Celestia Wikibook

[hank]

Greetings Celestians!

I have started a wikibook to provide (eventually) a comprehensive user's guide and reference for Celestia, where "user" is interpreted broadly to include add-on creators and potentially even developers.

But don't get too excited, because there's hardly anything useful there yet. (That's where you come in; please read on.)

If you're unfamiliar with the concept, a wikibook is a web-based document consisting of a collection of "pages" that are flexibly interconnected via hyperlinks. (External links are also allowed). A wikibook differs from an ordinary website in several important ways:

* Every page has a link which opens a forms-based editor that allows you to instantly modify and resubmit the source text for the page.

* A special simplified markup language is used, which makes editing the page source very easy. It's not fancy, but it does the job, quickly and easily.

* Anyone can edit any page in any way at any time. Readers are encouraged to do so immediately whenever they see something that could be corrected, improved or added.

This approach allows the document to be rapidly created and maintained by an informal group of contributors. Anyone who thinks something needs to be added can do it. Anyone who sees something that needs corrections or clarifications can make them. The results are instantly available to all.

This sharply contrasts with the more common practice where an author creates and maintains a document on their own personal computer. Periodically the auhor will update it, generate a distribution file, then upload it to a website for others to view or download. If other people have suggestions for improvements, they have to contact the author, who has to read and approve the suggestion, make the changes, regenerate the distribution file, and reupload the new version. This is a much slower process than the wiki way, where improvements can be made instantly. Also, in the common approach the author may become a bottleneck. If the author is too busy to implement and distribute changes, needed improvements cannot be made.

The disadvantage of the wikibook approach, from the author's standpoint, is that anything contributed to the wikibook is subject to arbitrary revision by other contributors. As a result, there's really no effective ownership or control of contributions. Hopefully, the original author will agree that any changes made are useful improvements. (If not, there's a discussion page associated with each wikibook page where disagreements of this kind can be resolved in a cooperative manner.) Ultimately a wikibook should be regarded as having a collective authorship. It really belongs to the entire community of contributors. It works best if no one feels any proprietary interest in their own contributions.

To be successful, a wikibook requires a high degree of comity, common sense, and cooperation among the participants. My hope and belief is that the Celestia community has what it takes to make it happen.

Many people have previously provided valuable service to the Celestia community by creating documentation on various topics which they've made available on their personal websites or via the Motherlode or in other ways. If they are willing to contribute their work as a starting point for the wikibook coverage of those topics, that would be extremely helpful. But in doing so the authors must realize that anything they contribute to the wikibook will be subject to arbitrary future revision, so essentially they would be giving up control of their work to the community (hopefully for the greater good). If they choose not to so, which they of course have every right to do, the wikibook will unfortunately eventually have to duplicate their efforts. (It goes without saying that one should not contribute someone else's work to the wikibook without their permission.)

If you think you might want to participate in creating the Celestia wikibook, I urge you to do so. There is a lot of information at the Wikibooks site that will help explain to you how the process works in more detail. But it's very easy, so you'll probably be able to jump right in. (Some people even find it fun.) Almost anyone can make some contribution, if only by fixing typos or grammatical errors. Also, you can create links to needed pages which cover topics that interest you but are not yet covered, even if you can't write the page yourself. Someone else who knows about the topic may later come along, see the empty page link, and create the page for you. You can also ask questions on the associated discussion page if there's something you want to know that an existing page doesn't cover.

The hope is that eventually the Celestia wikibook would include all the information about Celestia that anyone would ever want to know. Then when someone asks a question on the forum, they can easily be provided with a link to the relevant wikibook page. (If the information is missing from the wikibook, the responder can first add it to the wikibook before replying to the questioner with a link to it. That way in future the information will be readily available to everyone.) In time most people will probably look first in the wikibook, and not even have to ask for help on the forum.

But this won't happen without robust participation from the Celestia community. I've made just the barest start on the wikibook, and I really don't have the time right now to do much more myself. Hopefully I've done enough to show the potential and get other people interested enough to join in. As I warned you at the start, there's practically no useful information there as of now. But YOU can change that. If a lot of us contribute even a little, much can be accomplished.

So please check it out, and contribute what you can.

- Hank

[rthorvald]

I have started a wikibook

Great initiative!

-rthorvald

[maxim]

I added the link to the english and the german wikipedia entry for Celestia.

maxim

[hank]

I see that someone has already added some content to the Celestia wikibook (rthorvald, is that you?). Wonderful. Please keep it coming. If many people pitch in, we'll have a useful resource in no time.

Anyone who plans to become a regular contributor to the wikibook should consider becoming a registered Wikibooks editor. Among other things, you can then mark pages that you're interested in and receive notification whenever they're updated.

- Hank

[alphap1us]

Hi,
I wonder if we could "kickstart" this excellent project by using some of the documentation that is already available. If the authors would give permission, we could almost create the book from scratch an people could start working on it.

Cheers,
Joe

[hank]

I wonder if we could "kickstart" this excellent project by using some of the documentation that is already available. If the authors would give permission, we could almost create the book from scratch an people could start working on it.

You're right, that would certainly be a big help in getting the wikibook off the ground. But of course as you realize we could do this only if the authors agreed to release their work. They have put a great deal of effort into creating their documentation, with results that they are justly proud of, and it is quite understandable that they might be reluctant to give up control of them to the wiki. Perhaps some of them will, but I just don't know what to expect about this.

Hopefully all of them will at least agree to to allow us to include external links to their documents in the wikibook. That way we can refer readers to their documents until original content for the wikibook covering the same topics can be written from scratch. That could take a while, particularly because topics for which there is adequate existing documentation to be linked to would probably have lower priority than creating documentation for new topics. In the meantime the wikibook would just provide whatever corrections or additions might be needed to keep the coverage of the externally documented topics complete and up-to-date. That would be less effective than maintaining all the content directly in the wikibook, but it might be helpful as an interim approach.

- Hank

[Michael Kilderry]

I've started off two new sections for the Celestia Wikibook, the add-ons and versions threads.

Michael Kilderry

[rthorvald]

rthorvald, is that you?

No, someone else. I added some detail, though.
BTW, i think this should be a sticky.

- rthorvald