Online Publishing – Page 5

Forking the Wikipedia

Larry Sanger forks the Wikipedia reports on an initiative by one of the founders of the Wikipedia to create an alternative by taking the content and setting up an editorial system with more control by expert editors. The alternative would be called the called the Citizendium.

The Wikipedia is an important example of a social knowledge network that has stirred up a lot of controversy this year. There is a literature now about the Wikipedia and its discontents. See, for example the Request for Comments (RFC) by Alan Liu about student use of the Wikipedia. He sees 2006 as a threshold year when students started using the Wikipedia like never before.

Is it a sign of maturity when web phenomena like the Wikipedia don’t just get reported with that “gee whiz, isn’t this neat” tone, but are being really debated?

Project Gutenberg’s Distributed Proofreaders

Distributed Publishers is an official Project Gutenberg site that supports “the digitization of Public Domain books.” It provides a web document management system for proofreading and editing Public Domain books and claim to be the main source of Project Gutenberg e-books. As far as I can tell they don’t provide their software for others to adapt.

Lazybase.com – Free web databases

Lazybase is one of those clean neat ideas. A site that “allows anyone to design, create and share a database of whatever they like.”

Lenya and OpenCMS

I’ve been looking into open source content and document management systems. Two that seem appropriate are Apache Lenya – Open Source Content Management (Java/XML) and opencms.org: OpenCms – The Open Source Content Management System. They are both open source, XML based, and offer ways to hide the xml/html from authors and editors.

HyperJournal: an open journal system

HyperJournal is an open journal publishing system that supports XML (according to the docs) that is now in Alpha. It has an intruiging feature, “Dynamic Contextualization” that links things between articles including between articles at different Hyperjournal installations. I think that’s why they call it “HYPERjournal” as it is designed to automatically link things.
Continue reading HyperJournal: an open journal system

Online Journal

I am involved with a group of people developing an online journal for the humanities computing community. John W. sent me a link to Tools and Resources for Online Journal Editors and Publishers which looks like a great overview of the tools out there.
The question for us will be if we want to roll our own tools. Should the humanities computing community demonstrate the possibilities for technology or just concentrate on content?