david gerard writes: > No, no. All wikiprojects could be merged into *Wikibooks* if one were > so inclined. The encyclopedia is clearly only one book in the library, > it's just by far the biggest one.
Indeed. Or into Wiktionary, since it's all just a matter of defining in detail various keywords, stemwords, and phrases. On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 6:12 PM, Andrew Gray <[email protected]> wrote: >> Certainly not zero. Perhaps 10%? Neither textbooks nor wikipedia are >> normally designed to give a total soup-to-nuts explanation of how to >> do something. > > Ha. > > [[Wikibooks:Constructing an Industrial Civilisation from Scratch]]. You are stopping at industrial civilisation why? > ==Chapter 1: on flint nodules== > ==Chapter 307: smelting copper== > ==Chapter 87,823: the basics of nuclear fission== > > I love it as an intellectual exercise, but the plausible *utility* of > the whole thing might be open to question! Precisely how I felt about the idea of a million-articles Wikipedia many years ago. Once a thing has been done once, it's easier to see the value in iteration. I don't doubt the utility of the above for an instance, nor that it would be used year to year, and not primarily as a 'disaster recovery' mechanism. I think this is a non-linear approach to capturing practical knowledge that will deprecate standalone texts and manuals. At any rate, we have a very basic idea of what kinds of massively-parallel tasks we can learn how to do. We should be actively exploring what else we can learn as a group. SJ ps - All the Weyrs of Pern is a nice ref. There is non-fiction specifically for disaster recovery and making anything you might need while on a space shuttle. Most are focused on crafts and engineering, however. Figuring out how to cull the data for and publish the Transparent Hand also comes to mind. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
