Website

Multi-user:

Personal: Section "The best personal webpages of all time".

The problem of deletionism is that it removes users' confidence that their precious data will be safe. It's almost like having a database that constantly resets itself. Who will be willing to post on a website that deletes the content they created for free half of the time thus wasting people's precious time?

Term invented by Ciro Santilli to refer to content moderation policies that lock threads.

This is similar to deletionism but a bit less worse, as the pre-existing content is maintained. But new relevant content that comes up cannot be added in the future, so it is still bad.

Like Reddit (option to allow it per community added in late 2021) and support.google.com/.

And of course, 4chan just takes that to a whole new level, usually closing on the same day, and then getting deleted within a week. Why would anyone contribute non-illegal content to that king of system?!

Ridiculous, so when new information comes out, we just duplicate all the old comments on a new thread again?

Remember, Ciro Santilli is the Necromancer God.

Dan Dascalescu agrees for Reddit specifically: www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/9oujwf/why_archiving_old_threads_is_a_bigger_problem/

The best one is OurBigBook Markup of course! :-)

Written in R, but also relies on pandoc, so quite bad dependency wise.

Cross files references to IDs: yes. But no check by default for duplicates when doing automatic ID from title. Just automatically disambiguates with -1, -2 suffixes, and links take the last one available.

Source page splitting: splits at h2 by default. If configurable, likely always af fixed level?

Has some nice image generation from inline code from standard R plotting functions.

Hello world documented at: bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown/get-started.html

Hello world on Ubuntu 23.04 after installing R: The build CLI comes from: stackoverflow.com/questions/50888871/how-to-use-rscript-command-line-tool-to-build-a-book-in-bookdown

The installatoin Rscript -e 'bookdown::render_book("index.Rmd")' takes several minutes, it compiles a bunch of stuff from source apparently. but it did work.

While this has some of the metrics features that Ciro Santilli wants to implement for OurBigBook.com, it limits the number of articles your readeres can read.

How the fuck can you publish on a website that limits the number of views for your articles?!?! When all it has is static pages + some metrics?!?!

Evil. Just learn to use GitHub Pages for God's sake.

Ciro Santilli wants to rule this with OurBigBook.com.

This was the pre-Internet precursor of wikis. This program was likely venerable, shame it predates Ciro Santilli's era.

But the thing was much more bloated it seems, and also included visual programming elements, and WYSISYG UI creation.

No open signup it seems. TODO CV of owner.

They are making a proof assistant to integrate into the website: github.com/bookofproofs/fpl/, reminds Ciro Santilli of website front-end for a mathematical formal proof system.

Originally by Springer, but later moved to the European mathematical society.

By Evan Chen (陳誼廷)

800+ page PDF with source on GitHub claiming to try and teach the beauty of modern maths for high schoolers. Fantastic project!!!

Written mostly by Eric W. Weisstein.

Ciro once saw a printed version of the CRC "concise" encyclopedia of mathematics. It is about 12 cm thick. Imagine if it wasn't concise!!!

Infinite Napkin is the one-person open source replacemente we needed for it! And OurBigBook.com will be the final multi-person replacement.

Ahh, this dude is just like Ciro Santilli, trying to create the ultimate natural sciences encyclopedia!

____ In 1995, Weisstein converted a Microsoft Word document of over 200 pages to hypertext format and uploaded it to his webspace at Caltech under the title Eric's Treasure Trove of Sciences. ____

Decent encyclopedia of mathematics. Not much motivation, mostly statements though.

Created by:

Unlike Wikipedia, they have a more sane forum commenting system, e.g. a page/forum pair:

Based on GitHub pull requests: github.com/planetmath

Joe Corneli, of of the contributors, mentions this in a cool-sounding "Peeragogy" context at metameso.org/~joe/:

I earned my doctorate at The Open University in Milton Keynes, with a thesis focused on peer produced support for peer learning in the mathematics domain. The main case study was planetmath.org; the ideas also informed the development of “Peeragogy”.

