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Lessig Revises Book With Public Wiki
Silent_E writes "Always wanted to see your words in print?
The San Jose Mercury News is reporting that Lawrence Lessig is revising his book 'Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace' using a wiki-based, public discussion. The proceeds from the sale of the book are being donated. . All royalties are going to Creative Commons, plus the advance. "
Always wanted to see your words in print?
Mine are, usually after "How do you plea?"
Trolling is a art,
I've always thought that writing a book collaboratively is an interesting idea. It's just an extension of the childhood game where you write a word on a piece of paper, fold it over, and pass it along.
However, I always thought about a fictional book.
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Slashdot does count as "print", doesn't it?
Have you read my blog lately?
I can see the title of their chapter "Downloaders are dirty thieves."
Author's name should be revised to ..... Anonymous Coward
I think you have a freaking best seller on your hand there.
Hieraki is a project which aims to create a wiki with pages hierarchically arranged instead of interlinked like on a traditional wiki. It uses the notion of Books, Chapters and Pages.
Its the main means of documentation for the rubyonrails project and is used for writing documentation at several hosting services like textdrive and universities.
Disclaimer: I'm the author.
>I can see the title of their chapter "Downloaders are PENIS dirty thieves."
Professor's online publishing experiment
.com and edit them into a printed version of the book.
LESSIG INVITES HELP TO UPDATE 1999 BOOK
By Michael Bazeley
Mercury News
Further nudging outward the boundaries of online publishing, Stanford University Professor Larry Lessig will put his 1999 book ``Code'' online today and invite Internet users to help him write an updated version.
A noted copyright expert and proponent of free software, Lessig is putting the 297-page treatise about technology, culture and regulation on the Web in the form of a ``wiki,'' a site that can allow people to freely edit its contents. The law professor will take the contributions at http://codebook.jot/
``Code has become a part of cyberspace law culture,'' Lessig said. ``And what I found most interesting is that people outside of the academic world talk about it and use it a lot. I was really trying to find a way to encourage them to contribute to the evolution of `Code.' ''
Lessig said he also wanted to use the process to better understand the concept of wikis.
Lessig is the latest in a string of authors -- often from the technology world -- to open up their writings to the public. Former Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor published chapters of his book ``We the Media'' online as they were written and sought feedback. And East Bay author J.D. Lasica allowed online readers to edit chapters of his book ``Darknet: Remixing the Future of Movies, Music & Television.''
Similarly, a project called Wikipedia has been building an online encyclopedia almost exclusively from contributions of users.
Lessig's venture may be the most ambitious yet among book authors. Where feasible, he intends to use significant portions of reader contributions in the new edition. While he has not yet figured out how to handle authorship and credit contributors, Lessig intends to donate any book royalties to Creative Commons, a non-profit organization he founded to offer an alternative to traditional copyright licenses.
Palo Alto start-up JotSpot is providing the wiki space for Lessig's project.
Like Lessig, JotSpot founders Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer have an interest in consumer digital rights, dating back to their founding of the consumer-rights lobbying group Digitalconsumer.org in 2001.
``It was a nice alignment of the things I care about at a personal level,'' Kraus said. ``And it's an opportunity to showcase the technologies that JotSpot is developing.''
Looks like they've only been sure about the version numbering in the toolbar on the right: "CODE v2" ... (which would be a strange kind of follow-up to a highly successful v1.0)
Everywhere else, with the strange notation of "Code v.2" it looks like this is about trying to write a work that will never make it out of beta, stalling at v0.2
While this may seem like a compelling idea, I suspect editors will be in much higher demand than contributors. I don't believe this is a successful strategy in producing a coherent volume, since paid authors have a hard enough time getting their works published. Accepting submissions from all comers, particularly those professing some "expertise" in the given subject, is bound to lead to massive quantities of unusable material.
I wrote a letter to the editor of Science Fiction Age magazine in 1993. Not only was it printed, it closed a long running debate about the contents of the magazine. I had gotten tired of reading letters complaining about the one 'fantasy' story in a 'science fiction' mag, and the supporting letters were annoying too. One month, three of the four letters printed were on this topic. So I wrote in and told the guys at the magazine to just make a decision, tell us readers what it was, and stick to it. They would then at least have our respect, if not our agreement. I think they kept the one fantasy story, and I don't remember another letter about it.
I have to stop wasting so much time reading Slashdot. It's interfering with my crystal meth addiction.
You just might be. If you have your text to speech thingy going, and the voice recognition going too, you'll regret letting it read rm -rf ~/
See what I've been reading.
Shouldn't that be, "Public revises book with Lawrence Lessig" or better yet, "Lawrence Lessig Invites Public to Edit Book."
:D
The way they write headlines around here, you'd think Public is some fancy new ncurses based word processor
-theGreater Downmodded.
Perhaps not the same, but quite cool. I can imagine that when another edition comes out, he'll put the corrections in, and perhaps (if he's honest) he'll put in a special page of acknoweldgements to anonymous coward, byte me, etc!
Given that Larry Lessig is on the board of the Free Software Foundation, it is a bit strange that he uses a wiki engine which is proprietary, even though free (and, in many ways, superior) alternatives such as MediaWiki (the engine used by Wikipedia) are readily available.
ok, so there is lots to say about authoring by a single individual vs. wiki-mediated hordes (and i suppose James Michener's enterprise falls somewhere in between?:).
but what does the slashDot crowd make of Lessig's ARGUMENTS in Code, about code? what should CodeV2 make sure to address? are you going to weigh in?
There is actually an entire wiki dedicated to collaborative writing of books already.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.