Ideas for how to help the wiki grow and be useful

From Yochai Benkler - Wealth of Networks
Revision as of 17:22, 19 April 2006 by Ownut (talk | contribs) (pdftohtml?)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Help the Wiki Grow

  • 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.

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_


  • Kathleen Fitzpatrick [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?"

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