A wiki that gathers mathematical proofs.

URL: proofwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page

MediaWiki-based.

This appears to be the creator: github.com/externl "Joe George".

kinnu.xyz/.

App-only as of 2023, i.e. for children.

Humans make the table of contents, and then AI fills it. Ciro was thinking about doint the exact same thing at some point, maybe starting from Wikipedia categories.

Funding:

Source: github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack

Appears to be a Wikipedia clone but with much lower/no notability requirements guidelines, which overcomes one of Wikipedia's main issues: deletionism.

They do have the interesting idea of importing deleted Wikipedia pages as a source of content, which leads to some epic "most viewed pages" such as en.everybodywiki.com/List_of_erotic_and_sex_workers_with_unnatural_death which currently reads:

Stop Being Pervs, Go Watch Lichfaop/Faoplich Instead and you can also visit MR Info 24 for more details.

We can for example see Ciro Santilli's deleted entry PsiQuantum at: en.everybodywiki.com/PsiQuantum, Wikipedia deletion page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/PsiQuantum. Their attribution is atrocious however, e.g. it does not seem possible to find any mention of "Ciro Santilli" on the edit history, which just points to the delete article which is not visible anymore. They could really get into trouble for this one day.

Their main use case, as suggested by the website itself, if for people/brands to create pages about themselves.

This combined with the lack of "one version of each page per person" seems like an explosive invitation for unsolvable edit wars.

The website is backed by a French startup: jobs.stationf.co/companies/wiki-valley.

The dominating meme database as of 2020.

As of 2022 visible at: www.nature.com/scitable

Apparently they had a separate URL as just scitable.com, so they were somewhat serious about it before shutting it down.

As of 2022 marked:

This page has been archived and is no longer updated

RIP.

www.nature.com/scitable/blog/student-voices/ has last entry 2015, so presumably that's the shutdown year.

Self description:

Using our platform, you can customize your own eBooks for your students. Create an online classroom. Contribute and share content and connect with networks of colleagues.

so quite related to OurBigBook.com.

github.com/zadam/trilium.

Tree based organization at last.

Amazing WYSIWYG, including maths and tables, plus insane plugins like canvas mode, and specific file formats like code/mermaid diagrams/drawing mode.

Version history.

No multiuser features. Except for that, could have been a good starting point of an online multiuser thing such as OurBigBook.com!

Only possible to see one page at a time on output? Output chunking is a major feature of OurBigBook, I'm so proud.

Their tree based approach does have a problem however for the OurBigBook.com use case of sharing topics across users: every level forces is a scope. Which makes it basically impossible to reliably match topics across users.

HTML export keeps all data as HTMl is their native format. The files are mostly visible, but there is some CSS missing, it is not 100% like editor, notaby math is broken. There is also a hosted way of exposing: github.com/zadam/trilium/wiki/Sharing.

Markdown export warns:

this preserves most of the formatting.

Architecture: runs on local SQLite database via better-sqlite3. Data apparently stored in SQLite database at ~/.local/share/trilium-data, no raw files.

Markup is stored as HTML as seen from: sqlite3 document.db 'SELECT * from note_contents'. HTML is their native storage format, quite interesting.

WYSIWYG based on ckeditor.com/ which is a dependency. It is kind of cool that the view in which you view the output is exactly the same as the one you edit in, and there is no intermediate format, just the HTML.

Math is KaTeX based.

Why Wikipedia sucks: Section "Wikipedia".

Best languages:

The most important page of Wikipedia is undoubtedly: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources which lists the accepted and non accepted sources. Basically, the decision of what is true in this world.

Wikipedia is incredibly picky about copyright. E.g.: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_of_all_fair_use_images_of_living_people because "such portrait could be created". Yes, with a time machine, no problem! This does more harm than good... excessive!

