I'd rather starve by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated Created
This section is about idealists who would rather starve doing what they love or believe in rather than do shitty jobs to survive. Artists for the most part you may call them.
Welcome to my home page!
Zim by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated Created
Local only.
WYSIWYG:
  • bold
  • images
  • lists. But it is either hard or impossible to have a paragraph inside a list item.
Mathematics requires a plugin and a full LaTeX install: zim-wiki.org/manual/Plugins/Equation_Editor.html They have a bunch of plugins: zim-wiki.org/manual/Plugins.html
Can only link to toplevel of each source, not subheaders? And subpages get forced scope. github.com/zim-desktop-wiki/zim-desktop-wiki
Publishing to static HTML can be done with:
zim --export Notes -o out
The output does not contain any table of contents? There is a plugin however: zim-wiki.org/manual/Plugins/Table_Of_Contents.html
It is unclear if their markup is compatible with an existing language of if it was made up from scratch. Wikipedia says:
In Zim, text is written and saved in a lightweight mark-up that is a hybrid of DokuWiki and Markdown.
The Academic Family Tree by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated Created
But unfortunately they don't have paper to paper citations.
neurotree.org/neurotree/faq.php explains that you have to contact an admin to download the database, kind of sad:
How can I export tree data for my own analysis?
Registered users should contact the site administrator (admin at neurotree dot org) for instructions on how to export data from the tree database.
That page also explains how they disambiguate authors with the same name:
How do you identify researchers' publications?
Publications data are drawn from two databases: Medline and Scopus. Because of the large number of researchers with the same name, a disambiguation algorithm is required to accurately link researchers to papers they have authored. We match authors to papers using a two-step process. First, we identify candidate publications based on a simple string match between researcher name and the author list. Second, we look for overlap between co-authors and other individuals in the researcher's mentor network (trainees, mentors, collaborators, etc), and label publications with overlap as high-probability matches. Thus a complete family tree is likely to produce more accurate publication matches.
PubMed by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated Created
This amazing data source contains both:
  • all papers by author
  • papers cited by papers
Full database download is described at: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/download/
The only problem with it is scope, being life sciences-only.
Software that uses Electron by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated Created
Web of Science by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated Created
Scopus by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated Created
WikiGnome by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated Created
DBPedia by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated Created
It appears to only extract structured data from Wikipedia, not natural language, so it is kind of basic then.
Electron by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated Created
Free academic paper database by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated Created
These are free to query, but you can't download their database. For those that allow database download see: Open academic paper database.
Open academic paper database by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated Created
By "open" we also mean that you can download their database locally and that it has an open license, not just free access.
WikiFauna by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated Created
WikiFauna refers to a classification of different Wiki contributor stereotypes. Some of them originate from the venerable C2 wiki.
Peter Mortensen by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated Created
Peter Mortensen is by far the largest serial editor on Stack Overflow, making predominantly style and grammar edits.
He is the prototypical WikiGnome.
His edit count is insane, ~127k as of November 2024 and increasing.
As per Users with most posts edited and stackoverflow.com/users?tab=Editors&filter=all he was the second most prolific editor of all time as of 2024, surpassed only by marc_s.
Figure 1.
Peter Mortensen's profile picture
. Possibly a Tawny owl.
Citation by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated Created
Academic paper database by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated Created
Academia is so broken that there isn't even one be-all and end-all database of:
  • all papers by a given author
  • all citations of a given paper
It's Closed access academic journals are evil to the extreme.
Wikipedia user by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated Created
Pinned article: ourbigbook/introduction-to-the-ourbigbook-project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Video 1.
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source.
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/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 either:
    • to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
    • as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact