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.

Major projects can be seen at: Section "The most important projects done by Ciro Santilli".

A summary of minor projects is given at: Ciro Santilli's minor projects.

This section is a dump for anything else, to keep those sacred first sections that show on the top of the homepage clean.

The markup language of OurBigBook.com.

Also used on Ciro Santilli's website as a static website via the OurBigBook CLI.

The one markup language to rule them all?

Documentation at: docs.ourbigbook.com.

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

The website system that runs OurBigBook.com. For further information see:Relies on the OurBigBook Library to compile OurBigBook Markup.

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

Stack Exchange solves to a good extent the use cases:points of view. It is a big open question if we can actually substantially improve it.

Major shortcoming are mentioned at idiotic Stack Overflow policies:

Bibliography:

Where blog is taken in a wide sense, including e.g. Medium, WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, etc., etc.

The main shortcoming of blogs is the lack of topic convergence across blogs. Each blog is a moderated castle. So who is the best user for a given topic, or the best content for a given tag, across the entire website?

The only reasonable free material we have for advanced subjects nowadays are university lecture notes.

While some of those are awesome, when writing a large content, no one can keep quality high across all sections, there will always be knowledge that you don't have which is enlightening. And Googlers are more often than not interested only in specific sections of your content.

Our website aims to make smaller subjects vertically curated across horizontal single author tutorials.

MIT calculus course             UCLA calculus course

* Calculus                <---> * Calculus
  * Limit                 <--->   * Limit
    * Limit of a function
    * Limit of a series   <--->     * Limit of a series
  * Derivative            <--->   * Derivative
                                    * L'Hôpital's rule
  * Integral              <--->   * Integral

Some more links:

Basically everything that applies to the blogs section also applies here, but university lecture notes are so important to us that they deserve a bit more talk.

It is arguable that this is currently the best way to learn any university subject, and that it can already be used to learn any subject.

We basically just want to make the process more efficient and enjoyable, by making it easier:

One major problem with lecture notes is that, as the name suggests, they are merely a complement to the lecture, and don't contain enough detail for you to really learn solely from them without watching the lecture.

The only texts that generally teach in enough depth are actual books, which are almost always commercial.

So in a sense, this project can be seen as a path to upgrade free lecture notes into full blown free books, from which you can learn from scratch without any external material.

And a major way in which we believe this can be done is through the reuse of sections of lecture notes by from other universities, which greatly reduces the useless effort of writing things from scratch.

The intended mental picture is clear: the topics feature docs.ourbigbook.com/#ourbigbook-web-topics will is intended to act as the missing horizontal topic integration across lecture notes of specific universities, e.g:

MIT calculus course             UCLA calculus course

* Calculus                <---> * Calculus
  * Limit                 <--->   * Limit
    * Limit of a function
    * Limit of a series   <--->     * Limit of a series
  * Derivative            <--->   * Derivative
                                    * L'Hôpital's rule
  * Integral              <--->   * Integral

One important advantage of lecture notes is that since they are written by the teacher, they should match exactly what "students are supposed to learn to get good grades", which unfortunately is a major motivation for student's learning weather we want it or not.

One big open question for this project is to what extent notes written for lectures at one university will be relevant to the lectures at another university?

Is it possible to write notes in a way that they are naturally reusable?

It is our gut feeling that this is possible. But it almost certainly requires an small intentional effort on the part of authors.

The question then becomes whether the "become famous by getting your content viewed in other universities" factor is strong enough to attract users.

And we believe that it might, it just might be.

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

Existing lecture notes by students:

Lecture note upload website:

Exams uploads:

A list of reviews of such systems is maintained at:

This is the class of existing software the perhaps comes the closest to OurBigBook, in particular systems such as:

While we believe that OurBigBook can hold its own against most of them as a personal knowledge base, there is one feature which we believe truly distinguishes OurBigBook from all others in a big way: trustless mind meld with the OurBigBook topic feature, which no other system seems to have.

Many such systems are also no publishing focused enough, and are more focused only in maintaining people's private knowledge bases. Some of them don't even have publishing at all, or its complicated. While publishing is optional in OurBigBook, it is a crucial feature and extremely well supported.

This website basically aims to be a learning management system, allowing in particular a teacher to focus his help on students that he is legally obliged to help due to their job. But it will have the following unusual characteristics in current LMS solutions:

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.

OK, just going random now:

The steps are sorted in roughly chronological order. The project might fail at any point, and some steps may be carried in parallel:

Ciro decided to start with a decent markup language with a decent implementation: OurBigBook Markup. Once that gets reasonable, he will move on to another attempt at the website itself.

The project description was originally at: github.com/cirosantilli/write-free-science-books-to-get-famous-website but being migrated here. The original working project name was "Write free books to get famous website", until Ciro decided to settle for OurBigBook.com and fixed the domain name.

In this section we will gather some more advanced ideas besides the basic features described at how the website works.