Citing in Wikipedia is painful. Partly because of they have a billion different templates that you have to navigate. They should really have a system where you can easily reuse existing sources across articles!

Some exmaples by Ciro Santilli follow.

Of the tutorial-subjectivity type:

Notability constraints, which are are way too strict:There's even a Wiki that was created to remove notability constraints: EverybodyWiki.

For these reasons reason why Ciro basically only contributes images to Wikipedia: because they are either all in or all out, and you can determine which one of them it is. And this allows images to be more attributable, so people can actually see that it was Ciro that created a given amazing image, thus overcoming Wikipedia's lack of reputation system a little bit as well.

Wikipedia is perfect for things like biographies, geography, or history, which have a much more defined and subjective expository order. But when it comes to "tutorials of how to actually do stuff", which is what mathematics and physics are basically about, Wikipedia has a very hard time to go beyond dry definitions which are only useful for people who already half know the stuff. But to learn from zero, newbies need tutorials with intuition and examples.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Footnotes#Footnotes:_using_a_source_more_than_once gives the following method:

Definition, anywhere on article, likely ideally as the first usage:

And then you can use it later on as: which automatically expands the exact same thing.

It appears to be impossible to reuse a book reference with different pages with that method however. This is then covered at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources#Citing_multiple_pages_of_the_same_source.

To use a different page, see: www.quora.com/On-Wikipedia-how-can-you-cite-the-same-source-more-than-once-without-them-becoming-separate-references/answer/Ciro-Santilli. The best method is: and then use {{r}} as: or for multiple pages: TODO: if the previous at which the name is defined reference has pages, they will appear again on the new call. OMG that is impossible to get right then!

So, it turns out that Wikipedia does have a (ultra obscure as usual) mechanism for pull requests. You learn a new one every day.

OMG they have that. Slightly slightly overlap with OurBigBook.com.

A 2022 clone of phabricator.wikimedia.org/source/mediawiki.git gives first commits from 2003 by:

TODO when was wikipedia open sourced from Nupedia? The ealry days of Wikipedia are quite obscure due to its transition from Nupedia.

Because of edit wars and encyclopedic tone requirements. See also: Wikipedia.

Thus OurBigBook.com.

One thing to note is that Jimmy was a finance worker before starting wikipdia, e.g. he had capital to hire Larry Sanger.

Maybe that's the way to go about it, make money first, and later on change the world.

Starting just after the beginning of the Internet can't hurt either. Though tooling must have been insane back then.

Open source software engine created for and used by Wikipedia.

Their reference markup is incredibly overengineered, convoluted, and underdocumented, it is unbelivable!

Use the reference:

Define the reference:

sfn is magic and matches the the author last name and date from the Cite, it is documented at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Sfn

Unforutunately, if there are multiple duplicate Cites inline in the article, it will complain that there are multiple definitions, and you have to first factor out the article by replacing all those existing Cite with sfn, and keeping just one Cite at the bottom. What a pain...

You can also link to a specific page of the book, e.g. if it is a book is on Internet Archive Open Library with:

For multiple pages should use pp= instead of p=. Does not seem to make much difference on the rendered output besides showing p. vs pp., but so be it:

Let's see how long they last:

A really good option to store educational media such as images and video!

Shame that like the rest of Wikimedia, their interface is so clunky and lacking obvious features.

This is basically what Jimmy Wales had originally set out to make Wikipedia, a peer reviewed thing.

But then he noticed the entry barrier was too high while inviding an economist to review an article he wrot, and just made the more open thing instead.

The venerable first wiki.

The pre-Eternal September feeling is palpable.

People could freely comment their thoughts and sign below, making it much closer to what Ciro Santilli wants OurBigBook.com to be. But with upvotes ;-)

Nothing can better encapsulate the nostalgia of early day Internet. Genius at times, banal at others, you will be forever in our hearts!

This is good, and very close competitor to OurBigBook.com.

But they killed local build, so they are going to die.

