The LinusPedia

LinusPedia
Somewhere, in an alternate-history version of Sweden, around and about Christmas of 1990...

...Linus Torvalds, the history geek, gets bored.

He opens a text editor, and starts typing:

He starts working on a whole new encyclopedia. It's a crazy project, and he knows it. Encyclopedias are way too huge and complex, as projects, for any single person to write. But, he thinks, it'll be fun.

He recently saw a talk by some hairy hippy dude, Richard Stallman, talking about the GNU Public Licence, in which he mentioned a similar licence for documents. Since this was going to be a hobby project...well, why not? He added a blurb at the top of the document, specifying that it was licenced under the GNU Free Document Licence.

A few months later, he makes a post to a newsgroup:

To his surprise, a few people express interest in the project. He makes it available for download, and people start grabbing it.

It's not long before they start sending him patches. His own area is history, and in particular, famous battles and generals of history. He's joined by a few other history geeks, and also a biologist, a geologist, etc...

A few years pass. The encyclopedia is now thousands of entries and hundreds of pages long, and growing rapidly. While the major commercial encyclopedias are still generally agreed to be more polished and complete, covering topics in a more neutral tone, LinusPedia is gaining rapidly, and Britannica is starting to sweat a little. It's already enough for your average grandma, or for an elementary school on a budget.

A working structure has evolved over the time. Here's how it works:


 * Linus himself acts as a sort of project leader, a gatekeeper, and a sort of benevolent dictator of the project. Of course, given the licence, anybody could branch the project at any time; nobody has ever seen a reason to do so.  He doesn't actually read all the modifications to the text; there are too many.  However, he has a good overview of the project, and mostly just accepts changes from his trusted 'Lieutenants'.
 * Below Linus are a group of Lieutenants, people who are effectively in charge of different parts of the encyclopedia. There's a biologist, a chemist, a geologist, specialists in different areas of history...  All in all, there are probably somewhere between ten and twenty, depending on how you specify the grouping.
 * Then, there are other contributers; many are working for companies, schools, universities, and the like; but many are also just random Joes, contributing from home.

The encyclopedia itself, or rather the code to generate it, is available online. It consists of around a million lines of LaTeX code; by tweaking a few parameters, you can use it to generate a large HTML file, a series of books suitable for publishing, a handbook (which consists of abbreviated passages from important articles), and work is being done so that you can generate a sort of history (or chemistry or physics) textbook from the same code base. In any case, you can grab the code, render it, and 20 minutes later, voila!

There are, of course, projects which have turned this code into actual, useable products. There's LinusPedia.com, which puts the rendered HTML online. There are several competing commercial distributions, hardcover and softcover, and more exotic formats (CD-ROMs and DVDs, podcasts...)

Anybody can join in to the project, too! It's easy as can be. You just download the source code from linuspedia.org, download latex and the dozens of libraries and dependencies you need to generate books, and try building it. Then, you can dig in and start modifying text--but be careful, it's pretty intricate, it's easy to mess up cross-references and whatnot. You can render the book when you're done (only 20-odd minutes) and there you go! A new version of LinusPedia with your changes included!

Of course, there's not much point going through all that pain for yourself; no, you'll want to commit your changes upstream, so everyone can benefit. There's sort of an established process for doing that. You need to establish a working relationship with one of Linus' lieutenants, and with the community at large. The recommended way to do that is:


 * Start by correcting typos, grammar mistakes, bad formatting, misalignments, and the like. Small, easy to read patches are easy to assess and apply, and will attract notice and build trust.
 * Eventually, you'll get better at multi-line and multi-part patches, which you can post to the mailing list; they'll be criticized, but presuming you have relatively thick skin, you should quickly pick up the basics, and your patches will start being applied.
 * Pretty soon, you'll be modifying large chunks of text, or who knows, even adding whole articles!

The lieutenants all have specialties, so chances are you'll be working with one or another of them. James is notoriously conservative, so Central American history is considered a little out-of-date. Ralph is in charge of the Math articles, and they're widely regarded as excellent. For historical reasons, 'A' and 'B' each have a maintaner. There are noteworthy missing pieces: nobody has ever really taken charge of Southeast Asian history, and there aren't many botany entries. There's a running controversy about whether to include living people; the general consensus is that this would be too hard, and it couldn't be kept up-to-date; and anyway, other encyclopedias don't do it. After a flamewar a few years back, the idea was dropped.

Fictional people and places are strictly prohibited, because it's generally agreed that the space is far too large to start exploring, and it's too hard to decide when to make exceptions.

Most animals have only token entries, and plants have even less.

Generally, the maintainers are pretty conservative, preferring to stick to well-established topics. Their motto is, "Remember, it's paper!"

There are already hundreds of contributors--dozens of regulars, and many who fix spelling and the like.

At this point, the project is even bigger than Britannica, and the quality is widely regarded as better! Constant corrections are made to dates and facts, and the point-of-view is regularly updated to improve neutrality. It does a very good job of providing references!

It's created a whole ecosystem of similar projects: dictionaries, text books, reference books, and even novels (though those never really took off...).

Some even speculate that a similar sort of project might work for software....