[Textbook-l] [Wikipedia-l] Re: maybe time for a document project, sometime in the near future?
Daniel Mayer
maveric149 at yahoo.com
Sun Aug 17 08:23:28 UTC 2003
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#start
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)
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