Generally, if something is labelled as "e-learning", it's not a good sign, as it implies that it adheres to the "teacher"/"student" separation which Ciro Santilli much despises: E-learning websites must allow students to create learning content.

Charging for certification is fine. Creating exams and preventing cheating has a cost.

Another thing that is fine charging for is dedicated 1-to-1 tutor time. This is something Udacity is doing as of 2022.

www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/042815/how-coursera-works-makes-money.asp has a good mention:

MOOCs were first created by people with utopian visions for the internet. This means the idea for platforms like Coursera was likely conceived without a business plan in mind. Nonetheless, Coursera has managed to monetize its platform. It is worth noting, however, that monetization has lead to the effective elimination of the original MOOC idea, which is predicated on ideals like free and open access, as well as the building of online communities.

Coursera users must pay to engage with the material in a meaningful way and take courses for individualistic purposes. This has been a consistent trend among all major online education platforms.

and it links to: www.freecodecamp.org/news/massive-open-online-courses-started-out-completely-free-but-where-are-they-now-1dd1020f59/, very good article!

That is a fundamental guiding principle of OurBigBook.com. The educational content must be licensed CC BY-SA!

Perhaps the most reliable way of reaching this state is E-learning websites must allow students to create learning content.

Bibliography:

This is a key philosophy of OurBigBook.com!

Because there is value in tutorials written by beginners.

MOOCs are a bad idea. We don't want to simply map the pre-computer classroom to the Internet. The Internet allows, and requires, fundamentally new ways to do things. More like Stack Overflow/Wikipedia. More like OurBigBook.com.

A more specific type of E-learning website generally run by a specific organization.

A website, usually hosted by an university, that takes what is done in class, and pastes it online. It is already much more rational and efficient, and opens up the way for potential sharing outside of the institution (or by default paywalling as the University of Oxford did.

The fundametnal problem with VLEs is that they tend to not have enough incentives for students to contribute at all to the content. This is basically the major motivation behind OurBigBook.com.

Some courses at least allow you to see material for free, e.g.: www.coursera.org/learn/quantum-optics-single-photon/lecture/UYjLu/1-1-canonical-quantization. Lots of video focus as usual for MOOCs.

Some are paywalled: www.coursera.org/learn/theory-of-angular-momentum?specialization=quantum-mechanics-for-engineers

It is extremely hard to find the course materials without enrolling, even if enrolling for free! By trying to make money, they make their website shit.

The comment section does have a lot of activity: www.coursera.org/learn/statistical-mechanics/discussions/weeks/2! Nice. And works like a proper issue tracker. But it is also very hidden.

Harvard University + MIT combo.

As of 2022:Fuck that.

Also, they have an ICP.

By the Open University. "Open" I mean.

Some/all courses expire in 4 weeks: www.futurelearn.com/courses/intro-to-quantum-computing. Ludicrous.

www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/gc23gd/petersons_online_university_still_a_thing/.

Kudos for being a not-for-profit. Also, anyone can create content: e-learning websites must allow students to create learning content. Oh, but TODO is possible for anyone to make content publicly visible? Course join links lik: www.khanacademy.org/join/MJZ6NSV7 require login. webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/165132/how-to-create-a-course-that-is-publicly-visible-without-the-need-to-login-on-kha If that's the case, it is a fatal flaw not shared by OurBigBook.com.

Another cool aspect is that they have the "physical world teacher pull student accounts in" approach built-in quite well at course creation. This is a very good feature.

As of 2021 they were a bit struggling for money it seems: www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8XdUy-wyyM?

Like Jimmy Wales, he used to work in finance and then quit. What is it with those successful e-learning people??

These people have good intentions.

The problem is that they don't manage to go critical because there's to way for students to create content, everything is manually curated.

You can't even publicly comment on the textbooks. Or at least Ciro Santilli hasn't found a way to do so. There is just a "submit suggestion" box.

