This strikes me as likely getting it backwards. The Best Textbooks on Every Subject thread was active for vastly longer than almost any Github repo of this style that I’ve ever seen. It petered out after a few years, but that’s a really long time, and mostly because Luke was no longer actively maintaining it.
I expect doing this on Github to basically cause an immediate failure of this. This isn’t because Github repos like this can’t work, but it’s because Github repo’s like this don’t end up being added to via Github, but via separate channels, and are usually curated by one really engaged person who invests a lot of time into it. They are not a good template for crowdsourcing submissions.
You can easily edit any documents on GitHub itself; It’ll automatically create a pull request for you. Github also has good features for having multiple maintainers, handing off ownership, and even forking in the worst case. You can even find active forks of any repo. (I have an extension that displays this information on the main repo page, called Lovely Forks.)
Github allows better organizatio of the information (e.g., in the textbook example, we could have had a separate directory for each subject, and a separate file in those for each contributor’s opinions), as well.
Now, I have no doubt that starting any such community effort is hard, and maybe using Lesswrong has a lower barrier to entry, but in the long run, a Github repo is more viable. The best case scenario is for the author to collate the comments on Lesswrong into the git repo, and provide links to tutorials on using Github’s web interface for new contributors.
I have taken your advice; the link is now at the top. Feel free to offer commentary on formatting and readability; it’s my first repo and the cool tricks I have seen elsewhere are not known to me.
Thanks! I think the formatting is good enough. Adding screenshots will probably engage people more; It’s a quick way to show people if they are at all interested in the content.
You should create a github.com repo ala the Awesome lists (e.g., https://github.com/hellerve/programming-talks). Lesswrong does not lend itself well to these collaborative community resources, as evidenced by the death of The Best Textbooks on Every Subject.
This strikes me as likely getting it backwards. The Best Textbooks on Every Subject thread was active for vastly longer than almost any Github repo of this style that I’ve ever seen. It petered out after a few years, but that’s a really long time, and mostly because Luke was no longer actively maintaining it.
I expect doing this on Github to basically cause an immediate failure of this. This isn’t because Github repos like this can’t work, but it’s because Github repo’s like this don’t end up being added to via Github, but via separate channels, and are usually curated by one really engaged person who invests a lot of time into it. They are not a good template for crowdsourcing submissions.
You can easily edit any documents on GitHub itself; It’ll automatically create a pull request for you. Github also has good features for having multiple maintainers, handing off ownership, and even forking in the worst case. You can even find active forks of any repo. (I have an extension that displays this information on the main repo page, called Lovely Forks.)
https://github.com/JanVanRyswyck/awesome-talks/commits/master , for an example of one such repo I use and is in active “development.”
Github allows better organizatio of the information (e.g., in the textbook example, we could have had a separate directory for each subject, and a separate file in those for each contributor’s opinions), as well.
Now, I have no doubt that starting any such community effort is hard, and maybe using Lesswrong has a lower barrier to entry, but in the long run, a Github repo is more viable. The best case scenario is for the author to collate the comments on Lesswrong into the git repo, and provide links to tutorials on using Github’s web interface for new contributors.
I have taken your advice; the link is now at the top. Feel free to offer commentary on formatting and readability; it’s my first repo and the cool tricks I have seen elsewhere are not known to me.
Thanks! I think the formatting is good enough. Adding screenshots will probably engage people more; It’s a quick way to show people if they are at all interested in the content.