponding Wikipedia articles. Aside: A different color for cross-Wikimedia links would be nice so that true external links (outside of Wikimedia) are distinguishable from cross-Wikimedia links (I've suggested green before).

we could have a relatively sane system for linking from Wikipedia and Wiktionary to *particular spots* in the texts, for instance to provide context for a quote.

We could use anchors for this now that Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikibooks all have the latest and greatest MediaWiki installed.

Now, that would require some special coding if we want to make it a clean system (ie, one where visitors can edit annotations but not original text); or one could just dump Gutenberg's ASCII texts straight into giant wiki pages and do it all by hand.

I'm not convinced that locking the public domain source text would be the best option since there is a lot of formatting and Wikifying that can be done with source text. However, I wouldn't mind blocking anons from editing source text if that can be coded easily enough (since logged-in users are more likely to know better about not changing the wording of the source text). But at the very least, annotations should be open to edit by all.

Oh, and other Wikibooks modules should also have the ability to use the annotation feature (such as textbooks). So that is something to keep in mind if/when the annotation system is being worked on.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)