[Textop] Please circulate

[Larry Sanger]

Edited version below, amends dig at Wikipedia (sorry for the multiple
mails).

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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.

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
another 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.

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:
Top-level summary: http://www.textop.org/textop_summary.html
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" 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