Ideas for how to help the wiki grow and be useful

Help this Wiki Grow

Integrate Full Text With Wiki

• For this to be truly useful, the full text of the book should be integrated with the wiki. Let's put the book's theories into practice.

• See Chapter 1 and Bulleted Chapter 1

I tried to use pdftotext and pdftohtml but something is wrong with my libraries?:

~/Desktop # pdftohtml Benkler_Wealth_Of_Networks_Chapter_3.pdf

But got:

/usr/bin/pdftohtml: Symbol `_ZTV9OutputDev' has different size in shared object, consider re-linking

/usr/bin/pdftohtml: symbol lookup error: /usr/bin/pdftohtml: undefined symbol: _ZN6PDFDocC1EP9GooStringS1_S1_

See http://habitat.igc.org/wealth-of-networks/ch-1.htm - converted with Acrobat Save as Text and WordPerfect 5.1+

"In certain ways, a wiki is of course the ideal format for such a project, allowing as it does for multiple, collaborative authorship and a relatively boundless expansion. But the wiki seems also to maintain a separation between the primary text and its related paratexts -- here are the static PDFs from which the author speaks, and here are the malleable wiki pages on which readers chime in. How might we imagine bringing those voices into closer conversation?"

* Kathleen Fitzpatrick [1]:

Use of Illustration

• It would be great to have the book's illustrations available for commentary.

• The illustrations are now available as remote images, through use of their URLs, as the file upload feature is currently disabled for this Wiki space. If yiou want to add other illustrations, you need to have the posted on a different site.

Ease of Reading

Difficult Sentences

• I have just started reading that book and I found many sentences that I have difficulties with understanding. In the spirit of 'peer production' I am thinking about recording a list of such sentences here so that editors of the future version of the book could ease the readers work. Would there be a value in such a list?

Here are some examples:

p18 "My own emphasis is on the specific relative roles of market and nonmarket sectors, and how that change anchors the radical decentralization that he too observes, as a matter of sociological observation." (what change?)

p21 "given that I subject to similar criticism rules styled by their proponents as “property”"

p29 "High-volume mechanical presses and the telegraph combined with new business practices to change newspapers from small-circulation local efforts into mass media." (what is the predicate here?)

Kathleen: Yochai is using the word "combined" as a past-tense verb. The presses and the telegraph are subjects of the sentence. "combined with new..." is the predicate. - Ady

Ady: I do believe that those sentences do have sense - but still if others would have to stumble upon them and need to stop to think about their meaning then perhaps it would be useful to edit them. It all depends how many other readers would have similar difficulties as mine. -- Zby

In the acknowledgments section, Yochai Benkler confesses to a tendency towards "excessively long sentences". Given the significance of the book, considerations of ease of comprehension - with a particular concern for those whose native language is not English - would appear worthy of attention.

Long paragraphs

• Related to this, many of the paragraphs could reasonably be characterized as excessively long, and include weighty sentences with the result that there may well be a good number of prospective readers who find The Wealth of Network somewhat difficult to digest in its original format.

Bulleted chapters

By providing distinctive paragraph breaks and double-spacing between sentences, and adding as many levels of outline bullets as suggest themselves, the books seems to be much easier to read. See, for example, Bulleted Chapter 1

Wiki cross-pollination

Cross-posting to other Wiki spaces

Pages from other wiki spaces