[Textop] Call for participation: Text Outline Project pilot

[Larry Sanger]

All:

If you are interested in the pilot project, whether or not you're a
philosopher, do join textop-en-phil (Textop's English language philosophy
list; see below).

Also, I would be in your debt if you would forward this to appropriate
(philosophy) lists I haven't hit.  Seems the number of active philosophy
lists is smaller than I remember.  I posted the CFP to PHILOSOP, PHILOS-L,
EIRE18-L at LISTS.PSU.EDU and these Yahoo Groups: hobbes, james_william, and
scottish_philosophy.

--Larry

=========

Dear all,

I'm writing to post-B.A. philosophers interested in 

(1) philosophical texts (especially philosophical classics in the English
language),
(2) online collaboration, and
(3) free (*libre*) content.

The Text Outline Project (or "Textop": http://www.textop.org) is starting up
a pilot for a new online collaboration that will "collate" philosophical
(and other) texts in a certain way.  If you're interested, please join us on
the pilot project's mailing list:
http://lists.dufoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/textop-en-phil
and the general project list:
http://lists.dufoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/textop

Details follow.  Please forward this as appropriate!

========

THE PROJECTS AND ORGANIZATIONS: the project we're piloting is called the
Collation Project (http://www.textop.org/collation_summary.html), which is a
branch of the Text Outline Project , which is itself affiliated with the
Digital Universe Foundation (http://www.dufoundation.org).  Textop is 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.  Like Wikipedia, it will
be built by volunteers, and the result will be free and noncommercial.
Unlike Wikipedia, it will be an "open meritocracy": inclusive but led by
specialists.

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.

THE PILOT PROJECT: The pilot for the Collation Project will *probably* take
place on a wiki (http://www.textop.org/wiki), which is where you can read a
detailed plan for the pilot project.  Where and how the pilot will take
place remains to be decided by a rough consensus of the philosophers who
show up on Textop's English language philosophy list:
http://lists.dufoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/textop-en-phil
Later, we'll be using not a wiki but specially-written open source software
that this community will help design.

For logistical reasons, we are going to start with philosophical classics in
the English language, in the public domain, such as Bacon's *Essays*,
Hobbes' *Leviathan*, Hume's *Enquiries*, and Russell's *Problems of
Philosophy*.  Longer list: http://tinyurl.com/fw546  We will choose a small
number of these works to "collate," based on who shows up.

BACKGROUND LINKS:
We have an impressive Advisory Committee, including several philosophers:
http://www.textop.org/advisory_committee.html
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
Textop general mailing list:
http://lists.dufoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/textop

PROJECT DIRECTOR: I'm probably best known as co-founder of Wikipedia, but
I've been organizing Internet projects of one sort or another since 1995.  I
started the Association for Systematic Philosophy, Tutor-L (about college
tutoring and degrees by exam), Reid-L (about Thomas Reid's *Inquiry*), and
SEK (about Bonjour's *Structure of Empirical Knowledge*), as well as Nupedia
and Wikipedia (see
http://features.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/18/164213).  I earned my
Ph.D. in Philosophy (dissertation in epistemology) from Ohio State in 2000.
I am now employed as Director of Collaborative Projects for the Digital
Universe Foundation in Scotts Valley, California.

WHAT NEXT?  Do join us here: 
http://lists.dufoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/textop-en-phil
And here:
http://lists.dufoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/textop

--Larry

----------------
Dr. Larry Sanger
Director, Text Outline Project
Director of Distributed Content Programs, Digital Universe Foundation 
100 Enterprise Way, Suite G370, Scotts Valley, CA  95066 
larry.sanger at dufoundation.org http://www.digitaluniverse.net/