Books are great but they are dated. I am really surprised our community has not made a collaborative book online.
Books are great but they are dated. I am really surprised our community has not made a collaborative book online.
Books are great but they are dated.
YES. And then there's the "old book smell" that evokes fond memories of perusing the stacks in equally old libraries. There's also the "old computer smell," which can also evoke nostalgic memories, but it's not quite as nice.*casts disapproving gaze*
Fifty years from now I'm going to be like that lawyer from the original Star Trek with the massive collection of paper books.
What sort of collaborative book? We're not going to all have to agree on anything, will we? Like glue or balsa sealing or paint brands or which sim program to use or....Books are great but they are dated. I am really surprised our community has not made a collaborative book online.
What sort of collaborative book? We're not going to all have to agree on anything, will we? Like glue or balsa sealing or paint brands or which sim program to use or....
Books or wikis or better over a long period because they have a structure that is more conducive to organizing the information into sections and chapters
The single major problem with online collaborative works is deciding who is the gatekeeper of what information is included.
I think something like a wiki sounds ideal. Compiling into publishable work like an ebook doesn’t seem as useful.
I think something like a wiki sounds ideal. Compiling into publishable work like an ebook doesn’t seem as useful.
Well, Dave F. has talked with the authors of "Topics in Advanced Model Rocketry", specifically Gordon Mandell, and the authors have taken their copyright back from MIT press. Details in this post over here. Dave has permission to get teh thing into PDF format and distribute it public domain. Meanwhile, another fellow was scanning it, doing OCR and using an eqaution editor to get it looking prettier, but that's a big job for one fellow, so he'd shelved it about 10 years ago. But a bunch of us could accomplish a task like that, cross-checking one another, etc. That'd make a nice download from this possible wiki, which I think is a grand idear! (Note Dave F. and I both have a copy of said book, and very likely the $500-$1000 that they are commanding on ebay & Amazon would drop quite a bit with the electronic publication available! - I wasn't selling, anyway!)
I think BookStack might be a good fit.
In the brief look that I gave it, I wasn't too enthusiastic about the "book" and "bookshelf" metaphor that they pushed. I don't think of a wiki that way at all, nor do I think about the project we're talking about that way. It does look clean and modern.I do like that software. What does everyone else think?
In the brief look that I gave it, I wasn't too enthusiastic about the "book" and "bookshelf" metaphor that they pushed. I don't think of a wiki that way at all, nor do I think about the project we're talking about that way. It does look clean and modern.
I need to try to go and play with the demo a bit to see how it really works. It looks like it would be fine, again the book metaphor just kind of rubs me the wrong way.Do you this would produce a valuable tool? Would it be attractive to contributors?
I'm not yet sure how the editorial process would work on this whole project. Some wikis are better in this area than others, but it depends on what we want.
Should be for everyone, I'd think. A general collection of reference material.Who is the audience for this thing?
Experienced rocketeers looking for reference material?
Newbies looking for and introduction?
I need to try to go and play with the demo a bit to see how it really works. It looks like it would be fine, again the book metaphor just kind of rubs me the wrong way.
I'm not yet sure how the editorial process would work on this whole project. Some wikis are better in this area than others, but it depends on what we want.
There are many wikis out there, choosing one is not so easy necessarily.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software
Interesting (and a bit puzzling) that Bookstack isn't in their comparison table.
We had ‘Rocketry Online’s INFOcentral’ several years back. I think it died around 2005. Just what ya’ll are talking about. You can find it on the Wayback machine.
https://web.archive.org/web/19990508224457/https://www.info-central.org/infocentral.shtml
That’s a bit cart before the horse I think. Step 1 is to create something worthwhile. We can worry about the longevity question sometime in the future.That points out one of the risks of this kind of project that I have no idea how to deal with: if we build something online, it may eventually disappear or rot away even though it's valuable. How do we keep something like this alive and relevant so it can still be used 10 or 20 years from now?
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