This massive lost opportunity is even shown graphically at: cnx.org/about (archive) where there is a clear separation between:Maybe this wasn't the case in their legacy website, legacy.cnx.org/content?legacy=true, but not sure, and they are retiring that now.

Thus, OurBigBook.com. License: CC BY! So we could re-use their stuff!

By Rice University.

TODO what are the books written in?

It is a shame that they refocused to more applied courses. This also highlights their highly "managed" approach to content creation. Their 2022 pitch on front page says it all:

for as few as 10 hours a week, you can get the in-demand skills you need to help land a high-paying tech job

they are focused on the highly paid character of many software engineering jobs.

But one cool point of this website is how they hire tutors to help on the courses. This is a very good thing. It is a fair way of monetizing: e-learning websites must keep content free, only charge for certification.

Online forums that lock threads after some time are evil. What else needs to be said?

The most popular programming news sharing forum of the 2010's by far. If your content gets shared there, and it stays on top for a day, the traffic peak will be incredible. Reddit posts are sure to follow.

Basically a programming-only Reddit-lite.

Ciro Santilli had a few of his content shared there as mentioned at the best articles by Ciro Santillis.

Repeat after me. Inertia is all that matters. Features don't matter. But algorithms matter.

Quora is crap in many, many senses, but in part due to some bad Stack Overflow policies, it is the best crap we've got for certain (mostly useless) subjects. Until OurBigBook.com dominates the world.

The worst thing about quora is that you cannot subscribe only to certain subjects on your feed. Quora just keeps pumping shit you never subscribed to, no matter what. Ciro, for sport, unfollowed every single idiotic subject it was proposing, but it didn't work, sooner or later Quora just keeps pumping more shit back. Mind you, some of that shit is fun. But it's still shit. Though on second thought, YouTube also randomly decides to reset Ciro's humongous "don't recomend this shitty channel" choices from time to time, which is not much different...

Other terrible things, they just seem to have an incredible ability of making the website worse and more annoying over time! Truly amazing:

See also: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/quora for a coverage of the intense pro-CCP astroturfing present on the website.

They sent one of the rare spams Ciro actually was interested in!!! Likely going down lists of top Stack Overflow users.

They have some kind of cryptocurrency, TCHME token, as a reward. Ciro wonders if the value of TCHME will ever be high enough to serve as a valid incentive.

Also, what is the total TCHME supply? Can the website devs issue as much as they want? They do giveaways e.g. as shown at: twitter.com/TeachMeAsap/status/1621353671840899072

And a centralized system with a certralized marketplace would work just as well for the initial phases. But fair play, the idea is interesting.

Ciro Santilli dislikes the fact that they take themselves too seriously. Ciro prefers the jokes and tech approach.

Ciro Santilli's account is www.reddit.com/user/cirosantilli/, see also: accounts controlled by Ciro Santillis.

No good per-sub way as of 2022:

Ciro Santilli does the same via Google searches and Twitter/Reddit searches for himself, you can't invent anything new nowadays:

Kibo was known for his high-volume but thoughtful posts, but achieved Usenet celebrity circa 1991 by writing a small script to grep his entire Usenet feed for instances of his name, and then answering personally whenever and wherever he was mentioned, giving the illusion that he was personally reading the entire feed.

It boggles Ciro Santilli's mind that people use mailing list to collaborate on projects!

The only explanation is that the dinosaurs who created the projects are unable to adapt to new superior technologies.

Yes, Ciro is talking to you, big fundamental projects from last century: Linux kernel, GNU Compiler Collection (gcc.gnu.org/lists.html), Binutils (sourceware.org/binutils/), etc.

Some of you are already using Bugzilla for the bugs, so kudos. But if you've seen their benefit, why you still use the mailing list for patches?

