Firstly, in 2012, while he was at École Polytechnique, Ciro Santilli was introduced to LaTeX (thank God for French mathematical obsession), and his mind was blown:he though. Why isn't everyone doing that!

One particular event stood out: Ciro made a small change to his teacher's course material, who blessed be him (dude's a legend, Ciro just noticed he has some Chinese publications with another French dude, e.g. www.amazon.co.uk/高效算法-应试与提高必修128例-克里斯托弗-Christoph-Durr/dp/B078SJQPVK "High-efficiency algorithm competitions 128 examples", did he write it the Chinese himself?? Must be of course to complement the notoriously low French professor salaries), made it available, and then Ciro gave him back the .tex file. Ciro was just a bit worried about how the teacher would be able to tell what he had changed in the file to validate the change. The teacher just said of course, "no problem, I'll just use diff". Ciro had never heard of diff. Let alone Git of course, though yes, this was a bit early in Git's history version control systems had been around since forever of course. This was 2011 or 2012, about 4 or 5 years into a superior education curricula with various courses involving computers, some requiring quite a lot of "fill these empty functions" style programming. Education is a joke. Anyways, this was a prelude to exactly what Ciro wanted to do in OurBigBook.com. This might have been the one actually: webia.lip6.fr/~durrc/Iut/Notes580.pdf

Not long afterwards, Ciro started playing with Linux. Until then, Ciro had had some contacts with the mysterious operating system at university, and was a bit puzzled what the point of it was! He clearly remembers:University should be forced to use only open source software and hardware in undergrad teaching courses by law BTW.

Then came an Ubuntu live disk on his own machine, and finally a measly 40GB dual book partition in a Microsoft Windows machine on a laptop. At first, it took a lot of time to learn all the crazy new terminal stuff! Yes, at this point, Ubuntu was already usable enough without the terminal, an accomplishment actually. But as a programmer, Ciro felt obliged to learn. Many hours were spent reading man pages at the library. But it all just felt so right, and sometimes powerful... true wizardry.

And ten years later, Ciro was seriously considering buying a computer without Windows pre-installed. He had not used Windows a single tie on a personal machine even once in those ten years!

Finally, to finish things off Ciro found two websites that changed his life forever, and made be believe that there was an alternative: Stack Overflow and GitHub.

The brutal openness of it all. The raw high quality content. Ugliness and uselessness too no doubt. But definitely spark in a sea of darkness.

Base JavaScript library that implements the OurBigBook Markup. Use by both:

See: docs.ourbigbook.com/#ourbigbook-web-user-manual

These are websites that offer somewhat overlapping services, many of which served inspirations, and why we think something different is needed to achieve our goals.

Notably, OurBigBook is the result of Ciro Santilli's experiences with:OurBigBook could be seen as a cross between those three websites.

Quick mentions:

Static website-only alternatives:

Conceptual:

TODO:

Some possible/not possible sources that could be used to manually bootstrap content:

Existing lecture notes by students:

Lecture note upload website:

Exams uploads:

If Ciro Santilli were to write a book about quantum mechanics as of 2020 (before OurBigBook.com went live), he would upload an OurBigBook Markup website to GitHub Pages.

But there is one major problem with that: the entry barrier for new contributors is very large.

If they submit a pull request, Ciro has to review it, otherwise, no one will ever see it.

Our amazing website would allow the reader to add his own example of, say, The uncertainty principle, whenever they wants, under the appropriate section.

Then, people who want to learn more about it, would click on the "defined tag" by the article, and our amazing analytics would point them to the best such articles.

There is basically only one scalable business model in education as of the 2020's: helping teenagers pass university entry exams. And nothing else. Everything else is a "waste" of time.

Perhaps there is a little bit of publicity incentive to helping them win knowledge olympiads as well, but it is tiny in comparison, and almost certainly not a scalable investment. This may also depend on whether universities consider anything but exams, which varies by country.

That marked is completely saturated, and Ciro Santilli refuses to participate in it for moral reasons.

Beyond that, there is no scalable investment. Other non-scalable investments that could allow one to make a lifestyle business are:

Teenagers and young adults:

It is this perfect storm that places this specific section of education in such a bad shape that it is today.

This project is likely to fail. It could become the TempleOS of wikis. The project' autism score is quite high. It might be an impossible attempt at a lifestyle business. But Ciro is beyond caring now. It must be done. Other things that come to mind:

Dangerous combination:and for any crazy person who might wish to join: Men Wanted for Hazardous Journey.

If enough people use it, we could let people sell knowledge content through us.

Teachers have the incentive of making open source to get more students.

Students pay when they want help to learn something.

We take a cut of the transactions.

However this goes a bit against our "open content" ideal.

Forced sponsorware would be a possibility.

Would be a bit like Fiverr. Hmmm, maybe this is not a good thing ;-)