[Foundation-l] Stategic planning : Sharing textbook knowledge

[Samuel Klein]

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 at 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.