Advantages of mailing lists:

Disadvantages: everything else:

Not sure:

Smart people who agree with Ciro:

These are basically technically minded people that Ciro Santilli feels have similar interests/psychology to him, and who write too much for their own good:

Maybe one day these will also be legendary, who knows:

Another category Ciro admires are the "computational physics visualization" people, these people will go to Heaven:

Related:

Institution led:

cat-v.org/ by Rob Pike, co-creator of Go, looong time Unixer, and some kind of leader of a 9p resurrection cult. That one's spicy. E.g.: harmful.cat-v.org/, Ciro's version: good and evil.

Created by Dr. Rod Nave from Georgia State University, where he worked from 1968 after his post-doc in North Wales on molecular spectroscopy.

While there is value to that website, it always feels like it falls a bit too short as too "encyclopedic" and too little "tutorial-like". Most notably, it has very little on the history of physics/experiments.

Ciro Santilli likes this Rod, he really practices some good braindumping, just look at how he documented his life in the pre-social media Internet dark ages: hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Nave-html/nave.html

The website evolved from a HyperCard stack, as suggested by the website name, mentioned at: hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/index.html.

Shame he was too old for CC BY-SA, see "Please respect the Copyright" at hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/index.html.

exhibits.library.gsu.edu/kell/exhibits/show/nave-kell-hall/capturing-a-career has some good photo selection focused on showing the department, and has an interview.

Kell hall is a building of GSU that was demolished in 2019: atlanta.curbed.com/2020/1/31/21115980/gsu-georgia-state-atlanta-kell-hall-demolition-park-library-north

The remedy to cowardice, inattention, censorship and amorality.

Due to Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China, Ciro Santilli maintains information on this at mostly at:

Dan Dascalescu's "Web page archiving" comparison table: web.archive.org/web/20130922192354/http://wiki.dandascalescu.com/reviews/online_services/web_page_archiving

Previously called Lending library it seems: help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360016554912-Borrowing-From-The-Lending-Library

You can borrow online books from them for a few hours/days: help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360016554912-Borrowing-From-The-Lending-Library This is the most amazing thing ever made!!! You can even link to specific pages, e.g. archive.org/details/supermenstory00murr/page/80/mode/2up

They seem to a have a separate URL with the same content as well for some reason: openlibrary.org/, classic messy Internet Archive style.

Bastards are suing them www.theverge.com/2020/6/1/21277036/internet-archive-publishers-lawsuit-open-library-ebook-lending: Hachette, Penguin Random House, Wiley, and HarperCollins

archive.org/details/toomanyrequests_20191110 says 15 archives / minute, but apparently aslo 15 retrievals per minutes on Wikipedia, after which 5 min blacklist. After that, you start getting some 429s, and after that, server refuses to connect at al.

CDX: no limits apparently, they might just throttle you? Made 10k requets on bash loop and was going fine. But not that if you get blacklisted by create/fetch requests blacklist, server fails to connect here as well.

Ciro Santilli publishes videos of this not-so-common visual programming experiments on his YouTube channel occasionally: www.youtube.com/c/CiroSantilli. Ciro should however not be lazy and also upload each video produced to Wikimedia Commons, since YouTube does not offer a download option even for videos marked with a Creative Commons license: www.quora.com/Can-I-download-Creative-Commons-licensed-YouTube-videos-to-edit-them-and-use-them/answer/Tarmo-Toikkanen!

This is also where Ciro's downtime converged to in his early 30's, since he long lost patience for stupid video games and television series.

Ciro developed one interesting technique: while scrolling through YouTube's useless recommendations, when he understands what a channel is about, he either immediately:This helps to keep this feed clean of boring stuff he already knows about. There is unfortunately an infinite amount of useless videos out there however on the topics of:and no matter how much you say you don't want to hear about them, YouTube juts keeps on sending more.

Things Ciro hates about YouTube:

Likely FFmpeg is the backend of YouTube.

Bought by Google in 2006.

This thing dowloads YouTube videos. The thing downloads Twitter videos. The thing downloads BBC videos. It is just Godlike.