[Textop-en-phil] Some chunking issues; restart work on Leviathan?

[Larry Sanger]

All,

I decided to start in (at least a little) on chunking Hobbes (i.e., a part
that I haven't finished yet) on the wiki.  I chunked only one paragraph, and
I actually made four greatly overlapping chunks out of it: a distinction,
two definitions, and an argument.  See: http://tinyurl.com/eujex  (I didn't
actually file these chunks into the outline yet.  I think that's a step that
can be separated from chunking.)

In doing this, I was much more fastidious than I was when I did the initial
work on the outline, in that I tried to follow the (new proposed) rule I put
on this page:

http://www.textop.org/wiki/index.php?title=Chunking_rules

If I really wanted to follow that rule, I would have to start over on the
Leviathan completely.  But actually, I'm thinking I ought to start over
*anyway*, considering that I have thought over the project considerably more
since I was last actively working on collation, I have your input and
possible help, and I've been planning on going over the outline carefully
anyway (I spruced up the "divinity" section considerably, filing chunks that
were there down below).

But if I go back over my work on the Leviathan, I don't want simply to start
over from scratch.  The work I've done is far from useless, I think; mainly,
it just needs to be augmented and checked.  But in that case, I'd have to do
this: (1) upload all parts of the text of the Leviathan that I've worked on
already, to multiple text pages, such as the one I've put up at
http://tinyurl.com/eujex , and to organize the text pages on the central
Leviathan home page at
http://www.textop.org/wiki/index.php?title=Hobbes%2C_Leviathan; (2) step
through the outline, going through all node pages (such as
http://www.textop.org/wiki/index.php?title=Nature) and for every chunk,
transfer it to the appropriate place in the text page, indented as the new
chunks on http://tinyurl.com/eujex are indented.  **Then**, I (we) could
back over the text of the Leviathan more carefully, and we would know what I
had and what I had not done.  I think this is *probably* worth the effort,
i.e., it's *probably* more efficient than scrapping all the work I've done
and starting over completely.

(If I decide to do (1) and (2), that's relatively mindless work that certain
industrious persons might be interested, I hope, in helping with...)

The aim of this newfound perfectionism is to render work I've already done
up to the standard that I want to follow with the rest of the Leviathan.
I'm inclined to think that the only way people will be able to work together
on this sort of project and have a useful, non-confusing result is if they
adopt some rules, like the ones I have proposed recently, and try to follow
them carefully.  I was able to produce a reasonable rough draft by myself
because I knew (without articulating many rules to myself) more or less what
I was trying to do.  Such an understanding cannot be shared among two or
more people without being clearly articulated; and, of course, as soon as we
start articulating rules together, we'll naturally be in a healthy
competition to get the rules right.  The point is that there is just no way
to do collation sloppily, if we want to do it collaboratively.  And that,
again, seems to mean we have more prep/cleanup work to do on my work on
Leviathan, as I said...

(I do plan to respond to Philippe Martin and Clea Rees...but I wanted to get
some wiki work done today.)

--Larry