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OurBigBook Project

OurBigBook.com: the best way to publish your scientific knowledge.
The OurBigBook Project is creating the ultimate open source tools to publish textbooks/personal knowledge bases/Zettelkasten/digital gardens in the learn in public philosophy. It is our best shot yet at the final real-world Encyclopedia Galactica by allowing effective mind melding/collective intelligence via the topics feature.
Figure 1.
Logo of the OurBigBook Project
.
OurBigBook CLI quick start using our template project github.com/ourbigbook/template with Node.js installed run:
git clone https://github.com/ourbigbook/template
cd template
npm install
npx ourbigbook .
firefox _out/html/index.html
firefox _out/html/not-index.html
The HTML output is visible at: ourbigbook.github.io/template
To publish your project as a static website to GitHub Pages, first create a GitHub repository for it, e.g. johnsmith/mybrain and then:
git remote set-url origin git@github.com:ourbigbook/ourbigbook-private.git
ourbigbook --publish
and your project is now published to johnsmith.github.io/template
To publish your project to OurBigBook.com, create an account at ourbigbook.com/go/register and then:
ourbigbook --web
This will ask for your ourbigbook username and password, and then your project will be published at: ourbigbook.com/johnsmith.
A full blown showcase knowledge base can be seen at:
Mission: to live in a world where you can learn university-level mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and engineering from perfect free open source books that anyone can write to get famous.
Ultimate goal: destroy the currently grossly inefficient education system and replace it with a much more inspiring system where people learn what they want as fast as possible to reach their goals faster without so much useless pain.
How to get there: create a website (live at OurBigBook.com) that incentivizes learners (notably university students taking courses) to write freely licensed university-level natural science books in their own words for free. Their motivation for doing that are:
  • getting their knowledge globally recognized and thus better jobs
  • improving the world
  • learning by teaching
Video 1.
Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
. Source.
Notable features:
  1. topics: groups the articles of different users about the same topic, sorted by upvote to achieve mind melding/collective intelligence. This makes your articles easier for others to find.
    Figure 2.
    The topics feature allows you to find the best version of a subject written by other users user
    . Live demo: derivative.
    Video 2.
    OurBigBook Web topics demo
    . Source.
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published with OurBigBook CLI to either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 3.
    With OurBigBook you can publish local lightweight markup files to either OurBigBook Web or as a static website
    . For example, both of the following pages:
    are generated from the exact same source code at: github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io.
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Figure 6.
    Creating a new article on the web editor
    .
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the VS Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension
    . Source.
  4. Figure 8.
    Non-toplevel tagged headers demo
    .
    Visible live at: cirosantilli.com/film#documentary-film
    With OurBigBook, tags are just headers.
    This allows you to add arbitrary comments to your tags explaining them as the need arises.
  5. Figure 9.
    If your ID prefixes are getting too large, we have scopes for you.
    Source.
  6. infinitely deep table of contents: never again be limited to only 6 levels of HTML h6 legacy limitations! With OurBigBook, the sky is the limit!
    Furthermore, with our dynamic article tree of OurBigBook Web, every header can be the toplevel header for better SEO and user experience e.g. both the following pages show all their ancestors:
    Figure 10.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Live URL: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
    Figure 11.
    And this is how the same article looks on the static website
    . Live URL: cirosantilli.com/taxonomy#chordate
  7. Figure 12.
    OurBigBook Web search demo
    .
    Search for your and other people's articles.
    Visible live at: ourbigbook.com/go/articles?body=false&search=physics-and
  8. Every single section has a clear and sane discussion area, where you can easily ask the author for clarifications and corrections, and where other readers can find answers to their problems in older existing discussions.
    Figure 14.
    OurBigBook Web discussion list for a given article
    . We can then list all the existing discussions for a given header. URL: ourbigbook.com/go/discussions/barack-obama/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Figure 15.
    OurBigBook Web discussion example
    . This is how a specific discussion looks like. URL: ourbigbook.com/go/discussion/1/barack-obama/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
  9. Figure 16.
    With article announcement you can send a link to your articles to your followers
    . Source.
Figure 17.
OurBigBook file feature
. Source. You can create OurBigBook articles that talk about specific files such as images or source code. Such articles appear inside the global table of contents like other articles,. A preview of the file is automatically shown in the article when possible. Directory listings are also automatically generated to allow readers to navigate through all your files.
Figure 18.
OurBigBook GitHub repository
. Source. Everything that the OurBigBook Project does is open source.
Key links:

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