[Wikipedia-l] Re: maybe time for a document project, sometime in the near future?

[Daniel Mayer]

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)