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. "

Comments

the records...

[grub]

Always wanted to see your words in print?

Mine are, usually after "How do you plea?"

Collaborative book writing

[caluml]

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.

Re:Collaborative book writing

[FreeLinux]

Lots of technical books are collaborations. That's why so many suck! It's hard to read when the writing style changes from chapter to chapter, ideas do not carry through the book as they should and writing skills vary dramatically.

I much prefer a single author.

Re:Collaborative book writing

[IvyMike]

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, purple monkey dishwasher.

Re:Collaborative book writing

[kebes]

In practice I agree with you. However, that is because most collaborative books are self-contained chapters that some editor casually reads over and then glues together. The editor is, in fact, *not allowed* to make sweeping changes to the style of a particular chapter, since the author in question would legitimately get angry. Each author is given his own "right" to describe things as he sees fit.

In a wiki project, the final editor can pick the version of each wiki article he likes best, and he can mercilessly modify and change the style so that it sounds good. If anyone doesn't like it, they can of course fork the book based on the version they liked better.

The point is that the wiki style, by getting rid of this "ownership of the author" has the potential to make collaborative projects actually be better.

In practice, of course, this requires quite a good editor... so we'll see how well it turns out.

Why, I've already seen my words in print!

[14erCleaner]

Slashdot does count as "print", doesn't it?

Maybe the RIAA & MPAA will write their own cha

[hsmith]

I can see the title of their chapter "Downloaders are dirty thieves."

Revised Author

[WaldoXX]

Author's name should be revised to ..... Anonymous Coward

Hieraki

[Tobias Luetke]

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.

Article Text [slow, reg req'd]

[Anonymous Coward]

Professor's online publishing experiment

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/ .com and edit them into a printed version of the book.

``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.''

What's the dot about... Code v2 rather than v0.2 ?

[D4C5CE]

Looks like they've only been sure about the version numbering in the toolbar on the right: "CODE v2"
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 ... (which would be a strange kind of follow-up to a highly successful v1.0)

Questionable

[Ganellon]

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.

Re:Questionable

[truthsearch]

Lessig is quite intelligent. He knows what he's doing is an experiment. He also knows we'll never really know if such a thing is a good idea until someone tries it. While some technical documentation is written this way a book such as his probably has not.

Also, with a wiki a few good editors could go through what's entered and edit as desired. I'm sure Lessig will have no problems finding an editor or two to help.

You're quite possibly right, but I hope you're wrong.

Minor Correction

[theGreater]

Shouldn't that be, "Public revises book with Lawrence Lessig" or better yet, "Lawrence Lessig Invites Public to Edit Book."

The way they write headlines around here, you'd think Public is some fancy new ncurses based word processor :D

-theGreater Downmodded.

JotSpot is proprietary

[Eloquence]

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.