[Textop] Please circulate

[Larry Sanger]

All,

I've drafted (below) a message that I hope you will forward to
colleagues as well as relevant mailing lists you might be on--just by
way of at least marginally increasing our numbers with good people.  The
lists might include departmental lists, disciplinary lists, info science
lists, Internet publishing lists, etc., and Usenet newsgroups.  NOTE:
philosophers please contact me before posting to philosophy lists.

Edit freely.

======

Hello!

You've probably heard of a little encyclopedia project called Wikipedia.
I conceived, started, and led the project in its seminal first year, and
was probably more responsible than any person for crafting the set of
policies that have made it the (qualified) success it is today.  But I
know Wikipedia has problems.  The Wikipedia community's refusal to deal
with those problems head-on is actually why I have distanced myself from
the project.

Well, I've had an idea for a reference project--for a brand new *kind*
of reference--and I'd like to ask you to consider joining me in starting
a better community.  This *is* going to happen.  I am more excited about
it than I ever was about Nupedia or Wikipedia.

This new project is actually a side-project of the Digital Universe
(http://www.dufoundation.org).  It's called the Text Outline Project or
Textop (http://www.textop.org), and it is itself a set of projects,
managed by a strong collaboration among a global group of scholars, with
the aim of organizing the information contained in books, dictionaries,
opinionated essays, and news articles--and perhaps other sources--into a
single outline of human knowledge.  It will be an "open meritocracy."
Built by volunteers, the result will be free and noncommercial.
Top-level summary: http://www.textop.org/textop_summary.html

The Collation Project (http://www.textop.org/collation_summary.html),
the flagship, will analyze various public domain works studied by
scholars (e.g., Classics and history of philosophy) into approximately
paragraph-sized chunks; summarize the chunks; and place these chunks
into a single outline.  Each node of the outline will not have more
than, say, a half-dozen chunks, so the outline will be constantly
expanding.  This will provide a single reference point for comparing the
detailed content of scholarly works from throughout history and
eventually, it is to be hoped, more recent works as well.

We have a really impressive Advisory Committee:
http://www.textop.org/advisory_committee.html

Also of interest:
Proposed screenshot: http://www.textop.org/screenshot.html
Project manifesto: http://www.textop.org/TextAndCollaboration.html
Example outline: http://www.textop.org/outline_help.html
Letter: http://www.textop.org/letter.html
Proposed software requirements: http://www.textop.org/reqs_v1.html

What next?  What can you do?  Please join me and some really smart
people on the Textop mailing list:
http://lists.dufoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/textop
That's where it's all getting started; get the "digest" (all posts in
one day) if you want all the mails for a day at once.

We're starting up a pilot project on the project wiki:
http://www.textop.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
We'll begin by "collating" some classic works of philosophy.

Please do join us!

Larry Sanger
Director, Collaborative Projects, The Digital Universe Foundation
Director, The Text Collation Project